Interview conducted by Josh Horowitz
February 18, 2004
The first four films directed by Jim Sheridan have earned his actors six Academy Award nominations and two awards. With IN AMERICA, his most personal film yet, two more actors have been added to the nominees list with Samantha Morton and Djimon Honsou. We’ll have to wait until February 29th to see if either joins Daniel Day Lewis and Brenda Fricker in the winners column, both earning statues for MY LEFT FOOT.
While Sheridan’s last two films, IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER and THE BOXER, dealt with more political elements to his life as an Irish man, his latest goes right to the heart of his life as a husband, a father, and an immigrant. IN AMERICA is an emotional tale of an Irish family trying to become whole again after the loss of a child, not to mention a move to the streets of New York City.
Mirroring many of the experiences he himself had 20 years ago coming to America, the film was a family affair for Sheridan. The script was penned by himself in collaboration with two of his daughters. The three share an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay.
I spoke to Sheridan on the phone a few weeks ago prior to the Oscar nomination announcements.
Josh Horowitz: I’m talking to you right around where you shot the film I believe by Thomkins Square Park in New York.
Jim Sheridan: Yeah, 8th and Thomkins Square Park is where I did it.
JH: With the theater background you have, do you sort of workshop a script like you would a play with actors playing different parts?
JS: I kind of ask everybody what they think and I keep working the script but I never rehearse once I have the structure and the script right. I don’t try to do it like where I’m God with a lot of camera moves and marks for actors. I’m trying to catch emotions. I’m trying to catch the invisible. It’s kind of like trying to catch lightning in a bottle. I’m just going for what’s happening then, you know? So I try to keep it fresh all the time and not put any onus on the actors. I love working with actors, you know?
JH: When you’re working on a script, whose opinions do you trust?
JS: I trust people from the past like I trust my friends from the Irish Arts Center. I trust Terry George and I trust my brother, Peter.
JH: I’d imagine different audiences are taking away different things from the film. I saw a lot of almost patriotism in the film.
JS: I’m getting that. In a situation where the gist of what America is, is under question, it’s very patriotic. But I didn’t set out that way really. I set out to make a film and September 11th happened and everything was thrown into a different perspective. This is about what happened to me. It’s just the truth and it has taken up a patriotic tone almost by accident. I don’t mind that. I love America. I love the melting pot of America. I love the immigrant story. And I’m totally happy that people take it as a patriotic statement. America was so good to the Irish after starvation. Not only that but helping in the peace process in Ireland. So I feel that the Irish owe America a lot. I think a bit of it was paid back on September 11th. It was all Irish rushing into the building when everybody else was rushing out. So the hell with it. That’s just the zeitgeist. You can’t do anything about it. If you get a lot of men in a room who are critics on their own without a general audience, they’re like, are we being manipulated? But it’s like, come on this is a medium about emotion. It’s not a medium about your head. If you want to be in your head, go grab a book. And I find that a lot of the stuff that’s in the cinema that’s praised by critics comes from that kind of novelistic form. This story is just pure cinema and that I think is different.
JH: Though Paddy Considine ostensibly plays you in the film, one key difference is that you lost a brother and not a son. So in fact there are close parallels between the oldest daughter in the film and you.
JS: Yeah. The daughter is closer to me emotionally probably than myself. That character who is still young who is still trying to hold on to the world before the child died who feels like she’s responsible. That’s why I’m a director because I feel responsible. I’m like a protective father which is why I get on with the actors because I’m always trying to prevent them from dying. I’m not trying to get them to act. I’m just trying to protect them.
JH: How would you say you protect them on the set?
JS: I protect them by not making the camera God and not having little marks on the ground that they hit and say I’m in charge of the world. That comes from an era when it was hard to find focus, you know? Technologically that’s old
fashioned now although some great films have come out of it. I’m kind of more into the humanity of just trying to capture the emotion and the emotions are invisible therefore you’re capturing the invisible. So I’m always trying to get a feeling beyond the film of what’s beyond the surface pictures.
JH: Do actors ever not respond well to this technique? Perhaps they’re not used to being given that kind of freedom on the set?
JS: I’ve never found that. I think maybe they’re used to being controlled a bit more. Freedom scares some of them but usually I have a great relationship with them. I’m proud of the fact that I got nominations for a lot of actors who were at the time unknown. But of all I’m done, I’m as proud of the kids as anything.
JH: They are amazing in this.
JS: Amazing! Obviously it’s difficult to nominate kids for Oscars and all that but they’re just great.
JH: One of the kids, Christy, retreats behind a camcorder for much of the film. It’s one of her ways of coping with the loss I suppose. Any analogies we can draw between you and your relationship to a movie camera?
JS: Yeah. My brother and myself used to work together and then kind of in a way he became in a shadow because I just suddenly became successful overnight. I had left Ireland and when I went back he didn’t have any money at the time and he wrote a book and the book was suddenly very famous. It was going to have a big launch and I was thinking, oh my God, I’ll turn up and the press will still be asking me questions and not him. So I brought a video camera and I video-ed the event and it was amazing how invisible I was. I realized that the camera allowed me not to be visible to people which is why sometimes people who want to crash events, they carry a camera as if they’re filming something because it makes you invisible. You know the Indians say when you shoot somebody you capture their soul. I think the opposite is true, you lose your own. You disappear.
JH: At what stage did you daughters enter the screenwriting process?
JS: Very, very early. I’d only done a couple of drafts and it was 1992 and they were only 16, 17, and 20 and I asked them to look at the script and they wrote 120 pages each where they completely eliminated my character. I took what they brought in and they argued for their stuff. I had all their stuff from school and all that and the voiceover was from my elder daughter, Naomi. Then after we did all that, I still didn’t have a story. That’s when I added the story of my dead brother. Then at the end after we finished filming the main character didn’t make sense and the kids did. So I had to go improvise scenes to try and make sense for him.
JH: You talk about adding Frankie’s death to the story. Is there some kind of psychic cost of going that deep and using that material for a film?
JS: Not really. I think the psychic cost is that everything becomes a fiction. In other words, your real past becomes a fiction and then becomes
solidified in the fiction that’s images. What happens as you are making it is other stories reveal themselves. You’re like in a whirlpool of emotions and you don’t know where they’re coming from but I think you get liberated a lot from the past and you just begin to understand deeper stories.
JH: This is a film that’s been around for a while. At one time it was called EAST OF HARLEM and it was going to star Kate Winslet?
JS: Yeah. We were coming up to a strike and Kate had to make a decision of which film to do, this or another one and she went with the other one which never happened. And then the strike was postponed and I was looking for someone and I found Samantha Morton and Paddy Considine. Fox rang me actually and said they’d finance the film and they didn’t care who was in it.
JH: That’s got to be a shot in the arm. Samantha Morton is terrific in this.
JS: She’s one of the most truthful actors I ever met. Her eyes just can’t lie. You can go as close as you like. She’s like lightning in a bottle. You can just capture her. Her emotions play across her face all the time and she’s always truthful. She’s fantastic to work with.
JH: Paddy Considine is getting less attention than Samantha perhaps but he was a pleasant surprise for me.
JS: He is amazing and he deserves a nomination. If anyone deserves one, he does. He has to carry the film and it’s difficult. He’s unknown. He has to be a father circumscribed by kids and a wife who takes the initiative in sex. It’s not like a normal guy part. And to do it, you have to have a lot of male in you.
JH: E.T. I assume was not a random choice for the film the family sees in the movie. Like In America, E.T. was a film notable for it’s perspective, coming from the viewpoint of a child.
JS: Yeah and also the fact that my kids always thought we were like E.T. because they were illegal aliens. That’s really where it came from. And I love the film. It was just one of those nights in 1983 when we came here that was
magical. And my daughter did want to win the E.T.. Sometimes reality gives you more than anything you could make up and in the instance of E.T. if gave me more than anything I could possibly make up.
JH: Could you imagine directing someone else’s words in a film?
JS: I could if I suddenly had something that was really well written like IN THE BEDROOM or something by Kenny Lonergan. I love Steve Zaillian. There are a lot of great writers but usually they’re writing for other directors or studios and I don’t get them. But if I ever got one of them, I’d seriously consider it.
JH: Are you always writing?
JS: Yeah.
JH: Is it something you sort of have to do everyday?
JS: Not every day. I avoid it like the plague and then I have to do it and I’ve got to have it in eight hours.
JH: Daniel Day will act for almost no one. Martin Scorsese and Harvey Weinstein had to drag him practically kicking and screaming out of retirement for GANGS OF NEW YORK. What do you have on him to get him to act for you so frequently?
JS: I just kind of love. I love Daniel. I love actors. I just love being with them. It’s kind of a protective thing. And if I can ever find a great part for him, I’d love to work with him again.
JH: Do you still have a place in NYC?
JS: I don’t but I’m looking for an apartment right now.
JH: You want to spend some more time here?
JS: I love New York.
JH: What do miss most about the city?
JS: I just miss being able to go outside to a restaurant, go to a show, go to a film, stay up late and eat and go to a bar at four in the morning. That’s grand.
JH: I’ve heard that another different sort of Irish immigrant story might be your next film?
JS: Yeah. A political one about a political family. It’ll be very different but I’d love to do it.
JH: You’ve been known for more overtly political films in the past like IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER and THE BOXER. I take it you haven’t mellowed with IN AMERICA? There’s still that fire in the belly?
JS: We’ll see. Maybe I should call the next one NO MORE MR. NICE GUY.
IN AMERICA is currently in theaters.
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