Living In America

Regarded in many quarters as Ireland’s finest film director, Jim Sheridan has returned to the fray after an unusually protracted five-year layoff since his previous work, the tepidly received The Boxer. Sheridan’s reputation as a master of emotional punches was established in 1989 with his Oscar-nominated direction of the Christy Brown biopic My Left Foot, and further critical and box-office success followed in 1992 with the gripping, if controversial, In The Name Of The Father.

However, Sheridan’s latest project, In America, is infinitely his most personal and effective film to date. Largely autobiographical, with crucial revisions along the way, it’s Sheridan’s ode to a tense, precarious earlier existence raising two young daughters in a New York district scuzzier and more perilous than anywhere Ireland has to offer. They encounter a huge variety of humanity, good and bad, while Johnny (the surrogate Sheridan character) and his wife are still grieving the death of their infant son Frankie. In reality, Frankie Sheridan was Jim’s brother.
Given the nature of the project, it’s no surprise that Jim was assisted in screenwriting duties – and, indeed, throughout the production process – by his daughter Kirsten, herself the noted director of Patterns and Disco Pigs. Her own youthful self, and that of her sister, are enchantingly essayed in the film by real-life siblings Sarah and Emma Bolger. Meanwhile, the younger Sheridan is played by talented English actor Paddy Considine. Magnificent support is provided by Beninese actor Djimon Hounsou, best-known thus far for roles in Amistad and Gladiator.
You might see the In America poster campaign and conclude that it’s a cutesy kiddy-movie, an easy-option crowdpleaser. This notion couldn’t be any more mistaken: edgy, dark and paranoid, In America is nobody’s idea of a fairground ride. It does, however, transpire to be a genuine ‘tear-jerker’ in the very best sense of the phrase. Without doubt, it is Sheridan’s best work to date, and a hugely moving, clear-eyed memorial to his late, lamented brother. So how did the idea for the movie come about?
“Well, my dad was constantly telling stories about our time in New York,” Kirsten Sheridan says, “but I suspect he dramatises everything. He’s a storyteller, and it was just a very eventful time that he ended up with dozens of stories about, and they’d be stories that people would repeatedly ask about and generally find quite funny. So it grew from that – he wrote a draft, but he found that it was very episodic and there wasn’t really a whole lot holding it together.
“Then a few years ago, he asked my sister and me to write our versions, and they were more like diaries than shooting scripts. But it was while reading ours that he decided ‘maybe I should do this from the kids’ point of view’, but he still needed something to ground the whole thing. So that’s when Frankie came in – everything he’s ever written has elements of his brother there, or is influenced by him. He just went for it this time, I don’t know if he consciously decided. And the entire film, really, is about overcoming that.’
The inclusion of Frankie as an ever-present ghost figure instantly plunged In America into far darker waters than would otherwise have been the case, and makes the film sometimes harrowing (if supremely uplifting) viewing. Did Jim find it painful revisiting the territory?
“Not really, no… (hesitates) no, not really. The only thing that’s odd is when some people say ’I don’t understand the main character, he’s a fuckin’ eejit’ or whatever. That’s hard, ‘cause your actions are under constant re-appraisal.”
Kirsten takes up the theme:
“In a funny way, it’s definitely therapeutic for him. If you dramatise something, you give yourself some objectivity and you can step back from it. I think that’s what it did for him, and for me it was very personal and close to the bone until he dropped this aspect into the mix, about everybody getting over Frankie. That distanced me immediately, so it was much easier for me to look on it and work on it purely as a movie, without getting too obsessive about exact factual detail, like ‘this didn’t really happen that way’ – which wouldn’t have been helpful at all.”
Were the various tweaks to the biographical detail a matter of consultation between Jim and Kirsten?
“Well, a lot of the events in it actually happened,” testifies Jim. “Like I did come over the border, I did get the apartment, and there was a junkie or three living in the vicinity. There used to be a half-door on the first floor with constant drug-dealing going on. I did pay for the doll, although I lost about $120 dollars trying to win the ET doll. I did steal the air-conditioner out of the Irish Arts Centre – it was an 8-k air conditioner. And I did carry it up and it did blow the house and we did go to ET, and the kids did dress in those costumes for Halloween and did go round the houses trick-or-treating and did meet a black painter, who didn’t die of AIDS.
“But an actor who I knew did, and another black guy who I knew died of AIDS. The baby was premature, as well – and basically, they’re all the things that did happen. The key thing that didn’t happen, of course, is that I didn’t have a son who died: my brother Frankie died, and I kinda rewrote myself as my father, y’know?”
“So,” continues Kirsten, “it was kinda like family therapy, except on screen. And during the improvs, I’d hop perspective from one character to another – like, I was acting being my mother, but it was really me, and then I was getting directed by Paddy Considine who was meant to be my dad, and then my actual dad would jump in with a few lines and I’d turn into one of the little girls for a while and come up with some more lines. It was all fairly chaotic, I suppose, a real headfuck.”
How about casting strangers as yourselves – was Kirsten privy to the process?
“I was,” she replies, “to the extent that my Dad was very open generally to any input and he’d come home and say ‘what do you think of this person or that person’. But at the end of the day, when he makes a decision, it’s final, and I had to step back at a very early point and say ‘this is his film, this is his brother, this is his story’.
“And the voice-over at the end when we are looking at the moon and asking him to let Frankie go – I couldn’t say ‘this is my film and this is the way I think it should go’ so I wasn’t around on set that much because I thought, I will start doing that, ’cause I can’t keep my big mouth shut’. But I was around for the improvs and the writing. And from a very early point, I kept trying to structure the script, and almost make it like this perfect film where all the loose ends get tied up.
“What I learned from the writing of it, and from his take on the whole thing, is that life doesn’t really work like that, there’s a much deeper logic, and a much deeper structure. And if the audience can feel that on the film, then it’s much better. So in a way I just trusted to let go to the structural chaos that he likes to go to, and trust that it would all get out there. You have to let him get it out. I don’t know if he ever will, but he tries.’
Did the two little girls beat off any serious competition for the roles?
“Jesus, we saw a lot of people,” recalls Kirsten, “and had narrowed it down to a shortlist of a very few. But they were the first people that my Dad saw, literally. I brought in two girls, Emma and another girl, and Emma started reading, then my Dad went ‘OK, you do it’ to the other girl. And Emma just went up to him and said ‘is she reading for my part?’ and when Dad said ‘yeah’, she instigated a staring contest with him from that point on, which she won.
“Then she announced that her sister Sarah was in the car, and that we should see her too. And me and Dad thought that she was too young, because she was only ten, and we thought that the voice-over would need a 13-year-old because of all the issues involved. Then when Sarah read it, we were just blown away, it was almost scary. And from that point, I knew my Dad was sold, definitely. And the angel wings really suit her on the poster.
“I think that my Dad trusted the kids so much that he just let them do it, whatever way they wanted, and if they thought something worked better a certain way, then he’d go with it. And they ended up inhabiting the actors completely, they weren’t acting at all, they were just them.”
“The kids are very like my own kids,” notes Jim, “they’re real sisters and there’s the same age difference, and they’re amazing. See, the struggle is you can’t really direct kids. Most directors over-direct anyway, they over-intellectualise, they come in and say ‘I want you to do this, do this, do this’. I allow them to come alive on screen, I’m there to support them and not the other way round.
“Instead of pointing the camera somewhere first and then fitting the actors in, I prefer to let the person do their thing quite freely and then figure out where the camera should go. I ad-lib a lot of the time, and I’ll often ad-lib in scenes where it doesn’t really matter what they say. If dialogue is carrying information or plot-points, it has to stay. If it’s illustrating character, you can’t fuck with it either. So it’s only when its function is colour that you’re really safe to improvise, cursing or whatever.”
How did they achieve the balance between optimism and despair?
“That was a real long time in the process,” confirms Kirsten. “The original script, looking back, was a hell of a lot darker. For instance, Paddy’s character goes a lot more mad, and we’d written various scenes where he pulls a gun on somebody or loses the plot totally, and it was very heavy stuff. We had an idea in our heads that he’s following Frankie and he doesn’t want to let the kid go, so we thought we had to bring him to the edge.
“I think because Djimon’s character is so close to death, his emotions are so heightened that he can seem like an angel or a devil. He’s just got total extremes of feeling. Whereas everyone else can be in some kind of denial, he’s so close to death that he can’t be in any denial whatsoever, he embraces his final days completely and he’s kinda gone back to having the point of view of a kid, or maybe even a newborn, totally without hang-ups. I think maybe that he became the focus for the darker elements within the film, and then we found that we didn’t do it so much dark stuff with Paddy’s character.”
How does Kirsten, a child at the time, recall the period detailed in In America?
“Well, I was five, and we stayed there until I was twelve, and I remember it as a massive adventure. I had a very vivid recall of Ireland though, all that time. It was somewhere really safe with loads of family, where you’d spend Sunday in your Gran’s. America was a like a different planet. There was a lot more tension, especially because we were illegal. And suddenly, we became hugely aware of money problems, me and my sister. There was a bum called Frank, and I remember how he’d give us foodstamps because my Dad used to give him a quarter every day.
“I also remember him giving us money for ice-cream – and my older sister thought this was extremely embarrassing, but I thought it was fantastic. There used to be an opening line in the movie that said ‘this is a coming-of-age story, but unfortunately for me, it’s my parents who are coming-of-age’. In a way, that’s what it was. It was both brilliant and terrible from a kid’s point of view. The sense of madness and adventure was great, but the vunerability was quite terrifying.’
What about Jim Sheridan’s mature recollection of the same period?
“It was fantastic! The hard time I had was in Ireland before I left. Going to America and having to work to survive was really inspiring in fact, ’cause it stopped you thinking about – it was great just having to work to struggle to survive ’cause it focused your mind on reality, as opposed to working in the arts here and thinking it’s the centre of the universe.
“To be blunt, I was never at the harsh end of the daily grind of making a living until I was pitched into it. ’Cause you could always get the dole here, and I worked in the Project and got paid and it was a great time, don’t get me wrong, but it was also kind of unreal because it’s much harder then that in America, y’know? And then when you’ve had to endure all that, when you get an opportunity, you really grab it with both hands and go for it more. I left America when I was 39, and I’ve been back since, but only on business ’cause me kids went to school here.
“But I’m thinking of buying a place in New York sometime soon. Somewhere nicer than the pit I ended up in when we got there – it was down on Second Avenue, in the Lower East Side, it was Avenue D, I think, which was just a mad, wild, drug-infested shit-hole that you couldn’t describe. Literally as depicted in the film, but much worse. And it was much nastier than it is now.
“That’s where the male prostitutes used to be on the street, y’know? But that all stopped with AIDS. AIDS had kind of a leavening effect in terms of getting rid of all the prostitution off the street.”
As in, killing them all?
“Yeah, it did. But it wasn’t just that. No-one on earth was going there anymore, everybody suddenly got scared to death. Sex could kill you, which was a new, unheard-of idea. It’s cleaned up a lot now, I believe. I’m in no rush to go and see, though.”

In America opens on October 31