![]() And, if there’s any justic, it’ll work again here in the unlikely shape of a grumpy, middle-aged Scottish man in trunks. It worked for a boy with dancing feet and a girl with football dreams. If one has an overactive imagination, which most creative types do, you would definitely struggle.Ever since Robert Carlyle whipped off his kecks for the ladies of Sheffield, British filmmakers have been desperate to deliver the next Full Monty. “He said, ‘I wouldn’t say ‘stupid,’ Pete, but a man such as yourself I don’t think would survive. Mullan wanted to know if Feakes meant that Channel swimmers are “stupid.” ![]() “I asked him, ‘What is the difference between normal human beings and people who do this kind of thing?’ And he said, ‘Lack of imagination.’ ” Mullan’s swimming double told the actor he didn’t have the temperament to swim the Channel. It’s an absolute given that you will hallucinate at a certain point,” he said. “If your demons are pretty large, the task that you give yourself is pretty enormous. Everest do it to conquer their demons - just as Redmond does. Mullan discovered during his research that people who swim the Channel and climb Mt. “Then I realized, ‘Blimey, it really is Peter Mullan.’ ” “I spoke back to him in the same gravelly voice,” said Dellal. Recalled Mullan: “It made me laugh because it was so outrageous.”Īt first Dellal thought Mullan’s phone call was a practical joke because his voice is so raspy because of a 60-cigarette-a-day habit. She wrote him a letter that said, essentially, “If you don’t take the role, I’ll kill myself.” Apparently, it worked. “When I looked down, you have to be bonkers to try and swim this.”ĭellal only had Mullan in mind to play Redmond. “I don’t know if you have ever been across,” said Rose. The story began to congeal during his frequent trips across the Channel to France on the ferry. ![]() “The worst thing for a parent is to lose a child it was that kind of duality I was thinking about - a guy who has lost a child and a guy who sort of experienced what I had taking a child to school.” Then I was talking to somebody who had teenage kids and they said, ‘Wait until he’s a teenager and they won’t need you.’ I remember that in myself and I thought, ‘I wonder how will I cope with that when he’s 16 or 18 and he doesn’t need me any more?’ ” ROSE got the idea for the film five years ago when he and his wife dropped their then 4-year-old son off to school for the first time. It was about losing one child literally and one figuratively.” That was a story I really wanted to tell. “And the ensuing lack of relationship with the kid he actually did save. It was a wonderful script and then I embarked with on rewriting and working on it for about a year before it went to Peter.”ĭellal was intrigued by making a film that explored the relationships between “slightly older people,” especially a marriage that had “weathered an enormous storm” and the shame Redmond felt when he wasn’t able to save his son. “Then I read it that night and I couldn’t put it down. “I have no affinity for a man who swims the Channel,” she said. When director Gaby Dellal first heard the description of Alex Rose’s script, she wasn’t interested. I was coming out of the water with expletives beyond expletives, and Dave would come out and say all of this crazy English stuff like, ‘It’s a bit nippy today, Pete.’ ” He was a wonderful, understated Englishman. ![]() My swimming double, Dave, who actually swam the Channel, was able to do a lot of the wide shots. “It got harder and harder to jump into the pool,” said the 46-year-old actor. “For every minute in the water, there is two hours recovery time.” In all, shooting the swimming sequences took eight days.Īs the days progressed, Mullan’s body went into shock. Instead, Mullan, who is also a director (“The Magdalene Sisters”) could only stand the water for a few minutes at a time, and it took even longer for his body to adjust. “I said, ‘Guys, this is a movie it doesn’t work that way.’ ” The Channel swimmers that he talked to during research told him that it would be easier to actually swim the body of water rather than repeatedly get in and out during the numerous shoots that the film required. AWARD-WINNING Scottish actor Peter Mullan wasn’t much of a swimmer before tackling the role of a middle-age man who decides to take on the English Channel in “On a Clear Day.” So the Glasgow-based actor (“My Name Is Joe”) spent six months training in a local pool.īut nothing prepared him for actually getting into the frigid waters at Dover and Loch Lomond.
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