Jim Sheridan's latest film owes much to his two daughters, and to the young actresses who portray them, he tells Michael Dwyer.
Thirteen months have passed since Jim Sheridan's latest feature film, In America, had its world premiere to loud, sustained applause at the Toronto Film Festival, but the long gap between then and its cinema release here next week cannot be attributed to any lack of enthusiasm on the part of its distributors, 20th Century Fox. It opens in the US over the Thanksgiving weekend next month, well positioned for the Oscar nominations Fox is confident it will receive in the spring.
The movie was wet from the labs when it was sent to Toronto, and several fine details had to be tuned. The closing credits had yet to put on the film, and the song that plays over those credits - Time Enough For Tears, a potential Oscar-winner written by Bono, Gavin Friday and Maurice Seezer, and plaintively performed by Andrea Corr - had not even been recorded. It would have been too much of a rush to get the movie out before Christmas last year, and then Fox proposed releasing it in May of this year.
"I went against that," Sheridan said when we met in Dublin last week. "It's not really a summer film. That wouldn't work. People don't go to the beach and talk about a film that made them cry." Everyone cries, it seems, when they see In America.
The movie opens with an observation from its 10-year-old narrator: "There are some things you should wish for, and some things you shouldn't". Having made two remarkable films based on real-life characters - Christy Brown in My Left Foot and Gerry Conlon in In the Name of the Father - Sheridan has now made a film in which a man modelled on himself is the principal character, at a time when most of his wishes were not coming true.
He was born in Dublin in 1949, the eldest of the family's seven children. He first made his mark as a theatre director and actor in the 1970s after he graduated from UCD - with the Children's T Company, which he founded with Neil Jordan, and as one of the driving forces at Project Arts Centre during its dynamic golden era.
In 1981 he left for New York with his wife, Fran, and their two daughters, Naomi and Kirsten, who were nine and six years old, respectively, at the time. They struggled to get by, while he worked in odd jobs and as manager of the city's Irish Arts Centre. It was in New York that he received his only formal education in filmmaking, when he took an eight-week film production course at New York University, and where he wrote his early screenplays for Into the West and My Left Foot.
He shares the screenplay credit for In America with his daughters, Kirsten and Naomi. The film is a semi-autobiographical comedy-drama following the experiences of an Irish immigrant couple, Johnny and Sarah Sullivan (Paddy Considine and Samantha Morton), and their two young daughters, Christy and Ariel (sisters Sarah and Emma Bolger), over their first year in New York.
Devoid of whingeing self-pity, it charts their progress through a series of hard knocks to deliver a celebration of love, friendship, innocence and resilience that is, by turns, deeply moving and very funny. It draws tears not because it is manipulatively sentimental, but because viewers respond to the honesty of its emotions.
It is no discredit to the film's fine adult actors that scene after scene is stolen by the wonderfully natural young Bolger sisters, Sarah, who was 10 when the movie was shot, and Emma, who was six. "The difficult thing with Emma," he says, "is that she has a level of joy that Jim Sheridan doesn't possess - this internal child thing, this innocence. For the first time in all my films, I had to tell an actor I didn't know what they were doing, so I was having these conversations with a six-year-old to figure it out.
"There was a scene Kirsten wrote where Emma's talking and because the word 'whispers' was in the script, Emma started to whisper. I couldn't hear what she said, so I asked her to say it normally. But when it came to the edit and I saw the take where she was whispering, I knew she was right. And she was right several times.
"I decided at the end of the whole process that the most difficult thing in acting is joy. Marilyn Monroe had it, but it's filtered through a lens of sex there, whereas with the kids it was pure. The hard thing about Emma was that she would come up to me when I was two weeks behind schedule, she'd ask me what's for dinner on the set.
"To her, the dinner every day was all this food, and it was the most exciting part of her day. If you told her to wait, that you'd talk to her later, the minute you did that you had lost her. What was difficult was to maintain a level of childish joy in making the film, the way a kid feels they're just playing. If you were to really make a film right, I think that's the way you would do it. The older sister, Sarah, was fantastic, too.
"They're as good as any performances I've ever got from actors. They're up there with Daniel (Day-Lewis), aren't they?" In its intimacy, warmth and humanity, it's closer to his first film, My Left Foot, than the three which came in between - The Field, In the Name of the Father and The Boxer - and it represents a rich, confident advance in his filmmaking style. He's working on a smaller canvas, in one sense, but on a much broader one in other respects.
"It is a dramatically smaller canvas," he says, "because it's just about one thing. The first 35 minutes or so are like an episodic documentary, almost on the level of not being dramatic. Then the love scene shifts it into another area. People have said that I've never worked with kids before, but I did when I cast Hugh O'Conor [as the young Christy Brown] in My Left Foot. Noel Pearson thought it would be intimidating for Hugh to see Daniel playing Christy on the set, because that performance was total genius. But after two days, Hugh really got into the role and the movements, and he was brilliant.
"Everything really flowed. There was something so fluid about making that film, and I felt that making In America was the same. I could let the camera do whatever I wanted. When you have a really powerful performance - from Daniel or Pete Postlethwaite or Richard Harris - you just have to capture it, so it's not quite as fluid."
Achieving that fluidity was greatly assisted by his collaboration with lighting cameraman Declan Quinn on the new film, he says. "The lighting is much warmer and more colourful and more magical. As I pushed towards understanding all that, I developed a kind of visual shorthand that I didn't really have up to this film. Neil [Jordan] came out of the painter's world of his sister and his mother, and he was always steeped in visual ideas, whereas my background was more theatrical and narrative-driven. I now understand visual style much more. In a way, it's more to do with what's invisible, what's not there - when you take away visual information, it gets more powerful and more interactive for the audience."
The principal fictional element in In America is that the Sullivan family leave Ireland for New York to start anew after the death of their two-year-old son, Frankie, from a brain tumour. Despite moving to another continent, they remain haunted by recriminations and guilt over the boy's death. That part of the story was inspired by the death of Jim Sheridan's younger brother, also named Frankie, from a brain tumour when he was 11 years old.
"I took an idea out of James Joyce," he says. "He has Molly Bloom in love with this dead child, and she won't sleep with Leopold because of that, and this is a similar situation. Then I thought of The Dead, and Anjelica's character is in love with the guy singing outside the window.
"I think Joyce always made the women in love with dead people. I think it was something to do with the psychic wound in Ireland - from the Famine or war or whatever. In this story I put the husband and the wife in love with the dead child, so it's a triangle, and they go to the new land to let the death culture go.
"Because it's basically my own life, I approached each scene knowing it had happened. I wanted to get as close as I could to our experience, but the problem is that truth is stranger than fiction, so a lot of the time I had to take out some of the more extraordinary things that happened."
Three of the four main characters in In America are based on the movie's screenwriters - Jim, Naomi and Kirsten Sheridan. What, I wondered, was the response to the movie from Jim's wife, Fran, on whom the other principal character is based? "She really liked it," he smiles broadly. "Those who don't know Fran think the mother's too good to be true, and people who know her think the mother is not strong enough. Some of her family were making the point that Fran didn't work in an ice cream parlour like the character in the film, that Fran worked as a teacher in New York.
"But the teaching thing would have been just too clichéd. She's already got two kids in the film and she's pregnant, so you put her in a kindergarten, as Fran was, and you would have had too many kids in the film. I had to find a way to get the kids into Heaven, the ice cream parlour. I felt if she didn't work there, it would seem like the parents were letting the kids go somewhere they didn't know."
He is developing two projects for his next movie. One, about growing up in Sheriff Street in Dublin, will draw on 44, the book by his brother, Peter Sheridan. The other, The Mark of Cain, is the story of an Irish-American political family over the first 60 years of the 20th century - an outline that inevitably prompts associations with the Kennedy dynasty.
"It's a very interesting period," he says, "especially in what was going on below the surface. The rural people tried to stop the power of the cities in the 19th century, and the only thing that was effective was Prohibition. It was a method of stopping the rise of the Democratic Party through the saloon culture, but it didn't really work because it had the opposite effect. The problem I'm having is, as you say, that any film about Irish-American politics comes up against the reality of the Kennedys' story. I tried to shift it away from that. I wouldn't like to do anything against the Kennedys."
He is in the final stages of completing that screenplay and is determined to get one or other of these two projects before the camera next year. "I have to," he says. "I don't want to let so much time go by again." Whichever he goes with first, he is adamant that the Section 481 tax incentive has to be retained to ensure the survival of the Irish film industry.
"The government has to realise that it would be a disaster if it were to go," he says. "At the worst estimate, it's cost them some money, but God almighty, look at what they have taken in from the film industry. And you couldn't buy what Irish film has done for the tourist industry. The scary thing is that people could get rid of something without actually knowing what the figures add up to.
"Have we come so far in Ireland that we can just get rid of a couple of thousand jobs without doing the sums? It's not right."
In America goes on general release from Friday