‘Peaky Blinders’ Director Reveals Who Reunited Him and Cillian Murphy For ‘Small Things Like These’

The Big Picture

• Tim Mierlants, a Belgian director, brings authenticity to the Irish tale of grief and the crimes of the Catholic church.
• Small Thing Like These
  explores trauma, grief, and silence in Irish culture with a personal touch.
• Cillian Murphy’s involvement united past colleagues which adds depth to the poignant story.

The new Cillian Murphy-starrer, Small Things Like These, is as Irish as a film can get. It is based on the novel by Claire Keegan, it follows a sleepy Irish town in the mid-1980s, and it deals with the very real and very horrifying crimes committed by the Catholic Church. So, you might find it odd that the man helming the entire picture is Belgian director Tim Mierlants. However, Irish or not, Mierlants was undoubtedly the right person for the job. You can see it in the final cut of the film, and you can hear it in the way he passionately talks about the project.

Mierlants hails from Antwerp, and the majority of his filmography has dealt with grief, stemming from the loss of his brother in childhood. He made his feature debut in 2019 with Patrick, which won him the Best Director award at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival. Mierlants is also an accomplished TV director, working on various series, including Peaky Blinders, where he first met Cillian Murphy. Murphy, who is also a producer on Small Things Like These, wanted to bring together his co-workers of the past, including screenwriter Enda Walsh, co-star Eileen Walsh, and Mierlants.

The weight of the material is not lost on Mierlants, who can understand the trauma this story depicts, with Belgium also dealing with decades of sexual abuse within the Catholic Church. But the personal connection to the film runs much deeper for Mierlants. He saw himself in Bill Furlong, a man struggling with expressing his grief. Mierlants sits down to talk with Collider about packing so much history into a seemingly small tale.

Tim Mierlants and Cillian Murphy Met Working on ‘Peaky Blinders’

COLLIDER: I am so excited to talk to you about this film. I watched it last night, and as an Irish woman and as a really big Claire Keegan fan, it was everything I wanted and more.

TIM MIELANTS: What a relief. Thank you so much.

How did you become involved in this? Had you read the Claire Keegan book before? Talk to me about the inception of this project.

MIELANTS: I know Cillian from the third season of Peaky Blinders, and we loved working together. I think he saw my movie, Patrick, which is minimalistic and that kind of thing, and we felt like we should do something together again. Then, we were looking for material, and it’s Cillian’s wife, Yvonne McGuinness, who was waving the book in front of us, and then I read it. The story about grief is something that comes back in all my stories. I lost my brother when I was very young, and that was the deepest pain I can imagine, and it always comes back. That kind of structure of pain and kind of delayed grief, which is in the story, is something which I think is the engine of the story. That’s something I could structure and understand.

Also, going through this little boy and this man in midlife crisis, that’s something I thought, “I understand this guy. Even though I’m a foreigner, I think I can do that character.” I didn’t know a lot about Irish history, but I was very honest about this. I said to everyone, “You have to teach me. You have to explain it to me.” But then, at the same time, I felt like I was not carrying that heavy load on my shoulder of Irish history. So, that’s how it came about. That’s the history. That’s what happened.

‘Small Things Like These’ Is Just as Much About Grief as It Is History

I want to ask you so many things about this because when I watched this, I did think it was so true to Irish life, these very personal moments. The whole thesis is about grief, yes, but I really took it as Irish people aren’t good about talking about serious things. We’re very much like, “Don’t be looking at what your neighbor is doing, just focus on yourself.” I wonder, how did you approach this, as you say, like an outsider, when you’re not Irish because it feels so true to Irish life and the Irish approach to living?

MIELANTS: Where I come from, Belgium, is very Catholic, as well, and Catholicism is rooted in every aspect of society. What happened in Ireland in 1985 didn’t happen with us — that’s more like the ‘30s or ‘20s. That’s the difference. So, I kind of understand not being able to communicate, and if you’re silent, it’s okay. When you start talking, don’t talk. I think these guys are quite similar. My understanding when talking to a lot of people is you’re not allowed to talk about your emotions — men are not allowed to talk about their emotions. “Don’t talk about this.” Having a character who’s really vulnerable and very emotional, who can’t cope with his emotion, who’s not able to talk about this, and after losing his mother, not able to talk about this, you get this scene with Michelle Fairley where she said, “You’ve been grieving for a week now. Now you go to the other room. You go back to school.” Can you imagine such vulnerability, and then he builds a concrete wall in front of him? After that, behind a concrete wall, there’s this bursting volcano that wants to come out. So, it’s a very silent movie, but at the same time, I feel like it’s very loud inside of him.

I completely agree. I think this film might seem to some people like quite a small tale, small in terms of scope, but you have this massive history of systemic abuse of women trapped and forced into torture by the Catholic Church, and your film packs that all in into this very intimate, tender story. How do you balance a very personal story with decades of really strong history that is still going on to this day? We’re still seeing the ramifications of the Magdalene Laundries in Ireland today.

MIELANTS: I was more trusting the script and the book, and I was very much, at the same time, involving what I really understood, and that was the pain of the character and the pain of grief. That’s what I structured — every fault. I got this big A5 map with the timeline. I was connecting all these faults of what was going on in the brain, and I was remembering what kind of pain I experienced everywhere at any specific moment. What was the brain doing during grief? Sometimes you get images in front of you, and you think, “Where is this coming from?”

So, what you see is the top of the iceberg, but underneath, he’s [Murphy’s character Bill Furlong] thinking a lot. I was navigating Cillian through my own experiences of pain. So, I think these silences only become interesting when there’s a fog behind it, and that’s something I tried to put in the movie as much as I possibly could — with all the characters, actually.

How Did Tim Mierlants Cast ‘Small Things Like These’?

With that type of approach, you’re really reliant on the cast, and what a brilliant cast, like Eileen Walsh, and Emily Watson is terrifying in this film. Can you talk to me about working with Cillian, especially as a producer, as well, on this project?

MIELANTS: Oh, that was brilliant. Actually, I always want to do it again and again because, as I said before, I was mapping this out emotionally, and I was storyboarding everything. I took him with me to all the locations where the producer does, and I was involving him with all the storyboards and all the ideas and everything, and why it should be that way and that way and that way. Of course, we got in these discussions about this, but he knew exactly what I was after and what kind of tonality it was. So, from the moment we were on set, we were on the same level, and we could only go further from there. A lot of times an actor comes to set, and it’s like, “Oh, I thought this would be different.” That never happened. So, that was great. And certainly, with the talent of Cillian doing that is the best thing.

He’s phenomenal in this. What some people might not know is that earlier this year we had an Irish entry in the Best International Feature at the Oscars An Cailín Ciúin ( The Quiet Girl), which is also based on a Claire Keegan book. I’d love to know why you think Claire Keegan’s books translate so well to screen because they do in both films. Even though there might not be a very “plot-heavy” story, they translate so well to the screen. When you were reading the book, what were you most easily able to envision?

MIELANTS: I feel she understands people. She just knows them. I think in a very subtle way she nails saying, “If you’re silent, you are complicit.” Nailing that kind of thing, she just does it. And I think the brilliance of Small Things Like These is the injustice and the oppression against women, but using a male perspective to tell the story, I think, actually, is brilliant because that’s the silence. That’s the complicity of society. It’s a collective problem. We’re in this together. But using that perspective to tell something about society, about using the silence to tell something, I think that’s pure brilliance and amazing.

Are you worried at all by the response to the film? Even though I think it’s beautiful, and I think it’s very true to life, but I guess some people might have strong reactions to this film. Was that ever a consideration in the process?

MIELANTS: I premiered this movie in Belgium, and it’s extremely sensitive there about the church. We’ve got an enormous amount of cases of pedophiles in the church who abused, and I think the victims have only started talking about this right now, so it’s very, very sensitive. So, I also felt like that story also could have happened where I am from. Because the writing is so subtle and honest, I wasn’t anxious about that. I was more anxious like, “Is this movie gonna work? Is it gonna work as a movie?”

Tim Mierlants Worked With Matt Damon and Ben Affleck on ‘Small Things Like These’

Matt Damon is a producer on this. How was working with him?

MIELANTS: Matt read the script a couple of times, and he was more involved in selling the movie afterward. I got more conversations with Ben [Affleck] upfront. He was very supportive. Then he saw the edits, and he got good notes on the edit, which made the movie better. They are brilliant filmmakers. I was honored to work with them or to talk to them twice. [Laughs]

How did you go about picking your cast? Obviously, Cillian was on board, but I think Emily Watson is a stroke of genius in terms of the casting. Because Mother Superior is kind of the villain of the story. What did you want audiences to take from her, and what did you want from the performance?

MIELANTS: For me, the monastery was not a realistic place. It was more in his mind. That’s a place where something happened there with his mother, and he never coped with the grief. He never faced the grief. He never faced the trauma. For me, it was like him entering the monastery was more like entering the trauma he never faced before. So, he was kind of walking into his unconsciousness, and it was a more subjective approach, which was slightly hyperrealistic but realistic at the same time.

So, I was looking for these two worlds coming together. That’s the way I try to envision the monastery. With the fire and the haze and everything, and the way she plays has to be that same mixture between, “Is this real or not? Is there a devil talking inside himself?” And that’s something she nails. But it had to be subtle and has to get a place into the realism and the subtleness of the whole movie, so it has this kind of twisting tonality. We had to own it, and she did it just brilliantly. I was kind of looking and searching for the writing, but we gave the freedom to make mistakes. I made mistakes, and we all did it. Then, we just found the right frequency.

What message do you want people to take from this film? What lesson do you think people can learn, especially from Bill Furlong as a person?

MIELANTS: If you’re silent, you’re complicit. And I think that’s happening in this world. The movie I made before Small Things Like This is Wil, and it’s my own hometown, Antwerp, where a lot of people were deported to Auschwitz, and people were silent and didn’t do anything. That’s scary. That’s really scary.

Small Things Like These arrives in theaters on November 8.

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