"I don't want to be a happy person in a wheelchair"

I wrote this piece on September 6 to coincide with the television premiere on RTE1 of Blind Man Walking, a documentary by Ross Whitaker about adventure athlete Mark Pollock becoming the first blind man to reach the South Pole on foot. Events in Mark's life took a tragic turn after the filming of the documentary and this interview was conducted over the phone with him as he lay in his hospital bed. Anyone who wishes to keep up-to-date on his condition should visit Mark's blog at www.markpollock.com

By Susan Daly

Monday September 06 2010

On a good day, Mark Pollock considers himself a lucky man. He's alive and he shouldn't be, having split open his skull and ruptured an aorta, filling his chest with blood, when he fell from a second-floor window two months ago.

On other days, when the spirit is low, the adventure athlete allows himself to feel that he has been hellishly unlucky. In the fall Mark also broke his back in three places and he has still not regained any feeling in his legs.

It would be a terrible trial for anyone, but the sense of tragedy is compounded by the fact that just over a decade ago, Mark had to overcome another immense physical hurdle.

Twelve years ago, at the age of 22, Mark went suddenly and completely blind.

"I'm trying to think back to when I went blind," says Mark. "I'm only two months into this (breaking his back) and I'm not comfortable with it or probably not particularly dealing with it. Two months into going blind, was I thinking like this?"

Mark had been born with weak retinas and lost the sight in one eye at the age of five. The retina in his other 'good' eye detached as he was finishing a degree in Trinity College Dublin.

Over the next decade, Mark learned to rebuild his life, got a job, girlfriends, and won two Commonwealth medals in rowing. He became a motivational speaker, wrote an inspirational book called Making It Happen and competed in adventure races all over the world.

In 2003, he ran six marathons in seven days across the Gobi Desert, raising funds for Sightsavers International. He became an Ironman triathlete. He competed against legendary explorer Ranulph Fiennes who called him "truly inspiring".

For the tenth anniversary of his going blind, Mark decided to set himself a new challenge, more daring than any he had attempted before. He decided to compete against the likes of Olympic medallist James Cracknell and his team-mate Ben Fogle in the first race to the South Pole in a century. If he completed the 800km race, he would become the first blind man to reach the Pole on foot.

The harsh training regime he set himself, the financial headaches and his gruelling experience in the race itself are portrayed in a powerful and moving documentary being shown on RTE1 tonight called Blind Man Walking.

"I felt I had become a bit stale with the races and talks I had been doing," explains Mark. "I wasn't sure I was bringing any fresh insights to my talks and I wanted to really go and put myself on the line."

The South Pole race was more than putting himself on the line; it was potentially putting himself at death's door. It involved two months of non-stop trekking in temperatures as low as -48 degrees, pulling a 200lb sled of provisions behind him.

It was a 12-hours-a-day slog, head-down, battling the elements, trying not to starve, freeze, or fall into a crevasse in the ice. But for Mark, completing the race would prove once and for all that he was truly an adventure athlete.

"Any sporting thing I'd done before, there was always the element of 'Sure that's great, 'cos Mark's blind'," he says. "I really felt that when I was talking to people about this race they were fascinated with Antarctica and the South Pole and it wasn't about the blindness. It just felt like the adventure was a true adventure -- and it took me away from my blindness."

You'll have to tune in tonight to discover the outcome of the race. Suffice to say, Mark came back in one piece in February of last year, with a fresh perspective on life. He was making plans to get into radio and other media, and to expand his motivational business. He followed the South Pole race with other physical challenges -- including becoming the first blind man to co-skipper a boat in the 1,400-mile Round-Ireland Yacht Race in June of this year.

He had also made a very personal decision while at the South Pole: to propose to his girlfriend Simone. His Norwegian team-mate Inge had warned all the competitors to not act immediately on any major vows they made to themselves during the mentally-challenging conditions of the race.

"So I waited until November to ask Simone. I phoned Inge to tell him then and he said, 'Jeez, I was only talking about a couple of weeks to calm down, I didn't mean nine months!'"

The couple had been due to marry on this August Bank Holiday weekend, something Mark says has been "postponed, not cancelled".

Three weeks before, on July 2, Mark was attending the Royal Rowing Regatta in Henley, England, when he fell from a second-storey window in the house where he was staying. It is not yet clear if he was sleepwalking or disoriented as he made his way to a bathroom that night: all he remembers is being on the ground below.

"Apparently I was trying to get up and I remember hearing Brendan Smyth, the rower I did the Commonwealth Games with, saying, 'It'll be alright, it'll be alright, just stay lying down'."

His parents and Simone were at his bedside the day after the accident and have been there since as he moved from weeks of morphine-hazed consciousness to delicate surgery to stabilise his back.

He is now rehabilitating in Stoke Mandeville hospital in Buckinghamshire, a centre for spinal injuries in the UK. His doctors have no long-term prognosis on whether he will walk again and Mark is undergoing exhausting physiotherapy sessions, trying to build up his strength to be able to sit in a wheelchair for more than an hour or two at a time.

"At times I do feel unlucky," he says. "Then I think I really could have died in the first couple of weeks after the accident.

"We met a guy last night who is two years down the line from getting a wheelchair. He used to be a professional moto-cross rider and he's back out working, he's a mechanic, and doing all sorts of sports and living his life independently. On one hand, you think, 'Well, that's great, one small step at a time', and I can be happy and positive.

"But then you start thinking, 'I don't want to be a happy person in a wheelchair'."

One consolation to him is that TV viewers will be able to see him at his finest in tonight's documentary.

He didn't want his accident to change anything about the film -- especially not the title, Blind Man Walking, which he came up with for director Ross Whitaker, and which now seems particularly poignant.

'I didn't want to change it because of this accident," he says. "The great thing about the film is that it captures a time when I was feeling very content and had buried the demons of my blindness after going to the South Pole. Trusting Ross to tell the real story has allowed me to have a record of one of the most positive times of my life.

"It didn't feel like a short-term champagne-popping experience: achieving the South Pole gave me a long-lasting contentment."
FIRST PUBLISHED HERE: http://www.independent.ie/health/case-studies/i-was-the-first-blind-man-to-conquer-the-south-pole-now-i-dont-know-if-ill-ever-walk-again-2326009.html

Movie review: Hot Tub Time Machine

As published in last Friday's Day and Night magazine with the Irish Independent:

HOT TUB TIME MACHINE
***
Does anyone really want to relive the 1980s? The disastrous hair, Maggie Thatcher and Mr Big: there are so many reasons not to go back.

Hot Tub Time Machine revels in ’80s nostalgia right down to its ludicrous, neon-lettered title. For Adam (John Cusack) and his estranged buddies Lou and Nick - all stuck in depressive, dead-end adulthood - the era of Ronald Reagan and legwarmers were the best years of their lives.

When Lou (an insanely funny Rob Corddy) almost comes a cropper thanks to a cocktail of booze, exhaust fumes and Motley Crue, Adam and Nick (Craig Robinson) decide a restorative road trip is in order. The trio travel to the ski resort of their hedonistic late teens.

Like the lead characters, the resort has seen better days and there’s a rotting dead animal in their hotel hot tub. Enter repairman Chevy Chase (funny again for the first time in decades – a sure sign we’re heading back in time), add a dash of male bonding in the titular time-bending tub and the boys are rocketed back to 1986.

There is a nod to a Back to the Future style plotline, but this isn’t the place to come looking for a treatise on the time-space continuum. This is a movie having fun with itself and the era it parodies, where Don Johnson is a style icon and tape cassette Walkmans are the zenith of audio technology.

Directed by Steve Pink, who wrote Cusack’s Grosse Pointe Blank and High Fidelity, the script isn’t what it should be, relying a lot on visual gags, some toilet humour (literally, in the case of a catheter) and pop culture references that will be lost on audience members under 30.

Saying that, there are enough laugh-out-loud moments – especially a running gag about how Crispin Glover’s bellboy loses an arm – to keep things ticking over. As for the title, like much of the 1980s, it’s so bad, it’s good.

Saviours released on DVD tomorrow

Saviours trailer here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kon_pNs5VXg

Extraordinary stories, extraordinary characters and beautifully told. As far as I'm concerned, if you haven't seen this documentary, you've missed one of the most outstanding Irish films made in the last decade. People might now focus on it because one of the boxers featured is the much-missed Darren Sutherland and there is some terrible poignancy in that fact.
I saw it in the cinema months before Darren died and, even then, it changed the way I saw Dublin and the way I thought about the people I pass on the street every day. Powerful stuff.

Here's info from the distributors, Eclipse Pictures:
The multi-award winning documentary SAVIOURS will be released on DVD nationwide by Sony Pictures Home Entertainment Ireland TOMORROW, Friday April 2, 2010.

Described as the “Best Irish Film of the Year” by the Sunday Tribune and “this year’s Once” by Hot Press Magazine, SAVIOURS is a stunning observational film set in inner city Dublin. This award-winning film follows the roller-coaster fortunes of three boxers over an 18-month period as they battle to make the most of their lives, both inside and outside of the ring. All three test their mettle at St. Saviours Olympic Boxing Academy. It’s an oasis of goodwill in one of Dublin’s most socially deprived areas where the boxers are coaxed and cajoled by the club's colourful, wise-cracking coaches.

SAVIOURS weaves a compelling drama from the lives of these young men as they aim for glory despite the struggles they face outside the ring.

Bonus features include Tribute to Darren Sutherland and Directors / Editor’s Commentary

Directed and produced by Ross Whitaker and Liam Nolan

Cast includes Darren Sutherland, Abdul Hussein, Dean Murphy, John McCormack

Cert PG

Running Time 81 mins

Images available from Eclipse Pictures

Release Date 2 April 2010


For interview requests or further information, please contact Siobhán Farrell at siobhan@eclipsepictures.ie


Siobhan Farrell

General Manager, Eclipse Pictures

25 Hatch Place, Dublin 2;

Tel: +353 1 634 0112 (direct); +353 1 634 0121 (main office)

Quiet time with Cillian

Cillian Murphy is down at the Dingle Film Festival this weekend - and so am I. Wonder what our reunion conversation will be like... This is an interview from when I met him in Dublin last week...

http://www.independent.ie/entertainment/day-and-night/features/defying-murphys-law-2104305.html

Defying Murphy's law

Cillian Murphy doesn't do TV chat shows because, he says, he'd be no good at them. That's probably true. The Cork-born actor isn't one to embroider an anecdote just to entertain his interviewer.

It's not that he is rude or unfriendly, but he's just not that comfortable talking about himself. And that's not even the personal details; his wife, his two toddler sons, his 'real' life. We're discussing his more outlandish roles -- the transsexual Patrick 'Kitten' Braden in Breakfast on Pluto, the psychotic Jackson Rippner in Red Eye -- when he blushes and breaks off.

"I hate talking about my own stuff," he says. But as we're not ensconced in this nice suite in the Merrion Hotel to talk about me, he gathers himself.

"I enjoy playing characters who are as far away from me as possible," he says. "I guess that role in that plane film, Red Eye, playing this guy who was seemingly nice and then flips -- I really enjoyed that."

The cliché that acting is a mask behind which one can hide is true in some ways for Murphy, but the interesting thing is that he doesn't actually seem that shy. The last time I saw him, about six months ago, he was on a makeshift stage in a barn in the middle of field in Monaghan. Pat McCabe, author of Breakfast on Pluto, had roped him into performing at his Flat Lake Arts Festival outside Clones. Murphy was either supposed to be playing guitar with his old rock band (more of that anon) or doing a reading with playwright Enda Walsh.

"It didn't work out, so in the end I said, 'Oh feck it, I'll just DJ' and I just played tunes off my computer," he says. Completely unabashed, Murphy took to the stage armed with just a can of beer and his Mac.

Wasn't he a bit embarrassed? "It was great fun," he laughs. "That night, even playing tunes and having people dance, there's that need to perform, you know?" Although he does admit that in the end he got down off the stage and started dancing with the crowd because he felt like "a gawl", a particularly Munster term for 'eejit', up there.

"I wasn't a hugely extroverted kid growing up," he says, "but that performance thing was always there."

At first it expressed itself through music: he and his younger brother formed a rock band, which was at one point on the cusp of signing a five-record deal with a London music label. Their parents had reservations -- his brother, Paidi, was still in school, and Cillian in his first year of law at UCC at the time -- and they turned down the offer.

Shortly afterwards, he turned a fledgling interest in acting into his first professional performance as the charismatic lead of Enda Walsh's Disco Pigs. I saw him in that first stage run in Cork in late 1996 and, although it's easy to say this in hindsight, the raw, visceral power of his performance seemed prophetic.

Murphy didn't see it like that -- at first anyway. "I didn't know any better, I didn't see any future in it [acting]. I just thought, it's a great laugh, you only have to work an hour at night and you can sleep all day and you get to go touring."

Only a run in Dublin and at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival finally convinced him that there might be a future in this acting lark. "I was so lucky to get a play that was so brilliant and so successful," he says. "I began to realise that this was a bit more serious and it was making a proper impact."

So out went college -- "Law was the wrong match, definitely. There is a very narrow potential for creativity" -- and in came a profession where the performer in him took full flight. He might be reserved and unassuming in person, but there has been nothing tentative about his choice of roles.

His Batman baddie Scarecrow used the cool intensity of his striking blue eyes to chilling effect; in Breakfast on Pluto, those same wide eyes are key to the portrayal of the sensitive and innocent Kitten.

His reluctance to tread the chat-show circuit hasn't done him any harm in Hollywood -- his CV of independent 'European' films is interspersed with big-bucks works such as Danny Boyle's Sunshine, the aforementioned Red Eye, Girl With A Pearl Earring, 28 Days Later and, somewhere between the two worlds, Ken Loach's The Wind That Shakes The Barley.

Next week sees his latest film, Perrier's Bounty, opening in cinemas nationwide. It's Murphy's first Irish film in a few years.

"I don't have a system where I do 'one for them, one for us', but I think it's important to make films about your own country. And to have loyalty towards the industry at home. Take Vincent Cassel; he'll make films in America and then he'll go back home and make a huge amount of films in France."

As a younger actor -- he's now 33 -- he says he was keen to seek out roles where he wasn't defined as an Irish person. "As you get older, you worry less about that, it's more about the quality of the stories."

In Perrier's Bounty, he is Michael McCrea, a "bottom-feeder in the criminal world", playing opposite Brendan Gleeson, Liam Cunningham and Jim Broadbent. Broadbent plays Michael's father and it is the relationship between the two of them, as much as the "fun" shoot-'em-up scenes, that attracted Murphy to the job.

"No matter how old you are, you revert to being a surly teenager," he says, "you never, ever meet your parents totally as adults. You'll always be the child, they'll always be the parent, there's this friction and I thought that was really well played by Jim.

"What Mark [O'Rowe, the writer] does really well -- and he did this in Intermission [in which Murphy starred with Colin Farrell] -- he writes Irish males brilliantly. The inability to express one's feelings and the inability to say to the girl what he's feeling about her. The inability to sort this shit out with his parents. I recognise that in myself and in my friends."

If that sounds like a bit of a personal insight, well, it's only a glimpse. He admits that sometimes he can go home to wife Yvonne in London with the "residue" of a character hanging about at the end of an intense filmshoot, but that ultimately, "I'll say I'm just cooling off and getting back to 'Cill'; to myself."

He's been at home since filming on the new Christopher Nolan film, Inception -- also starring Leonardo DiCaprio -- wrapped in December. "I'm sure there's a way of working all the time, but that doesn't really interest me," he says.

Going out on the town doesn't interest him either -- he's anxious to keep his family out of the papers. And probably because of this low profile he keeps, the paparazzi don't bother with him. "I think it's fair game with me but it's not very nice when they do it with the kids. It hasn't happened much and there's not very much you can do about it, but as a dad your animalistic, protective instinct is to get angry."

He also has a professional reason for retaining an air of mystery. "It's very hard to retain any sort of distance from people nowadays, but if you can retain any of that, you should, so that when you do a play or film, people will be able to believe the character a bit more. There are some actors I don't know anything about and I'm glad because I can enjoy their performances more."

Again, he's probably right. And if that's what it takes for him to keep surprising audiences with his chameleon characters then, Cill, it's nice not knowing you.

Perrier's Bounty is released on March 26th

CILLIAN CHAMELEON – Murphy’s biggest on-screen transformations
28 DAYS LATER (2002): Trainspotting director Danny Boyle spotted Murphy in Kirsten Sheridan’s movie version of Disco Pigs and brought the indie darling to mass international attention.
RED EYE (2005): This was Murphy’s year of the baddie in which he proved those stunning baby blues could transform him in a split-second from romantic lead to chilling terrorist.
BREAKFAST ON PLUTO (2005): Certainly his greatest physical transformation, playing transvestite ‘Kitten’ Braden in this Neil Jordan film also brought him his greatest critical acclaim – and a Golden Globe nomination.
THE WIND THAT SHAKES THE BARLEY (2006): Ken Loach cast Murphy as a young Corkman caught up in the horrors of the Irish War of Independence and the Civil War in this Cannes award-winning saga. It was a personal revolution for Murphy, who said he found it challenging to be playing a character close to his own personality (“only braver”).