Being Jim Sheridan

Séamus Duggan talked to Jim Sheridan about his latest film, In America. Séamus also recently and coincidentally found a portal leading into the man's brain, and brought back some of what he found there for our attention.

In America takes as its starting point Jim's emigration to New York in the early eighties, his struggle to find work as an illegal immigrant and the premature birth of his third child. It is not however a documentary and although incidents are true to memory the film is clearly a drama. Some elements of what actually happened were too unbelievable to work in a film. Initial drafts of its script were written by Jim's two daughters who were each the heroes of their own scripts. In order to make the story work as a film, Jim decided to use the early death of his brother as a key element in the film. This means that one of the major characters in the film is invisible, but he remains very real for the other protagonists. In a sense we are journeying towards making the dead child come alive so that the other characters can say goodbye.

The journey to America is fraught with difficulties and has a mythic resonance. After getting through immigration to some extent because of the sympathy of the officials for the loss the family has suffered they must then go under water (by tunnel!) in order to reach their destination. There are elements here of Orpheus in the underground, and the Manhattan they arrive at is the world of a single building which is a dark and frightening place. Junkies look for money on the stoop and the place crackles with nervous tension. The door to their apartment has more locks than Fort Knox and on the way up to it they must pass a closed door with keep away scrawled on it and a screaming man behind it.

The full article is printed in Film Ireland 95