For a man who has won some of the most prestigious awards in international cinema in the last 12 months, both as an actor and a director, Peter Mullan is resolutely unimpressed by his new-found fame, especially its effect on his status in his native Scotland. "The Scots are like the Irish in that they don't respect or appreciate their own. Until you've got the headmaster's approval, you're not worth anything. I was exactly the same actor the day after I won the prize at Cannes, but I've never experienced such a change in attitudes in my life. It does my head in about the Celts, that we're rebellious by nature, but if you do something rebellious without that international approval, they don't want to know."
At last year's Cannes Film Festival, Mullan took the Best Actor award for his powerful performance in Ken Loach's My Name is Joe as a recovering alcoholic, still raw after chaotic years of drinking but determined to live life to the full. "I have never experienced anything like that in my life. The reaction beforehand was just `oh, well done', then the next day I'm a great artist." His directorial debut, Orphans, a black comic fantasy which takes place over one nightmarish night in Glasgow, won several major awards at the Venice Film Festival last September, but he's unusually frank about what he sees as the film's flaws. "I'm conscious that by not doing certain commercial things with Orphans I've probably limited the film's appeal, which is hard on the actors who gave those stunning performances. These are all actors who I think should be getting bigger parts, because they're so good. There are other Scottish actors who aren't a patch on these guys, who have done really well out of being cast in certain highly successful Scottish films . . . "
Mullan isn't naming names, but he's undoubtedly referring to Trainspotting, in which he played the small but crucial role of heroin dealer Mother Superior. He agrees that Trainspotting has opened a lot of doors for Scottish movie-makers in the international marketplace. "Definitely, and it's specifically Scottish, not Irish or English or whatever. The price of that has been its effect on Scottish theatre. Everybody's gone into the movies, so there's no energy going into theatre." It's a question of hard economics, he feels. "The most you'll get for writing a play is about 11 grand, for something that will take you two years. For an actor, you're getting £250 a week. So young actors are looking at the likes of Kelly McDonald, who gets a part in Trainspotting, and suddenly she's bought her own flat, she's in lots of other films, and she'll probably never be seen on a stage again.
"But Trainspotting has become a gold card for anyone involved in it. I can't even pay for a taxi, because the driver's going `You're Mother Superior from Trainspotting'. What the hell do they do when they meet Ewan MacGregor? It was a mixed blessing, because it meant the indies had nowhere to hide any more - the money was there for them. The downside is that everyone wanted more Trainspottings. So you get all these films where the clothes and the soundtrack are more important than the film. I have mixed feelings about all that stuff.
"As a phenomenon I love Trainspotting; as a movie I'm not so sure. I've never seen so many well-dressed junkies in my life. For My Name is Joe we hung around with a lot of real junkies, and they're all fat bastards. When I walk down the street there's no one happier to meet me than a junkie who can say they shook the hand of Mother Superior. It's completely bizarre. As far as they're concerned, it makes them look much better and sexier than they actually are."
Orphans is a much less idealised portrait of the underbelly of Scottish society, a roller-coaster of violence, drunkenness and humour, detailing the implosion of a Glasgow family grieving for the death of their mother. The inspiration came from his own experience of grief, he says. "Four weeks after my mother died, a guy nicked a taxi off us in Glasgow. I saw him a week later, and I just wanted to kill him. I'm not a violent man, and I did nothing about it, but I just remember standing there, wanting to do serious damage to this guy, and I guess that's where the idea started. "I could think of no other reason for the blackness descending the way it did, except that it was just after my mother died. I talked it through with friends, and discovered that more than a few of them had felt that way, that really angry way when you feel aggrieved. I'd never seen a film that looked at that crazy, angry side of grief. I'd seen plenty where people bring out photographs and talk about the past and try to get to know each other again, and I didn't want any of that.
"But what I was really trying to get at was a sort of modern allegory about the state of Scotland, with the Mother Welfare State no longer in place, and people just running around, going down the wrong roads, doing terrible things to each other. Then it became a question of how to bring together the real family and the metaphorical family, with no huge solution, no magical warmth."
He firmly believes Scotland will be independent within 10 years. "We're becoming a new country, with our own parliament. Nobody wants to be anti-English anymore. We just want a divorce, and we can be their best neighbour."
Despite its depiction in Orphans, Glasgow's reputation for violence is only partly justified, he feels. "It is a tough town, there's no doubt about it. But I don't think it's a particularly psychotic form of violence - it's just too much drink and people punching each other."
At the moment, he says, everything's supposed to be visceral in films. "You're not supposed to think. Every script I'm being sent is just boringly nihilistic, really dull stuff. I'd like to see more stuff being made that's actually for adults. But, then, in Cannes I was shocked by how many French journalists said they hated bourgeois French cinema, and they loved this visceral British stuff. It's interesting, because the French do make a lot of incredibly boring films that they think are for grown-ups, but they're only playing at being grown up. You're thinking - not another bloody menage a trois, and all these piddling little problems. I'd like to see films about big, fuck-off issues."
Although he's happy finally to be making a decent living (he has a starring role opposite Kevin Spacey in Thaddeus O'Sullivan's Dublin gangster thriller, Ordinary Decent Crimial), Mullan refuses to compromise for financial reasons on the jobs he takes. "I'm too old to be doing that. I have a wee house, drive a wee car, I'm happy and I've got more than enough to keep me going." He cites Loach as a model of the kind of director he admires.
"I was genuinely surprised when I saw My Name is Joe," he says, because Ken is the ultimate believer in realism, but it's very strongly sign-posted: this is where you laugh; this is where you cry. In that respect, it's a much more effective film, not necessarily a better film than my own."
He admires Loach's unique way of working with actors and concentrating on the essence of the piece. "You get directors who think they've got to be all professional and neurotic about the fact that they're making a film. But the thing about working with Loach is that when you're doing the scene, it never occurs to you that anyone else will ever watch this. It's just completely natural and normal - you'd swear there wasn't a film being made. He's one of the world's great filmmakers and he doesn't watch the actors when they're performing. He directs with his ears.
"No one is allowed shout `Action', it's just `When you're ready'. No one's allowed watch you when you're performing, not even the boom operator. You tell that to a young film-maker and their jaws will drop through the floor, because they've had these idiots telling them rubbish about what a director does, who think that professionalism is an attitude instead of a state of mind, and who want everyone to know who they are. The caterers on My Name is Joe didn't know who Ken Loach was until the last week of the film. He's the most inconspicuous guy on the set. I think Ken's attitude to film is like the way Bill Shankly was thinking about football when he said it was a simple game complicated by idiots."
Orphans opens on June 18th at the IFC, Dublin
My Name is Joe is available for rental on video
