The unknown Jim Sheridan directed the not-yet-a-movie-star Daniel Day-Lewis in My Left Foot and changed both their careers forever. Now the director and actor have teamed up again, and the surprise is that their film, In the Name of the Father, is not a megaproduction, but a small, personal film not unlike My Left Foot.
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With his very first film, Irish writer-director Jim Sheridan seemed to arrive out of nowhere armed with a mastery of emotional shadings, a point of view, and an edge of contradiction. My Left Foot, the heroic and unlikely story of cerebral palsy-ridden Irish writer Christy Brown, won Sheridan a Best Director Oscar nomination and won the film's star Daniel Day-Lewis the Best Actor Oscar itself. Little wonder, then, that Hollywood went courting Sheridan, and that his agency, CAA, bombarded him with big-budget projects. But Sheridan chose instead to make The Field, another small, personal film with an Irish setting, which went on to win a Best Actor nomination for Richard Harris.
Once again Hollywood courted. Once again, Sheridan, having signed a lucrative deal with Universal that left him with a good amount of creative freedom, chose to make yet another personal film set in Ireland, In the Name of the Father. And, as if the whole sequence of events had been designed to illustrate the beauty of poetic symmetry, Daniel Day-Lewis--hot off the success of The Last of the Mohicans and courted for such roles as the vampire Lestat in Interview With the Vampire and Julia Roberts's lover in Shakespeare in Love--passed on Hollywood's offers and chose instead to take on In the Name of the Father's lead role, that of real-life Irish political activist Gerry Conlon.
I happen to have seen a lengthy, extraordinary sequence from In the Name of the Father. As Conlon, a man unjustly imprisoned for an IRA bombing, Day-Lewis throws off sparks with mutedly spectacular acting. Sheridan, who found visual analogs for the ungovernable, crazed, proud spirit of his countrymen without even mentioning politics in My Left Foot, here puts his taut, life-is-a-prison, agitprop sensibilities right out there. There's a renegade symbiosis between Sheridan and Day-Lewis that strikes me as so rich, and so dark, that they seem already as inevitable a collaboration as Scorsese and De Niro.
Heading west on Sunset toward the Chateau Marmont, where Sheridan is staying while he puts the finishing touches on In the Name of the Father, I recall how the anarchic ferocity of My Left Foot reminded me of the Irish sector of the Eastern seaboard city where I grew up. Tenements and churches hemming in ruddy rogues who stared hard at alien passersby outside taverns, kids playing grudge-match stickball, the whole neighborhood redolent of cabbage, whiskey and transatlantic dislocation. I don't pretend to understand the Irish; I just find them interesting. And when I meet Sheridan, a compact, disheveled man with wildness in his eyes, he seems unlikely to disappoint me.
Sheridan rubs his eyes, slouches in a chair next to a stack of scripts, stares out at a sky of orange sludge, laughs and observes, "Hollywood is like being at a party where, while I'm telling you a story, you're looking over my shoulder. People here are always playing to somebody else out there--a mass, a consensus. Even actors here don't talk to the person in the scene with them--they want the mass endorsement as their validation."
When I note that exposure to Hollywood seems to have done nothing to undercut the intrinsic Irishness of his movies, Sheridan, who was born into a family of seven in Dublin's toughest section, says, "Irish writers have been the mainstay of English theater for so long, but it's all verbose, all hyperbole. It's James Joyce, Synge, Dylan Thomas, O'Casey, O'Neill--beautiful, poetic, yeah, but it's not getting things done, not changing things, is it? When we use language in this way, we hide. So, in the world's mind, Ireland is a Saint Patrick's Day parade. And what is a parade but a display of something that you're afraid may no longer exist? Irish people today must define what is Irish, because we're not a whole county, but one in which we have had to define ourselves in opposition to England. When you have to do that for so long, it becomes tiresome, childlike. Everyone wants us to be like leprechauns--which, people aren't aware of, is equivalent to saying 'midget'--or people wearing green coats and high hats. You know, playing the circus clown."
Few who experience Sheridan's ragged intensity in life or on-screen could possibly accuse him of spreading emerald-green pixie dust. After all, My Left Foot centered on a brilliant artist struggling with the actual and existential challenges of cerebral palsy. In The Field, an obsessive farmer wreaks havoc after losing the land he had worked for decades. In the Name of the Father is about a man who is jailed along with his equally innocent father. If Sheridan's movies, which are praised for bristly acting and visual snap, lose points for anything, it's for dour, hermetic earnestness.
"I'm totally aware that sometimes a lack of humor in a movie gives you the feeling that you're trapped in a bar with a guy who's ranting on and on while you're going, 'Jesus, take a breath so I can go to the toilet,'" says Sheridan. "It comes out of an urgency to tell a story. I am kind of extreme. But there's so many people in the film world being so well-rewarded for always giving audiences what they want.
"There's richness, power, humor even," Sheridan continues, not too convincingly, "in something like the great Irish play in which a father kills all his children at the end because they're starving. One thing that will come out of In the Name of the Father is that Daniel Day-Lewis does have a bit more humor to him--even a great humorous side--as do I."
Sheridan explains that he conceptualizes his new movie as a kind of companion piece to his first film. "My Left Foot was simply about a boy relating to the mother figure in himself," he observes. "My mother-in-law, my mother, all the women I knew so loved it that my relationship with them, with many Irish women I know, changed overnight. Very odd. After it, I wanted to do a movie about a good father, but I couldn't find one outside of James Joyce in all Irish literature. That lack is a product of writers living and working in a subjugated society. I feel there is intrinsic good in the Irish family which is never seen because of the English-Irish situation. I found in In the Name of the Father the good father in the most obvious place--the father whom the kid thinks is weak and broken, but whose apparent lack of strength, his kid comes to see, is his strongest quality. With a father and son in jail, captive, it was perfect, because there was one thing for certain: they were trapped--they had to talk to each other. Which doesn't happen in Ireland. Fathers and sons never talk."
Talk the film has, and judging from the script, much of it is riveting. Particularly, one suspects, when it will be heard emanating from Emma Thompson, who plays a lawyer, and from Day-Lewis. Some of Day-Lewis's post-_Mohicans_ fans may be perplexed that he would do a small, intense movie like In the Name rather than, say, Interview With the Vampire, which the Hollywood trade papers suggested he was going to do. "Dan has a great advantage over us all because his grandfather ran a studio for 40 years," says Sheridan. "He not only knows all about this 'star' business, he also probably knows more about this industry than any director. So, his annoyance with stories that he would star in this or that would be that he would never give his word and then go back on it. This work is spiritual to Daniel."
Yet, the movie business rarely understands men on a holy mission, and Sheridan concedes that it took Day-Lewis's bare-chested box-office success to get In the Name of the Father off the ground. "Daniel's wanting to do it made it a bit easier," Sheridan recalls. "Once Mohicans was a big hit and everybody loved him, that made it easier still. No matter what the talk was, I knew I could depend on Dan, knew that he would focus on this. That's his great quality: the ability to focus. He commits. He's inspired. If somebody's just acting, I ask them to stop, because you can't actually act in a film. It's too obvious if you do. Daniel isn't capable of acting like that. He told me that he did a dance when he read the script for My Left Foot, and that he had to stop reading it often because he recognized that he and I are dealing with the same things in our lives, things that have a lot to do with family."
Would Sheridan care to elaborate on what things? Insisting that he "cannot speak for Dan," he goes on to explain, "It's about the internal mother and father. We don't mother ourselves, don't love ourselves enough. We don't father ourselves enough because we're not disciplined enough with ourselves. What you have to do is believe you were conceived in love, to celebrate the love of parents, rather than the ego of the day of your birth. If that sounds mad, well ... I've never thought of it before."
After a moment Sheridan adds, "Seeing Daniel, I always think about how we all came from the jungle and, in that jungle, there's a wild boar running at you. Now, there's only one place to hit the boar with a dart to stop it dead in its tracks. The person throwing the dart must have a huge adrenaline rush and yet be cool as a cucumber. Daniel has that weird, strong ability. If I write something and he does it, it's exactly what I intended. I never have to say, 'Try it this way,' especially if it's the high points, the dramatic points. It is a kind of symbiotic thing. It's almost as if I'm writing Daniel."
There's a lot to what Sheridan says. As good as Day-Lewis is in The Last of the Mohicans or The Age of Innocence, he seems less on it, less free than in his work with Sheridan. "I really look upon Daniel as a kind of inspiration. I get a lot of help just thinking of him playing the part. With him, it's almost like I could write it for acting it myself. I could sort of know what would be almost impossible for somebody to do--except Daniel. I don't think I combed the depths of what he can do in either My Left Foot or In the Name of the Father."
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.