SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Bill Furlong is the coal man in an Irish town. He delivers sacks of coal to homes, businesses and a local laundry, run as a charitable institution by nuns, where girls considered wayward wash dirty clothes and scrub floors. One day, he finds one of the girls left in the cold and dark of an outer building, and when he helps her to her feet, she has a piercing, urgent request.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "SMALL THINGS LIKE THESE")
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (As character) Will you take me to the river or get me to the other side of the gate, please?
CILLIAN MURPHY: (As Bill Furlong) It's not up to me, love.
SIMON: "Small Things Like These" is a new film starring and produced by Cillian Murphy, the Academy Award-winning actor, and directed by Tim Mielants. It's based on the acclaimed 2021 novel by Claire Keegan. Cillian Murphy joins us now from Birmingham, England. Thank you so much for being with us, sir.
MURPHY: Oh, it's a pleasure. Thank you.
SIMON: I gather you read Claire Keegan's novel and felt you just had to make the film. What impelled you to act that way?
MURPHY: It was a really, really beautiful book. I think it's a little masterpiece. It's a novella, in fact - very brief, but very, very powerful. And it's a very seemingly simple story, but, in fact, it's really, really complex on a personal level for the characters, but also on a social and political level, I think, for the country. And I felt if we were faithful to the novel that we could really deliver something that had a very quiet, provocative power as a film.
SIMON: Yeah. Bill spends a lot of time washing his hands when he gets home. I mean, he's the coal man after all, but is he also trying to - I don't know - wash something else down the drain?
MURPHY: I mean, like, when you watch the film, we do get to see into his past, and we do get to see what made him the man that he is and how that is now all coming home to roost, so to speak, for him. And so, yeah, I mean, it's a very old metaphor, isn't it, the washing of the hands? But I think certainly for somebody like him, It's something that he hasn't dealt with, his past.
SIMON: Yeah.
MURPHY: And there's this sort of confluence of events - what's happening in his own personal life, what's happening in the town and what's happening in his family. And they're all coming home to roost in these few days before Christmas.
SIMON: He has tea with the mother superior of the home, played by Emily Watson, and she can tell he's been upset by what he saw when he encountered the young woman. How does she try to divert him, if you please?
MURPHY: Well, the beautiful thing about that scene, I think, is that they're talking in banalities, really. Nothing is said. It's all about the subtext and the space between the actual words. But what in effect she's doing is blackmailing him, really, is saying that you have information, but we also control the education of your daughters, of which he has five. That information is important to us, so therefore, we use the education of your daughters as leverage - and also your standing in the community, because he has a business. At the time in Ireland, everyone was leaving and emigrating and not coming home. You know, there was a very bleak economic time in Ireland. So she has all the power.
SIMON: Bill is cautioned by a local bar owner.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "SMALL THINGS LIKE THESE")
HELEN BEHAN: (As Mrs. Kehoe) Then you know that the sensible thing, Bill, is look after your family and your business, will be my advice to you.
SIMON: That's not obscure at all, is it?
MURPHY: No. And that's, you know, another reason why I thought that the film would have some resonance for audiences because, you know, I think there is a real universality in the specificity of the story. The resonances are very clear, if you want to look for them, as to what's happening in the world today.
SIMON: Why do you find it a particularly compelling story today?
MURPHY: You know, I'm reluctant to be prescriptive about this, and I'm reluctant to kind of tell audiences what they should feel or what they should take from it, because I really feel that the point of art is to ask the questions and not provide the answers, and there was enough dogma coming from these institutions at the time. So my feeling is that if the film, which it has been doing in Ireland and the U.K. and wherever we've played it - if that can provoke people and get people to exercise - and when the screen goes to black and the lights go up, we've been finding that people just sit there, and they don't get up, and then they start talking because the kind of quite radical structure of the story is that the story really begins when the film ends. So people have very, very different interpretations of what will happen after the film ends, and I really want people to go into it and take from it what they will.
SIMON: Novel and the film, of course, are drawn from fact - the Magdalene Laundries, as they were called = and they weren't a product of the Middle Ages. This film is set during the Christmas season of 1985. We should note the Irish government issued a formal apology in 2013 and set up a fund for the victims, but the religious orders that maintain the laundries deny that women were kept against their will. Why does Bill feel he can't turn away?
MURPHY: Well, I think what I was very careful not to do was to play him like a hero. And this act that happens at the end of the film is kind of ostensibly a heroic act, but I actually think that it's a man who is in the throes of some sort of a nervous breakdown. Do you know what I mean?
SIMON: Yeah.
MURPHY: And he's been just sort of driven forward by his body in a nonintellectual way, in an emotional and instinctual way, towards this poor girl in the shed. And I suppose, again, you could think that he's rescuing his own mother. I mean, they share the same name. She's a Sarah. His mother was Sarah. You know, there's all these connections, so I feel like it's not - certainly not an act of heroism. He's a man that's many, many, many years ahead of his time, and I think what he will face after this act is very difficult, but I think it's a lot to do with his past and the fact that he's just driven there. Do you know what I mean? It's, like, the power of his body and the power of the 45 years of him being on this planet and observing this and the pressure of living in this sort of society just drives him there.
SIMON: When the theater goes dark and the film has left the screen, do you want the audience to ask themselves, well, what would I do?
MURPHY: I think when a film succeeds, the audience naturally puts themselves into the shoes of the characters and the protagonists and question what they would do themselves. Yeah, I think that I certainly do that when I watch films or I'm really, really engaged in a film. And, like, I always think that when you're dealing with difficult subjects like this, art is a gentler way of approaching them because there's been many, many, you know, commissions and government reports and academic papers and editorials written about this time in Ireland and books, and - but I just don't know how many people read them or digest them, whereas I think with a film, you know, people can come at it in a gentler way, and I really feel that the film shouldn't be about blame, but more about sort of understanding and questioning.
SIMON: Cillian Murphy - his new film, "Small Things Like These" - thank you so much for being with us.
MURPHY: Pleasure. Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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