The eagerly anticipated In the Name of the Father, starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Emma Thompson, opens in Ireland on 26 December. Director Jim Sheridan, talks to Hugh Linehan about storytelling, directing and Irish filmmaking.

Hugh: Did you find it difficult to get backing for this particular story?

Jim: Yes, until I had Daniel it was difficult, but Daniel made it a lot easier. Fundamentally I don't think it meant much to the Americans. They were interested enough in the father/son side of it. Nobody is really interested in an injustice story. It is a difficult story to tell. But the father/son story is not so difficult.

Obviously this is a film that has large political implications. You've said in the past that Hollywood producers respond on a very visceral, folktale kind of a level to stories and presumably that would be the way in which a story like this would be attractive to a company like Universal. Is that the way you yourself would be interested in approaching this story anyway?

Yes, I'm not so interested in the political side of it. I mean, I am of course, but only as told through the father figure. If it was believed that the rage of England was just rage without consequence or anger without consequence, that's boring and it doesn't work. I don't define myself in terms of relating to England. I actually don't really care what they think in a funny way, though I don't want them to be upset. So I'm just talking about opening up the process out of the English/Irish debate which for twenty five years hasn't produced anything but violence. What has it produced? What have they solved? If we change the Irish constitution, and I'm not saying we shouldn't, why isn't there a constitutional change that embraces the two islands? England should have a constitution to start with and that constitution should state that Catholics and Protestants are equal and that nobody claims anybody's territory. So let's just get this out of a political or Catholic/Protestant debate and put it into a human rights situation, into just people relating. It's absurd. It is just getting more and more messy. If I thought that our film would add to violence at all I wouldn't be making it.

You are known particularly as an actor's director but what way do you approach working with your cameraman or editor. Do you use storyboards for example?

I do some storyboards, but I find they don't work that much for me. In any particular area that I get involved with I try to know a bit but, if I don't know a lot, I just don't say anything because it only interferes. I know quite a bit about all the other elements but in some things in life you have to have a studied ignorance so you can stay above the situation, otherwise you are down in the minutiae of it all the time. In essence I don't think that film is a predominantly visual medium. It's just a story telling medium with different aspects; one is visual, one is sound, one is music. The visual tends to predominate because it is the most powerful but it's not necessarily always the most true. Usually it is, but not entirely. Film is more a medium that manipulates concepts of time. I think.

Like music, for example?

Music exploits time. It breaks time down into component parts. Each of us has x number of heart beats which, on average, over seventy years equals y number of heart beats. A fly has x number of heart beats which are going five times faster so that everything it sees is five times slower than what we see. When you're going into a car crash you get that feeling of things slowing down because your heart speeds up. So time is only relative to conditions of the heart beat and to external stimuli. Film manipulates all these things – it's the only medium that does. But twenty four frames a second is only an approximation of reality. So anybody who says, 'well here is this visual medium which is manipulating reality in a painterly sense', that's only the tip of the iceberg. The iceberg that's below it is the time that's left out of the film. In other words, I'm doing a film about seveteen years in two hours. What happened to the other sixteen years, three hundred and sixty four and a half days? And in the half day we do the last two hours. That's the story, how do you do that? So if you say, well, visually this and visually that, how do you deal with all those other huge components that time has, if you stop now and say that this is the present and this is the future. That's the most important thing in our lives, is now – the present. Not what we're looking out at. You can close your eyes, you know.

Do you see film as the best way to reach an audience, and what way do you think about audience in your filmmaking?

It is the best way to reach an audience and in Ireland we can tell personal stories, whereas in Hollywood they tell mass stories for a mass audience. I think Irish filmmakers can fall into the mistake of thinking that they can go into the mass market without losing their identiy. I don't really think you can unless you are an expert technician and I don't really think that's our bag.

Will you, for example, continue to tell Irish stories because they come from yourself? Will they tend to be Irish stories in the future?

Every time somebody says to me to tell Irish stories I feel these kind of reverberations around the word 'Irish' like a kind of adjective with some pejorative term attached to it and I don't like it. I have no racial fucking part in me. I'm not racist in that way. There's only universal stories in me, stories of human conditions. They're not attached to nationalities.

I agree, but it's been said that the universal resides in the particular.

So, in this particular instance, I happen to be from Ireland and the authenticity I can gain is from that. But I know America as well. I've lived for seven or eight years in America. I could do certain stories – and Billy Wilder did millions – about America. But you can't approach it as if there is something wrong about doing an Irish story or something non-commercial or wathever. There is something great about doing these stories.

The one thing I would say to Irish filmmakers is that we are one of the few white people on the earth who've been colonised enough to understand that feeling. What we have to tell the world is that although you're colonised and altghough you may feel it – and women most certainly do – you don't have to act as a victim.

That is an important message. We've acted like victims for too long and it's time to end it and stop thinking like that. So we should really be thinking in terms of how we could tell people in South America, Africa, and black people in the US, that one group survived this lowly living without resorting to brutality. That is the story that I think we could tell over and over for the next hundred years. It will help everybody else in the world.

There have been some changes here, as you know, in filmmaking structures and funding over the last year. What do you think about that and what do you think will happen over the next while, or how would you like it to go?

I just hope people get opportunities and get some money to get going. It's hard for me because to me it's always in the particular individual. I'm not good at structures that are supposed to get eveyrbody to be a filmmaker. But I think that it's good if money is provided for scripts, to develop stories and somehow then to bring in the experts from outside. But outseide I mean it could be me or John Boorman or other people who've gone abroad and had the pressure of having to communicate outside of your own particular little country. That pressure is good for people. So I think it's twofold. One – money should be given to develop scripts, and two – experts should be brought in from abroad to explain what is not universal in the particulars.

How do you mean – what is not universal in the particulars?

Well if somebody writes a script in Ireland and it's not communicating, except to five people in Temple Bar, it's not of much interest to anybody. You have to lift it out of that context and put it where everybody who is writing a script can communicate with the entire world and explain their situation. What normally happens is that somebody gets some money to write a script and they go off into hibernation for a year and a half and worry about this, that and the other, instead of just whacking out the script and getting on with another one. Give people money to write ten scripts, a little bit less to write ten rather that everybody writing a masterpiece. But I'm not sure how money for production is going to work – this is only me predicting. I'm not saying money should not be given for production – but it should be very carefully considered how that is worked out.

Who should make those decisions?

Somebody who's an expert on selling films, rather than someone who's an expert on making them.

This article was printed in Film Ireland 38 (December 1993 / January 1994).