In light of current political conditions, the release of director Stephen Burke’s “Maze” seems particularly pertinent. And with its NYC premiere, this Irish hit can be seen in New York starting Friday, March 22nd, and expanding throughout the rest of the country through April 12th, 2019.
Based on real events, “Maze” focuses on a unique event in the history of the conflict in Northern Ireland which has spanned almost 30 years — from 1969 to 1998 — and cost over 3,600 lives. Known as “The Troubles,” it began with a civil rights march in Derry on October 5th, 1968, and ended with the Good Friday agreement in 1998. At the heart of this conflict was the constitutional status of Northern Ireland. The Protestant majority’s goal was to stay part of the United Kingdom; the nationalist/republican’s minority wanted to have it united with the Republic of Ireland. The Northern Irish republican paramilitary group fought for both unification and British withdrawal.
However, all sides made it to the negotiating table where a historic peace agreement was sealed in April 1998 after decades of conflagration and stalemate. The path from violence to politics was long and costly. As many as 50,000 people were physically injured; countless others were psychologically damaged, a legacy that still shapes the post-1998 period.
One of the many dramatic moments through all this was a 1983 prison escape staged in HMP Maze Prison (also known as Long Kesh) on September 25, 1983, outside Belfast in County Antrim. A maximum security prison considered to be one of the most secure in Europe, it held prisoners convicted of taking part in armed paramilitary campaigns during The Troubles. In what remains the biggest prison escape in UK history, 38 Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) prisoners escaped from H-Block 7 (H7) of the prison. Initially, the escape went according to plan, however, it fell apart due to the timing of a shift change, and a battle broke out between IRA men and prison officers, all of whom were dressed in the same uniforms. At its height, one officer was stabbed and died (of a heart attack) while 20 others were injured, including two prison officers who were shot with smuggled guns. The escape was an IRA propaganda coup and gave them a morale boost after the hunger strike’s failure of 18 months earlier, in which 10 prisoners died.
“Shooting in a real prison was a massive advantage,” said veteran actor Tom Vaughan-Lawlor, who plays Larry Marley, architect of the escape. The actor has grappled wit
h this and as as evil wizard Ebony Maw in Marvel’s “Avengers: Infinity War.” The Dublin native explained, “There was no need to imagine the feel of incarceration; the walls, cells, and all the history of a building hung in the air. I loved how the script was both a prison-escape thriller, and a drama about two men from very different backgrounds — Larry and an imagined prison warder Gordon Close (Barry Ward). We never sentimentalized the relationship, never took the obvious or easy route. My research was about finding out as much as possible about the escape itself but also about the history of the conflict. I met with some of the escapees and it afforded me a very intimate understanding of the intensity of the time, and of the focus and discipline required to plan and execute something on that scale.”
Q: You did the filming there?
Stephen Burke: It was a big issue for us because the Maze is almost completely knocked down and we didn’t have the budget to build a set. About three months before we were due to shoot a prison in Cork City closed down because they were building a new prison right beside it. They had no plans for the old one so we said we’d like to shoot a movie in it, is that ok? And they said it’s OK, so we had an entire prison to shoot in.
Q: A whole prison?
SB: A whole prion, though we didn’t need all of it. That wasn’t our only stroke of luck. It actually matched the Maze prison.
Q: Tom, Did that help you get into character? Did you feel the ghosts?
Tom Vaughan-Lawlor: Yes. The alternative was sets, which obviously are very different — and expensive. But this prison was full of massive walls and gates, and ghosts if you will, of prison. It’s a massive character in the film and we were lucky it worked out that way. You didn’t need to imagine what incarceration is like because of the intensity of the cells and how small they are and being packed in there for filming days, you really got a sense what that existence is for years.
Q: There’s so much history and people in the Maze, how did you keep it all straight?
SB: There are so many interesting details involved that we just had to focus down on Larry Marley’s story. When we did that, it really helped to make clear what were the details we needed to show. There’s a lot of fantastic stuff that also would have been great [to include] on the cinema screen, but it just would have been [too much] for our story.
TV-L: What was fortunate in one way, from when I first read the script and to when we shot, was that there was about 18 months for me to prepare. So I had all that time to read up on the history of the jail and Northern Ireland. It was embarrassing how little I knew, the ins and outs. Because I grew up in Dublin, I was embarrassed by how little I knew about the conflict that was right on my doorstep. So it was fortunate to have that time to research and ground myself in that period. We met so many of the guys who escaped and were part of the blanket protest, so having that insight as well and being able to ask questions that might be seemingly inconsequential, just little details, was massive in grounding us in the world of the film. We were lucky to have that background.
Q: What were some of those questions?
TV-L: There were the big questions like how did you survive? What’s astonishing is the guys who were on the blanket protest, the dirty protest, how did they endure it? I just couldn’t conceive of it. They were very… I don’t want to say humble, but they just shrugged their shoulders and got on with it.
They said, “We were young men with an ideology and a purpose and we stopped it.” So I found that amazing. Also the details of how the created they made work the whole system of getting messages in and out of the Maze and of communicating with their families. Complex stuff. When you’re doing a film about people who are still alive or their families are, you want to make sure you’re doing it… I was going to say “honoring” but that’s not the right word. You’re being respectful on one level; you’re aware and sensitive to the fact that these people are real. So you really have to do your homework.
Q: And you can’t be partisan about one way or the other.
TV-L: When you do a film that’s political or has a political bent, you have to read the script and be happy with the politics in it, if you’re going to do the film and stand by it. It’s very even-handed and judicious to both sides. It’s about community and reaching a dialogue and trying to make sense of conflict.
Q: Stephen, how did you get yourself involved with this?
SB: I started working on the subject with my first short films about the Northern Irish conflict. I did one about the civil rights movement in Derry in the ‘60s and one about the hunger strike movement. This was the third time I was doing a film where I was familiar with the subject. With all three of those films, I did try to show both sides of the story. Not just to be fair but also it’s such a misunderstood conflict that I wanted to give people an understanding and not just a one sided view.
I began my writing and directing career making award winning short films about characters caught up in the Northern Ireland conflict (After ’68 and ’81), and I am excited about returning to this theme from a new perspective 20 years on.
Q: And why did you focus on this story of this prison escape?
SB: Because it was a big success for the IRA, when we came to doing it, it had been nearly 20 years since the Good Friday Agreement. Even so, we still had to be persuasive with our financiers that we were going to take a responsible view and it wasn’t going to be “The Great Escape for the IRA.” We were going to look at it in a rounded way. There was some hassle at various points just when we started shooting. The Irish Prison Service is run by the government and an officer whose father was a prison guard, and happened to be killed by the IRA, had some concerns. He was the only prison officer in the republic of Ireland that was shot and killed by the IRA. He said what the hell are we letting this film shoot in the Cork prison? Then the government went to the prison service and said what the hell is going on down there? All our financiers who were public bodies, they came out with a public statement in support of us saying we were experienced filmmakers were taking a responsible approach; they wouldn’t have funded it if it wasn’t so.
Q: Did it feel very heavy to do this? Or did you just push through to film as quick as possible?
TV-L: We were lucky in the sense that we were in prison all day every day, so that gives you a taste for that life and channels your mind. And also because our schedule was tight that concentrated one’s mind to make sure there was no messing around and you’ve got to make decisions quickly, which sometimes can lend itself to a film like this.
I did a lot of reading around the subject and the story, and my character is clear in term of his objectives and singlemindedness, so you have to find a commitment to match that — which is easy. If you’re going to play a part that’s a lead or you are leading from the front of an acting company you have to be able to deliver. It’s an exciting opportunity because the script can be amazing and you can have amazing crews and supporting cast, but if you’re playing an important role, no matter how good your support is the cake can collapse in the middle. So that’s the galvanizing responsibility. I loved it because he’s a leader in the film and you want to be the leader on the set. If you are number one on the call sheet you have to carry it like that and that’s an exciting responsibility.
Q: Did you find yourself rallying the crew?
TV-L: I’m not an extrovert in that way but I wanted to make sure we were working as hard as we could.
SB: My approach to it was because we knew in the end people that lived through it were going to watch it, if we did something wrong we were going to be called out on it. So we tried with everything to be as authentic as we could. We done our research, we had interviews with real escapers and a lot of our actors came through Northern Ireland so they lived through it or their parents lived through it.
Also we had an ex-prisoner that survived the hunger strike come down because he had an interest in the film and we just pounced on him and asked what happens when you do this or that, and we were really grateful for all the questions he answered.