Some Father s Son

Forget Some Mother s Son for a moment. If you really want to know what is as central to Jim Sheridan as breathing, it is the fact that he was born and raised as the son of one very specific mother and father, Anna and Peter, in the heart of Dublin city s Sheriff Street.
Indeed, his characteristically impish look and devil-may-care attitude disappears completely when asked just how much of his work is rooted, for example, in the tension between himself and his father.
About 90%, he says, curling up in a chair in Dublin s Westbury Hotel, looking momentarily startled by the honesty of his own reply to the question.
But then this declaration will come as no surprise to anyone who has looked beneath the surface of Sheridan-directed and/or written films like My Left Foot, The Field, Into The West, or the tellingly-titled In The Name Of The Father, which, as with Some Mother s son, he co-wrote with Terry George. Likewise, anyone who was at the premiere of In The Name Of The Father in Dublin s Savoy three years ago, will not need to be reminded of the emotional, and, perhaps, racial resonances that rippled through the cinema after the showing of that movie, when Jim and his dad hugged for at least a full minute, like some desperate couple lost to the ritualistic dance of the return of the prodigal son. Or the return of the prodigal father.
While it would be patently ridiculous to reduce all of Sheridan s work to mere externalisations of the oedipal conflict, there is no doubt that this theme has been pivotal to the man, going right back to his earliest successes in theatre, with plays such as The Liberty Suit, which was written by his brother, the poet, Peter Sheridan, and Mobile Homes. So, when interviewing Jim Sheridan there really isn t any other point at which it is more perfect to begin.

Joe Jackson: Let s look at how this father hang-up has shaped your work in a very specific sense. The mirror scene in The Field, for example, where Bull s wife slams a mirror in front of him as he explodes with pain and rage, was not in John B Keane s original play, but from your Project Theatre production of Mobile Homes. Likewise, Richard Harris turned The Field into his King Lear because he obviously ached to play that particular Shakespearean role.
Jim Sheridan: The scene was similar in Mobile Homes, so I guess I did change John B s play, to an extent, as did Harris, in his interpretation of the part. But let s not forget that Shakespeare himself fucked up the original story of King Lear. And Othello. In the original Othello, it is much more obvious that Iago hates Othello because he stole his girlfriend, but now we project in the same play homosexual longing between Othello and Iago.
Yet that s only because Shakespeare has taken away all reason, like Scorcese does, in his movies. He takes away reasons for characters to behave as they do and keeps the reasons a secret to himself so as to allow people to fill in the gaps themselves. But, if I have a fault, it is that I fill in the gaps and don t allow the audience to! That s not great, I know, but when you come from a culture, such as Ireland, that is culturally sidelined, you need to make it understandable to people in an over-explicit way.
Is it fair to say that you changed the focus in The Field from an exploration of mendacity in a small-town Irish community to more a story of one man s struggle with his own demons as in the death of his young son, the close down of communication in his marriage and so on?
Ray McAnally read the original draft and was mad at me because he wanted the Bull to be more mean and vindictive, whereas I had made the Bull more heroic, and the community see, and react, to that heroism, so it also is about their reaction to the Bull. Though, yeah, maybe less about the community itself than John B s play. Yet the difficulty was that although the play was presented a bit outside this country, the film was made for an international audience and they don t understand the assumptions of our communities, its core nature. American communities are all about individuation, about being the one guy that stands out from the community, whereas here it is much more a thing of oh-we-have-to-band-together-against-the-Brits or whatever.
Does that mean you have to restructure the text of a play, or a sociological or historical set of circumstances, just to accommodate the American perception of a hero?
That s a question I ask myself all the time whether what you re doing is just accommodating some outside force, or not. But then partly it has to be because the problem is that for too long we ve lived in such a closed world, talking to ourselves or talking to the English, that we don t know how to look, or move, out there.
That particular oral tradition really works well in literature, novels, which are essentially sound, and probably best capture our national schizophrenia. At least, in the worst case, it s schizophrenia, in the best sense it s James Joyce.
Joyce obviously heard voices. You can t read Finnegan s Wake without thinking this guy s off his head . And he was. Finnegan s Wake is close to schizophrenia, close to insanity.
But that works in a book, because you ve a long time to sit down and work out where a book is going. Whereas a film is more limited, a mass medium. It s also a visual medium so to really be a genius you have to almost have hallucinations so powerful they will drive a vision that no one, or nothing, will stop. Look at Neil Jordan. When you meet him he s not the most communicative person, verbally right? But he definitely has a vision that will knock you on your ass, artistically.
So what are you saying here, that our Neil isn t in close contact with linear thought?
(laughs) He s not, no.
Are you?
Probably not!
So if, for example, you are accused of creating historical lies through your movies, does that matter?
No. Because our language is lies, one statement meaning the opposite, which is how we had to communicate, historically, to remain safe, under the Brits. And the British really do find that so fucking hard to interpret, because their statements definitely are linear and only mean what they say. But once you start to make a film, it s impossible to tell the truth. It becomes an agreed truth. And let s be fucking honest here. What has been agreed between Ireland and England has led to disaster, right? So if that s the truth, you can stuff it. I opt out, I m not going to partake in that truth. It s bullshit.
Nevertheless, Terry George has said that you and he were so sensitive to the question of historical accuracy, that it basically made you reshape Some Mother s Son, because of all the flak you got following the release of In The Name Of The Father.
Terry was much more sensitive than I was. It didn t make me reshape anything. Because I m not as put out by all that criticism as he is. Maybe that s because I did so much theatre, where re-created reality is the dominant mode of communication and takes precedence over historical truth or something that is simply a documentary. And the real fucking point is that Guiseppe Conlon lives again in In The Name Of The Father, right? Whereas previous to that he had been forgotten.
So they can go on and on and on about historical truth but if they want to talk about historical truth , why don t they write about the fact that none of these people who were obviously abused by the British government have been recompensed. People write about what we did wrong. For Christ s sake, give me a break. They don t actually care about the human beings at the centre of the problem.
But do you? Or do you put yourself at the centre of other peoples problems and historical realities simply because, as I suggested earlier, you need to untangle your own inner tensions?
Of course I fucking care about the human beings at the centre of the Guildford Four thing. But I see what you re getting at, so let me answer that in a roundabout way. Recently I was with a guy who is an enabler and helps directors and he told me a story about a drunken director who watched a particularly lousy actor in action then gave this wonderful piece of advice. Tell him not to drink the coffee before the cup hits his mouth. Now, if you really know acting that is the only direction you can give an actor!
But when I heard that what it did was send me winging back thirty years to when I was 17, my brother, Frankie was 11 and I brought him to the pictures and said let s go for a knickerbocker glory under the Metropole, in O Connell Street. And as I talk to you right now I can still see him eating that ice cream, with a smile on his face. But the thing is that he was eating it before he put it in his mouth. And, though I couldn t have known it at the time, three weeks later he was diagnosed as having a tumour on the brain. So somewhere in my mind, looking at my brother that day under the Metropole, I knew there was something wrong.
That, to me is what being a director is. You re looking at someone and thinking there s something wrong here, when it comes to communication . And communication, to me, is what it s all about. Everything. That s where it begins, and ends. It s got nothing to do with fucking art . It s got to do with primal forces. So, in that sense the separate reality you build is more important than the reality left behind. Because in the reality we exist in, there is only one fact you die, right? But in the reality we create, as filmmakers, writers, whatever, we pretend there is immortality. So the essential job for me, in relation to In The Name Of The Father was to try to immortalise Guiseppe Conlon and Gerry Conlon. The rest is horseshit.
Obviously, your brother s death was central to your life.
No doubt. He died about nine months after that ice cream incident. And I was talking to someone this morning who had a pain in their head and they went to the doctor and he said don t worry, if you have a tumour you don t know, because there are no nerve endings in the brain, therefore there is no pain. So, in effect, you have this octopus in your brain, going down deeper and deeper, and the senses jut close, one after another. But it was my father who couldn t deal with my brother s death. It was always difficult to talk to him about that, but years later I said I know it s always worse for a parent when a kid dies, but what did you feel?
And it turned out that what happened to him was that he d gone into the hospital, at the time of Frankie s illness, and read the description of the operation in that white chart they hang on the back of the bed. He read that before he even talked to the doctors. And what he read was We opened him up, exposed the brain, located the tumour, it s malignant, let s go in. Then later again, if we go any further in we kill him, it s past the point of no return, better close him up. That s what my father read, standing there in that hospital. And I said, What effect did that have on you? And he said, I had to build cells against tragedy. Now, I think that because we were younger, we didn t build cells, didn t solidify at that point, emotionally. But I think he did.
So what he actually did was left the house and started a drama group which was like an alternative family, because, I think, he couldn t bear to look at my mother, or us, because that reminded him of Frankie. And then, on stage, he d make up another family, like in June And The Paycock, where I actually played Johnny Boyle and fucking attacked him throughout the whole play! But, either way, that was his way of putting the family back together.
What effect did your brother s death have on you?
It made me a little bastard. I seem to have immediately decided the parents can t look after the kids, because they had let my brother die. And I began then, to realise that everybody is going to die. I also lost my faith in God, because I was at that age, 17, when all these questions come into focus anyway. But I also wanted to become the protector, the tough guy, which, to tell you the truth, is where that scene with the mirror comes from, because we had a big row at home, I ll tell you the scene, but me mother ll kill me for telling you this!
At the time I was getting more and more aggressive towards me poor oul da. And he was losing control because, on the one hand, he had this terrible tragedy, as in Frankie s death, then, soon afterwards he had this insurgency, at the same time. So one night he comes in and orders my brother, Johnny, to do something and I say, don t do it. And I knew instantly there was going to be a row and that digs, at last, were going to get thrown. So he threw a very quick punch and it was all over in one dig, because he hit my tooth and that had a cap and it fell out. So I lost the fucking head, completely. I started trying to talk, but couldn t, which made me even worse. Because I used to always be able to beat him in a verbal argument because I was a smart aleck and would always win.
But here I was, now, like Donald fucking Duck and everyone was laughing at me! I had no way to win verbally, so ~I ran upstairs and reefed off the wall this four-foot mirror we had and ran back down and pointed it at me da and said look at yourself.
Which is precisely what you had Bull s wife say to him in The Field.
Yeah. But even though that may sound like a scene from a film to illustrate a lecture, it also, to me, perfectly captures that move from a verbal to a visual culture, where words fail and you have to hold the mirror up to someone, directly, to let them see exactly who they are. And, as Shakespeare said, holding the mirror up to reality is what art is supposed to be all about.
Definitely. But you hadn t the balls, at the time, to hold the mirror up to yourself, had you?
No. (pause) That is the truth. What else can I say?
You could say that you have been doing it ever since, though this, of course, raises that question of whether or not you are misrepresenting other peoples realities in order to get a better look at yourself.
That s why I say that 90% of what I create is rooted in that tension between me and my dad. And I m not exaggerating when I say that.
But are you making intellectual excuses for your own core psychology when you suggest as you did during our last interview that: In Irish literature the father was always a bully. The historical reason for this is that the father had no real power, the true figures of authority were outside of Ireland. And few would deny that the oedipal story is still central to the Irish psychology, because, in ways, the figure of authority remains outside this country. That, to me, is another part of the relevance of In The Name Of The Father.
But that is a historical fact. And the oedipal story is central to the Irish psychology. Look at Joyce s work The Playboy Of The Western World, which is a primary example of the oedipal story in that you kill the father three times and he comes back! And it just so happens that my own personal situation was similarly rooted in those oedipal tensions. And this whole thing goes back to Greek drama. way beyond just the Irish context.
So, that night in the Savoy, when you and your dad hugged, was it like him coming back to you, or you to him, after too long a time? It certainly felt that way, like a collision of separate lives, a reconciliation of some kind.
Daniel Day Lewis said the same thing. And Pete Postlethwaite. And it was a reconciliation, totally. In fact, the weirdest thing is that that was the only time my father said I love you and that was right there in front of all those fucking people in the Savoy cinema! But then he obviously saw himself in Guiseppe just as he d seen the Bull as an externalisation of himself. And he also would have seen the guy in Mobile Homes, who was a monster, as an externalisation of himself. And the guy in My Left foot. It was as if there was a kind of debate I had with him in the movies and plays.
For example, one night my mother and him went to Mobile Homes and I sat behind them and, at one point, she hit him on the shoulder and said, that s you , not that s like you! So when I started to do In The Name Of The Father I said to him, look, I m doing a film about a good father and we d go out for a pint and he d say, that s good. And that s all. But I think he was very aware, on some level, that this was me making a film about our relationship and finally coming to a point where I could see the good side in him, and in the whole situation. Because he was very caring. He cared for the whole fucking world.
But before your father died, did you and he reconcile fully or is it like a lingering psychic wound, an endlessly unanswered question in your life?
We didn t really, no. So it does linger, in that sense. But that night in the Savoy, for some strange reason, had to be public. That was the most private we could get because, as I say, it was in front of millions of people! Yet when it came to talking things out before he died like, when we talked about In The Name Of The Father during those pub conversations all I really got to ask him about was Frankie s death. But we didn t talk it out because he had those cells and it was like trying to prise open a big safe. But what s happened is that when he was alive I saw all the weaknesses, whereas now that he s dead, I am, at last, beginning to see his strengths. But when either me or Peter talks about him it s like this wave comes over us, though what it is I honestly don t know.
On the morning after the opening of In The Name Of The Father Nell McCafferty was on the Pat Kenny Show and said, basically, yeah, great movie but do we really need another film about an Irish father and son. What about the mammy?
My Left Foot was mothers and sons, though, obviously, the father and son thing has been central to my work. In fact I had a horror feeling about this recently. I adore American rap music, right? Like Snoop Doggy Dogg, even though there is a huge misogyny there, and I m trying to figure out where that comes from. I think it s that in American black culture the women are the authority figures, because all the fathers have left. So the black guys have nobody to fight against, but the women, so it s bitch this and bitch that.
But, in terms of the oedipal story the thing is that you kill the father, yeah, but essentially, you replace him with your own authority because you can t kill the mother. So, in any countries or communities that are beaten down, I think, the mothers, basically, are trying to protect the kids from going out to fight, on the streets, or wherever, so they smother them with love. And that s totally the case in relation to Irish mothers. And I found a very interesting story where the mother is murdered but people don t like it, can t deal with that concept at all.
But did you also give your own mother hell after Frankie died? Did you fuck up her life?
I honestly don t think I fucked up my mother s life or wanted to. Nor did I even want to rebel against her. But then my mother has her own history, which fires different feelings in me. She was like an orphan, because her own mother died when she was born. And I ve asked her was she terrified, then, when I was born because I was the eldest. But when I was born, obviously, she didn t die, so that was like an exorcism of sorts.
Yet Into The West was about that, about the kid whose mother died when he was born but who revisits him, in the water. That story was about me ma, essentially. And a lot of people love that story better than anything else I did. Yet it was the one I couldn t direct, because I couldn t touch it. It s like, even talking to you now, I can reach out and feel a certain force of electricity that comes from my father, but with my mother it s a different force and I can t quite grab that.
What does a certain force mean in relation to your mother? That old Irish tendency towards idolising the mother, which, of course, can lead to an unhealthy tendency to idolise all women?
Could be, definitely. And if you ask my brothers they will tell you that my mother loves me so much I am spoiled beyond recognition in the house. So if I rebelled it was obviously against the father, who I saw as the figure of authority, whether he was, or not. What my mother gave me, through all that chaos at home, was this sense of security because I always knew, no matter what happened, that she loves me. That s why I m still incredibly secure, at that level, today.
But do you live fully connected with your emotions? Or have you built up cells like your father did?
No. I don t live connected to my emotions. But, as with talking here right now, I definitely can intellectualise my emotions.
But saying to someone these are the reasons I love you is hardy the same as telling them I love you and meaning it. So can you tell your wife, daughters, mother, I love you simple as that?
Yeah. But, now that you ask me, I wonder, say, in terms of my daughters, do I tell them often enough? And in terms of my mother, although I obviously love her, it s not something that is verbalised often. I think when it comes to direct emotions as in what I was saying earlier about our language in general Irish people think, is this sick, or what?
Nevertheless, don t you ever stop and think that perhaps your mother needs you to directly express your love, especially given the fact that she so recently lost your dad?
Yeah. And there is that gap in her life. But having to grow up on her own, from zero, she is totally independent and carries emotions that are very primal. She either likes you, or she doesn t. So she has her own power, in that sense. Yet, okay, maybe I don t tell her often enough that I love her, but as much as I may have a dialogue with my father in my movies, I m not going to start now having a dialogue with my mother, through the pages of Hot Press! But, you re right, I should talk more to my ma, while I can.
But can you deal with concepts such as a person wanting to kill their mother, or, indeed, have sex with them?
No. But then who can, in Ireland? That s where I think we have a huge problem coming to terms with the feminine in, say, a sexual sense. In fact, there s no erotic Irish film where sex heavily features. And in the one where it does, Neil s The Crying Game the woman turns out to be a man! This, to me, means we re all living in a state of denial when it comes to really sexualising the feminine force, whether that is because of our mother-Virgin Mary hang-ups, or not.
But when it comes to the question of self-denial and death, what I ve realised, of late, because my eyesight is getting weaker with age, is that you don t really see with your eyes. You see with your memory and your emotions and insight and you can decide not to see , as my da did, after Frankie s death. But death also can force you to come up and see everything. Like, I remember all the events around my brother s death, in absolute detail, like a heightened form of reality. So I believe that death forms a nexus, like a traffic junction, through which everything later on must pass to test the reality of it all.
Is there any sense that you feel you have to bury your brother, maybe on film, before you can move on from that spot?
Yeah. And I did start writing a film about that. And after my father died, I had this sensation that I had to say goodbye to Frankie, who is 30 years dead! It s weird, because it s like I don t have to say goodbye to my father because by the time he died, I d half prepared for that.
But had you really? Had you ever even actually, truthfully said hello to the man, which is, after all, the first step towards finally being able to say good-bye . The direct rather than tangential path, in other words?
To tell you the truth, I don t know. But the difficulty with going at all this in a more direct fashion is that I really don t know if I m equipped to do that, if that is part of my own psychology, personal, racial, whatever. I really fucking don t.
But if you don t, isn t there the possibility that you will continue to pollute everything you put your hand to, by imposing that familial story where it maybe doesn t belong? Couldn t everything you write or direct become a form of subterranean biography as Truffaut said of Orson Welles until you tell the real story?
That s a question I often ask myself. But don t forget that pollution is part of fertile ground. It s out of manure that anything grows. It doesn t grow out of intellectual, arid soil. So, what I m saying is that out of the shit something good grows, whether that shit is my own personal psychology or not. Yet when I tried to write a film about myself going to America, I realised I have to make myself my daughter because if I don t, I m stuck with myself and have nowhere to go. I m one-dimensional. And I have to see myself that way. If I begin to see myself in two dimensions that is the start of schizophrenia. Whereas writing is an attempt to pull all the characters into one dimension, which is a unified narrative.
And thus ward off the tendency towards schizophrenia? Is that what you re saying your work enables you to do?
Yeah. And, as I said earlier, the great writers, whether that is Joyce, Shakespeare, Dante, all walk that thin line. And I feel I do, though I m obviously not comparing myself to those guys, as a writer. Yet you talk about subterranean biography, look at Shakespeare, Hamlet is his biography, because his son died.
Orson Welles did the same with his adaptation of Shakespeare, Chimes At Midnight, where he turned his rejection of his own father into the prince s acceptance of the King, even though that was a betrayal of the original text by Shakespeare. So do you see this tendency as a legitimate form of self expression?
Definitely. And that s what cinema, theatre frees us to do. And I don t, can t feel guilty about that. Nor would Orson Welles, I m sure. Isn t that using art, or whatever the fuck, as something cathartic, which is what drama was originally created to be? For the writer, the actors and, hopefully, the audience. And the difficulty, for me, is that there has to be that splintering of the self. I can t face my own story dead on, though you re not the first person who said I m going to have to do that, before I can bring a clean hand to my other work. But, as things stand, if I was writing my da in a film right now, he d probably be me! Or, more like me, than him. And, either way, what the process of writing will get me to, is a deeper understanding of how much of him there is in me.
But the full power of the story of Frankie would be fucking amazing. I know that. Maybe I won t be free of all this until I write that story, from my own space. And externalise it. Because, a dominant sense I have of myself is that there is this aura around me, but it s not quite fully formed. Right at my back it doesn t form, or protect me. And that lack of self confidence, lack of self-centredness, in the purest sense, is a weakness and makes me less than I d want to be. Maybe I need to tell that other story to complete that aura.
I am doing a story next, which is about growing up, but there s no father in it, he s dead. And the fathers are written out of Some Mother s Son but that was more Terry s choice because, in a way, I think he s using that film to come to terms with the feminine side in himself, the mother, the female, women.
So you agree when he says this is more his movie than yours? Or is Mick Sheridan, of the Sunday Independent, right to suggest that your mark is all over this movie.
The problem with Mick Sheridan is that he was in UCD with me and we did plays together and he wants to do the films himself, but that requires more commitment than he s willing to give it. And he did give up the journalism for a while and, I think, is bitter because he had to go back to it. If he uses me as a dartboard to get through that, fine, but if he gets stuck in using me as a dartboard that s not going to help him at all.
(Mick Sheridan responds: What s my answer to that? Fuck him. More commitment? I ve written a number of movies that are in development, including a boxing movie. Jim s trying to do one on Barry McGuigan, I m doing one on Jack Doyle. And I don t feel any bitterness towards Jim Sheridan. His problem with me is that I make comments on things he s done, like in relation to In The Name Of The Father that whole saga, which I chronicled. As in what happened between himself and Gabriel Byrne, which he didn t come too well out of. He wasn t too fucking happy with that because, basically, Jim is a decent guy, but he s ruthless. And if he does things that I, as a journalist, consider to have less than integrity, I am quite entitled to comment on that. His behaviour, with Gabriel, was open to the whole world: he didn t stab in the back, he stabbed him in the chest.)
Yet, to get back to Some Mother s Son, yeah, it is more Terry s movie. But that doesn t mean I m relinquishing my responsibility in any way. It s mine and Terry s film because I played the father figure, in a way, helping him to get it made. And we had arguments along the lines you might expect, in that he d tell me to fuck off with my oedipal stuff, and I d try and pull him back from the obvious political bias in the film. And at one point he said, well, you direct it but I knew if I moved into that space we wouldn t still be friends. Because I knew what I felt about the film had nothing to do with what he felt about it.
Like, we could externalise the Gerry Conlon story when we wrote it together in America but for me to come back here and step into a story Terry had written about Northern Ireland, and partly, his own experiences, would have been too much. Even emotionally. Because not even Shakespeare had people who died for their beliefs, as the hunger strikers did. Only Kafka had that. But, that said, I think the hunger strike, as a method, wasn t good, wasn t effective, was silly, was self-denial, so many things that I m against. And the film is one-sided, no doubt.
But the possibility that Terry is using Some Mother s Son to say sorry to his own mother, or to try to embrace the woman in himself, plus the fact that you use your movies to deal with similar oedipal tensions doesn t that bolster the accusation you are both bastardising the hunger strikes, and Bobby Sands to serve your own purpose?
In many people s minds Bobby Sands is such a huge figure that you are going to bastardise him no matter what you do. And, yet, on the other hand, it s unhealthy that you can t be seen to even criticise Sands, or the hunger strike, which this film does, in many ways. That s why I don t want Some Mother s Son to be seen as adding to that mythology. And when it comes to all those suggestions that it may drum up support for the IRA, in terms of its bombing campaign, I d hate that to happen. I m against fucking bombing, I hate it.
But I don t think the film will have that effect, at all, because the effect of film is long term, in comparison with television, which is immediate. So if you want to drum up support for the IRA just show Drumcree over and over again. And, to tell you the truth, what I hope is that the IRA will reinstate their ceasefire and get involved in the process of debate, discussion. And I am optimistic.
At one point in the early 70s you yourself were in Sinn Fiin, with people like Eoghan Harris as bosom buddies and political cohorts. How important a part of your development was that?
Gardiner Place Sinn Fiin was never a place for political cohorts . It was like a room where everybody in the same organisation was trying to figure out why nobody had the right line! The right line was held by a select group, which was Leninism, basically. I was on the perimeters and I sold the paper, but I wasn t in it for long. Just months. But I got very fed up with it. It was a pain in the bollocks, to tell you the truth. Too dogmatic.
And, even then, Eoghan had his coterie of followers and once he got into his talking thing he could never stop. But he had an explosive, charismatic attacking ability. Like, you say to me that I don t delve into myself, but Eoghan Harris doesn t go into himself one inch. He goes into other people instead. But he has this huge ability to write and is, fundamentally, one of the major talents in Ireland. He wrote something on the famine which is about building the roads. If he could combine that with discovering the road in himself he would be major.
But my own problem with Eoghan is that I got annoyed with him on a superficial level. And, I m tired of what he does. I don t care anymore. It s the same thing over and over. As in most journalism, I mean, an odd time you ll get something in Hot Press that says something but in The Sunday Independent and The Sunday Times it s the same thing over and over again. Boring. Boring. Boring. So, if people say I should go deeper, I could say the same thing to a lot of journalists. And would.
Look at the way Hugh Leonard attacked Some Mother s Son last Sunday. He s as jealous as hell. The day My Left Foot got all the nominations, he ran by me on the street. Literally ran by me.
His argument was, basically, that you had been a smug little bastard on The Late Late Show, the previous week, defending what he called Some Provos Do Have em and, by extension, defending their bombing campaign as you laughed all the way to the bank.
Bullshit. I actually am writing a film now, against bombing and all that shite. So what he was saying I d never do, I have already done. It s just that he has to judge it from his petty he just can t write films. Why doesn t he go and write a film, him and Mick Sheridan? None of the ones he s done have worked. Da didn t work and the one he did with Mia Farrow didn t work either. So it s begrudgery.
Another belief is that Irish critics should go deeper into their analysis of cinema.
Definitely. But the sad thing is that there doesn t seem to be anyone out there who is capable of giving a really broad cultural perspective on all this, critically. Instead we get someone like Dunphy saying Heaney s poetry is crap, which is just a knee-jerk response. And people like Fintan O Toole and John Waters I just don t get, because I think perspectives should be smaller than theirs are, more down-to-earth. Pauline Kael was a great critic, and Kenneth Tynan, because they clearly loved what they did. You have to fucking love what you do. And there s nobody here who really loves being a critic, like they did. The critic seems to be the person who can t do it, rather than loving what they themselves actually do.
I mean, even in terms of film criticism what have we got? Dave Fanning on television. Michael Dwyer? But there s nobody like Tynan or Kael. And there s no French New Wave critic, who is going to become a film-maker. It s not a respected tradition, because the role of critics in Ireland has always been to hold the artists back, to attack people like O Casey because their work is dangerous to the status quo.
To me it s like there are three stages of development, when it comes to all this. One is, this guy says, did you marry your mother? and the other guy hits him because that means he fucked his mother. Then the next stage is, this guy says you know something, she s your fucking ma, isn t she? and the other guy thinks about it, says could be and starts laughing and it becomes a joke. Then the third stage is that the idea is externalised into a play. But a lot of the time in Ireland we re at the first stage. Like, you said that to me? Whack!
We haven t even got into the joke stage, much less the externalisation into art stage. We re so fucking insecure here that if someone criticises us we just lash out and say, you bastard . Same thing if someone praises us! We think, don t fucking praise me, ya cunt, because I ll fucking kill you because I know praise is just to draw me out before you open the trap door!
So what stage are you at, Mr Jim Sheridan?
Me? Stage one, of course!
So what happens if I suggest that you probably put all your actors through hell, in your so-called search for truth , because basically you yourself are living an artistic lie?
Whack! (laughs) Then I ll go off and think about it and probably come back and say you re right.