Schumacher's Take

A Hollywood Director Brings the Dangers of Journalism to the Big Screen

On the afternoon of June 26, 1996, at a traffic light just outside of Dublin, two gunmen on a motorcycle drove up to Veronica Guerin, Ireland's leading investigative reporter, and pumped five bullets into her neck and chest while she was in her car. Less than a year earlier, Guerin had traveled to New York City to accept the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) International Press Freedom Award for her reporting on Ireland's criminal underworld. 'Veronica Guerin,' a movie produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, directed by Joel Schumacher, and starring Cate Blanchett, will hit theaters soon. In late September, Schumacher spoke with CPJ executive director Ann Cooper about Veronica and the film.

Ann Cooper: What made you think this would be a good story for a film?

Joel Schumacher: Jerry Bruckheimer not only sent me a script, but he sent me a huge loose-leaf binder filled with Veronica Guerin's articles and tons of research.

...The minute I read it, I just felt I wanted to tell this story because I thought she was so bold and so brave. I know some people think she was reckless because she faced up to these thugs and criminals and would not be threatened and continued exposing them. But I always feel that that's sexist. I don't think people would say that about a man. I don't think they would call [Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel] Pearl reckless because he was following a story, or any of the male journalists you see in the middle of war with shells going off near their heads as reckless, when most of them have families also. But when it comes to a woman with a child, many people think that she should have backed down.

AC: What sort of understanding did you gain about her and what drove her to do this?

JS: I think she, like a lot of strong journalists, wanted to really shine the light wherever it shouldn't be shone. I think hypocrisy and cover-ups and everything that was going on that she felt was nefarious, she just wanted it out there. And it was also making her a star at the same time. This [Irish Catholic] bishop had impregnated a young woman who was a part of his parish, and as soon as this young woman found out she was pregnant, the bishop, with the help of the Church, was shipped off to Nicaragua. And the other newspapers had gotten the story of the young woman. They had gotten the story of the mother of the young woman. But no one had talked to this bishop. And so [Veronica], with her own money, got a ticket to Nicaragua and went down there

.....When she sat on his doorstep in Nicaragua, he got so frightened that he ran off to New York. And then she followed him to New York. And finally, he just broke down and gave her this interview.

....She turned out to be the only person who had this interview with him. It ran for three consecutive Sundays.

....The paper's circulation jumped from 150,000 to 350,000 overnight. She had become very successful at what she called "doorstepping" people, which is just to knock on their front door. As you know, most journalists try to arrange an appointment to interview someone. And what she would do is just knock on their front door and they'd open the door, and she would try to get comments from them.

 AC: Tell me about [her celebrity status]. Do you think that was part of what drove her?

JS: At the time, I don't think there were a lot of women in Ireland who had formidable positions and were acknowledged by the ordinary person as a success story and a real superstar, in a sense. She was extremely attractive. She had great personality. She was obviously very bright. And she adapted herself to almost any situation. In other words, she was extremely comfortable in confronting bishops, members of Parliament, notable politicians, taking on her editors and publishers at the paper. But then she could also sit in a pub with the lowest of the low, watch a soccer game, have a pint, and get them to trust her.

One of her most valuable relationships, although it was part of the seeds of her own demise, was with a man named John Traynor, whom she nicknamed "The Coach." He was kind of a popular character, sort of the mayor of his own neighborhood in the sense that he ran brothels. He ran a car parts garage and also a car [dealership], which was all a cover-up for him. Traynor was in bed with [notorious criminal] John Gilligan, the man who, in most people's minds, engineered Veronica's murder. Traynor worked everybody...And Veronica struck this strange alliance with him. He actually fed her enormous amounts of true stories about crimes

...And she made him more of a celebrity by writing about him as "The Coach" and printing some of his quotes. Ultimately, John Gilligan, who was a very violent sociopath, and who Traynor was in the drug business with, would realize of course that Traynor was feeding stories to Veronica ...As she got closer to exposing Gilligan, he wanted her out of the way.

 AC: Do you have any sense from the people you spoke with what the [1995 CPJ award] meant to her?

 JS: I think it was one of the most important things in her life...Because Ireland, for all its fame, is still a very small and, in many cases, overlooked country. And for her to be on that dais meant everything to her because it was such an international acknowledgment. And she had already been shot in the leg at that point and had been threatened many times.

 AC: There were people who accused her of shooting herself in the leg.

 JS: She received an enormous amount of jealousy from other journalists because she came out of nowhere, did not study journalism....They were insanely jealous of her because she had become a real superstar and people really looked forward to everything she wrote. So they accused her of exaggerating the drug problem, of making up the statistics that she would write. And then, worst of all, they accused her of shooting herself in the leg just to get more publicity.

 AC: In your research, did any of those accusations seem to hold water?

JS: None of them are true.

 AC: In a sense, [CPJs] award may have helped give her some legitimacy, although, alas, it did not save her life.

JS: Yes. I also think that sometimes, when a journalist becomes a major star, I think there can be the delusion that that might make you bulletproof in a way...I don't think most people realize how many journalists are murdered every year, and how many are jailed. At the end of the film, we show a photo of the real Veronica ...And that is followed by a card that tells the number of journalists that have been killed in the line of their work since her death.

 AC: There are a lot of movies that have been made about journalists: All the Presidents Men, The Year of Living Dangerously, Harrison's Flowers. Some of them have been great, and some, especially for journalists watching them, are absurd. And I wonder if you studied any movies like that in preparing for this, and were there any that you sort of thought got it right?
 

JS: Well, I don't know enough about journalism and the way it works on a day-to-day basis to make that judgment. What I used on this movie is exactly the same as I would use if I were telling the true story of a surgeon or a prostitute. What I did was I went to the source. Cate Blanchett and I spent hours and hours with the people Veronica] worked with at the paper, who were very forthcoming...I've gotten to know her mother very well...Her brother. The rest of the family. Also, Tony Hickey, who led the police investigation into her murder...What we tried to do is not really concern ourselves with other films but more, "Are we being true to this person? Are we really showing her life to somebody who might be interested in it? Are we doing it justice?"

We really hope that Veronica Guerin's mother and son and family see the movie and feel that we did the job right.

(reprinted with permission from the Committee to Protect Journalists, Dangerous Assignments: Covering the Global Press Freedom Struggle, Fall/Winter, 2002.)