Jim Sheridan: Daniel's Director

Sheridan the director and Day-Lewis the star do seem to unleash a special madness in each other. "Daniel is English, but he gets under anything. He just is. He focuses my films. There's a personal space he has around him that I wouldn't even think of invading. It's in that space, that privacy, that the power is. I'm kind of in awe of him as an actor. He's really brilliant, brilliant, brilliant. I'd always be putting myself up there to try and be as good as him. No, he's a bit more than a great actor. There are a lot of those. He's a great person. He was just amazing physically in My Left Foot, so totally immersed that I kicked a ball at him once from 50 yards, and he stopped it with his head. Madness, you said? I don't see or look upon myself as having madness. But Daniel--he does contain that thing of huge, pure rage, distilled through kind of a thin net, a little opening of absolute purity, so what you get is rage and purity. And yet, it's not coming at you because you always feel Daniel will inflict more damage on himself than anybody else."

Speaking of which, the actor did make damaging headlines when, doing Shakespeare on the boards last year in London, he reportedly saw his father's "ghost" scolding him for frittering away his gifts on acting. "That was during Hamlet," Sheridan says, as if the play's themes explain it all. "I think it was out of frustration in a lot of ways, almost like Dan was willing himself to be mad, working so he would go crazy. I never really spoke to him about that because what could I ask, you know? But I know Dan would have that ability to be able to imagine so deeply that he could make the thing stand there in front of him. But that happens to all of us in a fever. You see apparitions. Visionaries have it, I suppose. Saints have it. I don't really have to ask Daniel about it. I understand it.

"I allow Daniel to have, as you say, some twitch of madness," Sheridan continues, "yet he can still be understood. He gives me the confidence to go all the way with the way I direct. Most actors think you have to have a motivation, but in our lives we have dual motivations. One is do, one is don't. What happens is that Daniel and I understand contradictions and allow ourselves to bring them out in each other without there being any problem. It's total love, you know?"

Given such intense bonding, it's hard to imagine that the lead role of In the Name of the Father was once discussed for Gabriel Byrne, who is listed in the credits with Sheridan as co-producer. Apparently, this is not the easiest subject for the otherwise loquacious Sheridan. "Gabriel had the idea," he explains. "He talked to Gerry Conlon, had the rights to the book and got [co-screenwriter] Terry George involved, who got me involved. Then, [Byrne] was caught up in whether he'd play the IRA guy in the movie or do some other film, you know? But he didn't, like, tell me that until we were into shooting and he went and did another film for Gabriel Axel, who directed Babette's Feast."

Despite his up-front political convictions, Sheridan is concerned that his new movie might be characterized by some as playing partisan politics on the question of the home rule and the IRA. "It's hard to predict, but I think the audience is going to feel like, 'God, they can understand why there is terrorism,'" he asserts. "But, more, they will understand that you have to be good. You have to be like the father who pursues good even in the face of such victimization, keeps stating his case, keeps putting out the truth with the only weapons he has: his voice and body. I think English people seeing it may even say: 'Fair fight.'"

I ask Sheridan about how misperceptions, bad karma, whatever, caused the Cannes committee back in 1989 to reject My Left Foot, which went on to worldwide critical and financial success. Any rancor on Sheridan's part? "What's the point of sounding like you're putting yourself in the victim's role?" he answers, shrugging. "The Oscars show a love for the underdog, reflect a kind of democracy. Everything at the Cannes festival is a political move that decides what's gonna or not gonna win. It's a cultural elite. I'm not trying to appeal to those people. It's like when I was in school, a lot of the times the teachers weren't that clever. If you were too smart, you'd get hit. It takes a lot to lift that yoke. If you actually express how you feel, you'll get hit."

Plugging into mass sensibility on the one hand, and kowtowing to the cultural elite on the other, just aren't tacks that Sheridan is likely to take. He's too obsessive and passionate a soul. For instance, when I toss him a light no-brainer about how he first fell in love with movies, he recalls, "My first traumatic experience was around age seven, living in a Catholic parish district in Dublin, and going to a benefit showing of Shane at a Protestant church in disrepair with a leaky roof. From my background, giving money to the Protestants was like giving money to the devil. I overcame my moral scruples because it was two pence cheaper than going to the cinema. They showed the film on a sheet and the film kept breaking, and suddenly the caretaker got up and said, 'Don't anybody rush out because we're gonna entertain ya.' I remember thinking, 'Oh, my God!' as all the local Protestant men rushed up onstage, then turned around and had black shoe polish on their faces. They started doing this old vaudeville routine, and people were laughing, but I was thinking, 'I'm in a hell kind of situation.' From then on, the theater had a kind of primal terror."

At age 16, Sheridan was helping his father run a local theater that boasted its own acting company, in which Sheridan himself acted. Among the other thespians in the group was The Crying Game director-to-be Neil Jordan, with whom Sheridan wrote one of his eight plays. "The father was always a bad figure in every play I did," Sheridan admits. "My father and I had lots of rows when I was in my early twenties. Most of them had to do with the extraordinary circumstance of my brother dying of a brain tumor. It made me, at too early an age, a father figure."

Sheridan had always wanted to act, be a star maybe. He acted while at University College in Dublin, but he scored greater success running a theater company named "Children's T." From there, for four years until 1980, he ran the Project Arts Center, Dublin's thriving alternative theater. Next, he migrated to New York, where he became the artistic director of the Irish Arts Center and studied film at New York University. He thought the movies were "naive by comparison to the theater," but he and playwright Shane Connaughton wrote the script for My Left Foot, which was produced by his longtime crony and former agent Noel Pearson. "I had considerable success in the theater," the 45-year-old Sheridan recalls, "and you get to the point where you think you can do anything, really. The ego is strange. What's hidden comes out, and suddenly this new person emerges, of whom others say, 'Who is this person, so arrogant and self-possessed?' Then, when one or two plays I directed didn't work, I had to adjust. It must be so much more difficult for people who go straight into the cinema, because movies are on such a vast scale and you get this enormous amount of money. By the time of My Left Foot, the same sort of thing happened to me again, with the five Academy Award nominations, and all. But, this time, I had a cushion of prior experience. So, I found being at the Oscar ceremony very relaxing. To get all those nominations, especially for the first film I did, was an achievement in itself. When we won the first one, I thought, 'At least we won't go back home and have everybody saying, kidding, "Ahhh, yiz did well, didn't ya?'""

The success of My Left Foot prompted Hollywood to pitch Sheridan "everything under the sun. Scripts are hard for me because they're mostly like new literature, you know? I read three pages and go, 'No, no, no, no, NO!' When the great scriptwriter comes along, he won't even think in terms of film or literature, it'll be like sculpting. I hope this doesn't sound pretentious. I thought there were extraordinary things in Terminator 2 when there were all those holes in the people. It had the dimensionality of a painting. And I love Steven Spielberg's stuff. There is an intrinsic strength in what he does. I like movies that seem from the preconscious like Jurassic Park, because there we're dealing with things we know happened in the jungle. I have a soft spot, too, for E.T."

Unlikely as it may seem, both Spielberg and Sheridan enjoy deals at the same studio, Universal. Sheridan is so far keeping mum about what he will tackle next. Talk of a big Irish-immigrants-in-America saga has dwindled lately, but not, he insists, because of Far and Away. "The difficulty was that the idea we had is kind of like Roots," he says. "The sea of change the Irish experienced coming to America was huge. In a funny way, all white people should be Irish to understand how it is to be oppressed. It's an experience we have to offer. We are white people who have gone through what Third World people go through all the time. I'd love to do a theme from the American inner city because there's a commonality with Ireland. In Ireland, people always push the structures to the limits because they don't believe in structures. If the structure is so oppressive, you can't believe in it. You have to destroy it."

Sheridan has also been thinking about making a drama with music to star U2's Bono, which could put the singer in a limelight such other rock gods as Sting, Bowie and Jagger were not always flattered in. "He wants to do a film and we've talked about doing quite a few things," Sheridan says. "He's very deft, a great mimic. I get on with him and he always makes me laugh. Sometimes singers wait for the audience response, I guess, and get hooked on that. Elvis wound up making movies that were almost like he had his audience up there with him. Sinatra wasn't bad--he had big rage. There's a history of it not working on-screen, but you can tell that Bono would."

If Bono decides against risking the exposure of the movie camera, who'd carp if Sheridan and Daniel Day-Lewis teamed again and again? "It could easily be that Daniel could become a mega-movie star," Sheridan says. "And maybe he wouldn't get the chance to do stuff like mine. I hope not. It puts such a huge onus on him. He's aware of that. If he feels there's lots of money invested in him, he wants it to work and he doesn't want to be an asshole, you know? But he could be a huge star and still do films with me. And if I wanted to come to Hollywood and make big pictures, I would. But only if I had a lot on my side, because you're competing in the area of high altitude with very little air, where you'd better be a good long-distance runner with a lot of stamina. Down below, there's a lot more oxygen. I'm really proud of the stuff I do--it's a kind of unique thing--and I'd rather dig inside myself to see if something's there. If there is, I'll do that. If there's not, it will be, like, NEXT?"

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Stephen Rebello interviewed Antonio Banderas for the November Movieline.

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