Director on mission to capture Whitey’s evil

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This article was published 18/09/2015 (4033 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

TORONTO — If the movie Black Mass succeeds at anything, it is in the way it responsibly presents mobster James (Whitey) Bulger as the scary, monstrous thug he was.

He terrorized his South Boston community through the 1970s and ’80s before he was ultimately captured living a quiet retirement lifestyle in California in 2011.

Getting to Bulger’s evil essence was the aim of director Scott Cooper. He made himself aware not just of Bulger’s violent deeds, but of the man’s perversely sterling reputation in some quarters of South Boston, where he may have been deemed more a scalawag — the opposite of his respectable senator brother Billy Bulger — than a remorseless sociopath. In the film’s opening minutes, Bulger (Johnny Depp) and his crew help a little old lady with her groceries.

“Whitey is very concerned about myth, no doubt about that,” Cooper says. “But it was very easy to see through the story he was putting forward.”

Filming in South Boston put Cooper in constant contact with people intimately connected in one way or another to the film’s subject.

“You talk about six degrees of Kevin Bacon,” Cooper jokes, referring to the actor who plays FBI chief Charles McGuire. “In South Boston, it’s two degrees of Whitey Bulger, because everybody had a story and everybody knew.”

The terror the man inspired still permeates. Asked what he thinks of Bulger, actor Joel Edgerton, who plays crooked FBI agent John Connolly, demurs.

“He’s such a chilling individual, I’m scared to tell you what I think of him,” he says, citing an incident not seen in the film in which Bulger contacted Connolly’s FBI partner.

“He made a phone call to John Morris at one point when the house was falling down and John hung up the phone and later on had a heart attack,” Edgerton says.

“The other day, I was in an interview and I said something about Jimmy Bulger and I thought: ‘I hope that doesn’t come back to haunt me.’

“Obviously he was a very charismatic, powerful figure, but psychopathic in the way he was willing to back up his words with actions,” Edgerton says. “He ruled with a lot of fear.”

Cooper says getting to the truth of Bulger made it necessary to avoid the tropes of the classic gangster movie, in which the audience is compelled to sympathize with the bad guy.

“None of us wanted anybody to walk out of that theatre going: ‘I want to be Whitey Bulger,'” he says. “You feel that way after Scarface or after Goodfellas, or after The Godfather.

“I love those movies, but there was a responsibility to not do that here,” he says. “It should feel more like Donnie Brasco, for example. We didn’t want to create more fuel for Whitey Bulger’s myth.

“I say this with trepidation because some of the best American films ever made are in the crime or gangster genre.”

The job of de-mythifying Whitey Bulger has largely fallen to former Boston Globe reporters Dick Lehr and Gerard O’Neill, whose book Black Mass: Whitey Bulger, the FBI and a Devil’s Deal was the source material for Cooper’s movie.

But curiously, the reporters say they weren’t especially menaced by Bulger for their work. The same couldn’t be said of the federal agency with which Bulger conspired through John Connolly.

“The retribution we experienced came from the FBI,” says O’Neill. “There wasn’t anything directly from Whitey Bulger.”

“We got a couple of calls basically saying: ‘We know what you’re doing. You better be careful.’ That came from the bureau in South Boston.”

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca