Jim Sheridan on Re-Creation: "Ian didn’t upset me that much. He wasn’t somebody you really wanted to be around, though"

Far from receding, interest in the 1996 Sophie Toscan du Plantier murder case has peaked again following the death  of chief suspect Ian Bailey, and the subsequent announcement that key pieces of evidence are being re-examined, using the revolutionary new M-Vac DNA technique which has solved several US cold cases.

While Jim Sheridan obviously had no idea that either was going to happen, they’ve added extra currency to the October 3 release of Re-Creation, the filmmaker’s tense imagining of what would have occurred if Bailey had stood trial in Ireland for killing the 39-year-old French woman who’d come to County Cork looking for peace and tranquillity – and found anything but.

“They already have unknown male DNA which the French took many years ago after Sophie’s body was exhumed but, yes, this new M-Vac testing seems like a quantum leap forward in terms of what it might prove or disprove,” Sheridan notes as we meet him and his writing partner David Merriman in the Dylan Hotel in Ballsbridge.

It’s the latter who responds first when I ask when they decided to make Re-Creation and what they thought it would add to Sheridan’s previous Murder At The Cottage: The Search For Justice For Sophie  Sky documentary series.

“I met Jim at the end of him doing Murder At The Cottage,” Merriman recalls. “I was putting together a docu-stream about the Rock Against Homelessness gig which the journalist Barry Egan organises every year. I got Panti to host it and Jim came down to be interviewed and we got on really well. Straight away, I could tell how passionate he is about the Bailey case. As he ran through the information with me, we realised there was a lot more there. There’d been certain limitations doing the documentary and then some new information came along.

“It was originally going to be a hybrid,” he continues, “with Jim and the actress Vicky Krieps in this dramatic telling of Sophie’s story alongside documentary footage. We’d hired blood splatter analysts, a behavioural science unit, former FBI agents and pathologists to re-examine everything. They then told us what they thought was plausible and not plausible.”

BRUTALITY OF THE MURDER

With so many people on the payroll, the intended docu-drama ran into financial difficulties shortly before it was due to start shooting in Luxemburg.

“Somewhere along the line we went over budget and instead of being able to afford a load of sets, we had to make do with just the one,” Jim explains. “So, I had the idea of basing it in the jury room with the twelve men and women, good and true being presented with all this new evidence. We locked ourselves in a hotel and came up with the script in six days.”

French, blonde and forthright, Krieps’ character, known only as Juror 8, is almost a jury room surrogate for Sophie.

“It’s interesting you say that because in the original docu-drama Vicky was playing Sophie’s ghost,” Jim reveals. “I knew from seeing her in The Phantom Thread how remarkable she is, so we met up in Berlin, got on and she said she’d do it.”

Some of Re-Creation’s most intense moments are when Juror 8 locks horns with Juror 3 who’s played with similar aplomb by John Connors.

“A big part of the movie is the dramatic tension between Vicki and John,” David agrees. “He’s such an incredible actor. They both are.”

The fine ensemble cast also includes Colm Meaney as Bailey, Aidan Gillen as the fictional prosecuting lawyer, Hamilton Barnes, and Sheridan himself as the calm, methodical chairman of the jury.

The twelve have Bailey bang to rights at first but then Juror 8 starts saying her piece…

Before diving deeper into the case, how would Jim sum Ian Bailey up as a person?

“I’ll put it to you this way – I had a cameraman, Colm Quinn, who is one of the nicest guys going. He went down to Cork when we were in France and after a day he was screaming at me, ‘Why did you give me this gig? Get me out of here!’ I realised that I must have a lot of staying power because Ian didn’t upset me that much. He wasn’t somebody you really wanted to be around, though. In his mind, he didn’t exist if you weren’t talking about him or he wasn’t talking about himself. It’s weird; he was larger than life but at the same time not present.”

The impression I got when I met Bailey at the Electric Picnic in 2017 was that he was revelling in his notoriety.

“Ian was a nobody desperate to be a somebody – even if what made him a somebody who was being accused of murder,” David proffers. “Having given his DNA early on to the police, he thought he was going to be found not guilty…”

“But the wife-beating thing is very difficult to get around,” Sheridan jumps back in. “It wasn’t a secret. Everybody knew Bailey had beaten Jules up, so it wasn’t much of a leap to think that he was the guy who’d killed Sophie.

“I was just thinking about that Shakespeare quote in Hamlet: ‘The censure of the which one must in your allowance o’erweigh a whole theatre of others. O, there be players that I have seen play, and heard others praise, and that highly, not to speak it profanely, that, neither having the accent of Christians nor the gait of Christian, pagan, nor man, have so strutted and bellowed that I have thought some of nature’s journeymen had made men and not made them well, they imitated humanity so abominably.’ That’s the character of Bailey. He strutted and bellowed as if he were a Shakespeare over-actor.”

In case you’re wondering, Sheridan was word perfect with that quote.

Jim has spent years delving into complex cases before but has always reached a point of closure. What keeps drawing him back to Sophie?

“It’s the brutality of the murder which makes no sense,” he tells me. “It’s one of those crimes that you can’t find a motive for. There’s no sexual one, they say. Even if somebody goes over for a romantic encounter and ends up killing the person, I don’t think they’d get a breezeblock and smash their head in.

“What also makes no sense is that in such a close-knit community nobody heard anything, nobody saw anything, nobody knew anything.”

A MEDIA TRIAL

Sheridan has previously described it as “a crime of passion”. Can he tease that out?

“The bludgeoning feels like a payback for something that’s happened over a period of time rather than, ‘You wouldn’t sleep with me and now I’m going to batter your head in for ten minutes’. Maybe it’s even an indication to somebody else that it’s very dangerous to be involved with what’s going on.”

Comparisons are being made between Re-Creation and Sheridan’s 1993 Guildford Four biopic, In The Name Of The Father. Are they justified?

“With this film, I started out trying to see if Bailey did it and, if so, could I trick him into confessing,” Jim says. “Then reading his statements, I realised that, ‘God, this is more like In The Name Of The Father.’ In The Name Of… was something that really shocked people up in Belfast, because at that point the IRA couldn’t appear on television and suddenly they were watching this movie about them, which had come out of leftfield.

“I remember a TV guy in England saying, ‘It’s a brave thing to do’ and me going, ‘No, it would have been brave if I’d done it when Giuseppe Conlon was still alive.’ In a way, it felt like that with Bailey. Here’s a guy who’s alive, accused and, in a way, has had no protection. When we started out, 99% of people thought he’d done it. There was also the element of, ‘If I’m going to side with wrongly accused Irish people in England, I should also do it for a wrongly accused English person in Ireland.’

“You can have everybody shouting ‘Oh, the guy did it’ – but there has to be one person in the crowd saying, ‘Maybe not.’”

Colm Meaney as Ian Bailey

Sheridan pauses for a moment and then adds, “In The Name Of The Father had a powerful effect but, at the end of the day, there were dead kids in Guildford who somebody fucking blew up. I don’t think Bailey killed Sophie, but somebody did. So, going back to your previous question, it’s hard to gain closure.”

“Bailey was a villain – he just wasn’t this villain,” Merriman adds. “The problem with his framing is that for the last twenty-eight years, somebody who murdered Sophie Toscan du Plantier has been walking around, having birthdays, going on holidays, drinking cups of coffee and nobody’s been called to account. How long is that going to go on for?”

Do they feel that some of the journalists covering the Sophie case in the 1990s were too close to the Gardai and, on occasion, acted as their mouthpiece?

“Yeah, absolutely,” Merriman nods. “We discovered audio recordings of the police that hadn’t been heard before, which gave us an insight into what was going on with them and the media. There was a free flow of information between the Garda and journalists at the time.”

Jim suggests that the Gardai’s response to the Director of Public Prosecutions not bringing charges against Ian Bailey was to go, “We don’t care whether you say he can’t be going to trial – we’re going to bring him to trial in the media.’ That’s what happened. It became a media trial. Even the M-Vac stuff now. You’d think they’d just keep quiet about that and do their job.”

Sophie’s family have dismissed Re-Creation as being based on “questionable evidence” and warned that it may hinder further investigations. Jim and David obviously disagree – but have they tried reaching out to them with information now and in the past?

“I have all along,” Jim says. “Sometimes we’ve tried to contact them in roundabout ways. We might speak to a journalist or police person who will relay it to them.”

“We went to France to give them new information,” David adds. “I’ve a lot of sympathy for the family. They’ve obviously been through a great deal. They’ve kept the story alive for the media and rightly so. We just happen to see it from different perspectives.”

Is there information that they weren’t able to include in Re-Creation for legal reasons?

“Yes,” says David baldly.

A FUN ROAD TRIP

Next up for Messrs. Sheridan and Merriman is a film about Joanne Hayes, the innocent woman who found herself at the centre of the Kerry babies murder case.

“We wrote it during Re-Creation,” Merriman reveals. “The DNA had been found connecting the real parents to the child that’d been found on the beach, which finally exonerated Joanne after she’d gone through living hell. I set up a call with her solicitor to see if Joanne wanted to be involved in a documentary. She didn’t, which was completely understandable. So, we ended up getting the transcripts to the Kerry Babies tribunal. Through them we discovered the horrible injustice done to this person who was in love and trying to live her life.”

“We have to balance the exoneration of Joanne Hayes with not making her relive what she’s been through,” Jim adds. “I just feel that the weight of being wrongly called a murderer has to be taken off her shoulders.”

At 76, Sheridan could be forgiven for slowing down but his career seems to be accelerating with two other projects currently being worked on. The Dubliner clearly has a lot more stories to tell.

“I’m doing In And Out Of Africa with my partner Zahara (Moufid),” Jim concludes. “It’s about making the mistake of taking two cats and a dog on a family road trip. We started in Dublin and went via-Portugal, where I was living for a while, to Marrakesh where I ended up with a motorbike on the bonnet of my car and a guy flying through the air. I think he did it deliberately – they drive in front of you looking for a payoff – but I didn’t give them one. It mixes a fun road trip with the story of immigrants and a father getting to know his daughter-in-law.

“Then there’s Lions Of The Sea which is fiction but with real sea lions. It’s set in the Galapagos Islands and deals with things like climate change and overfishing.”