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SHERIDAN'S TRAVELS
FAMILY MATTERS
Paddy Considine, Emma Bolger, Samantha Morton and Sarah Bolger.
in america
Jim Sheridan, director of such Oscar-nominated films as My Left Foot and In the Name of the Father (which won the Golden Bear in Berlin in 1993), is quietly insistent that his new film, In America, is not autobiographical - well, not entirely.
“A lot of what takes place in the film really happened to us,” he says. “I really did drag an air conditioner across New York. I really did lose a lot of money trying to win an amusement park doll and we really did have a premature baby. But I definitely changed and added a lot of things, including the time period. In fact, in some cases the truth was far too strange to work as fiction, and we wound up cutting out things that actually occurred because they seemed entirely too extraordinary.”
IN 1982, IRISH
DIRECTOR JIM
SHERIDAN MOVED
HIS YOUNG FAMILY TO NEW YORK. TWENTY YEARS LATER, HE
BEGAN SHOOTING
A FILM CALLED IN AMERICA ABOUT
A YOUNG IRISH
FAMILY THAT MOVES
TO NEW YORK.
MIGHT THERE BE A
CONNECTION,
WONDERS SAM CONNOLLY?
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What actually happened was that Sheridan went to New York to run a theatre company. He’d been doing the same thing in Dublin at the very progressive, very popular Project Arts Centre but had got into trouble over a show put on there by a radical theatre group called Gay Sweatshop. So, in 1982, Sheridan took off for New York to run the New York Irish Arts Centre, taking his family with him.
Director Jim Sheridan on set with Emma.
| They lived in an apartment building in Hell’s Kitchen (the name since given by Sheridan to his Dublin-based production company).
While he was there, Sheridan studied film-making at NYU. He made his debut as a film director with My Left Foot in 1989, by which time he was back in Ireland; that film was nominated for five Oscars and won two.
What happens in In America is that Irish émigrés Johnny (Paddy Considine) and Sarah (Samantha Morton) arrive in New York some time at the beginning of the third millennium (the film was one of the first to shoot in New York after 9.11), broke and with two lively young daughters (Sarah and Emma Bolger) in tow. It’s make-or-break time for the parents (with break-up seeming a very real possibility for their marriage). But the teeming New York tenement and its collection of weird and wonderful people - especially Mateo (Djimon Hounsou), the ‘screaming man’ - hold endless fascination for the kids.
That first visit to New York was a period of his life that Sheridan had always meant to revisit, but it was a chance encounter at the Oscars ceremony in Los Angeles that started the process that resulted in In America. He met an old neighbour from the Hell’s Kitchen apartment block. “Ah!” said the friend. “That house was blessed!”
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