Plucky Jim

Let s face facts. If there is a cultural renaissance in Ireland at the moment it has more to do with rock n roll and cinema than with those forms of high art that defined the cultural realm in this country for far too long.
Tellingly, less than ten years ago, at a State Of The Arts In Ireland conference in Dublin s National Gallery (where else?), rock music wasn t even deemed worthy of discussion while the only note of hope was struck by Muiris Mac Conghail, when he spoke of the budding film industry. But then, way back in 1987, U2 had only recently released the album that would finally break them worldwide, The Joshua Tree, and our latest cinematic endeavour was a relatively non-descript offering entitled Eat The Peach.
Within two years, however, Jim Sheridan would win an Academy award for his directorial debut, My Left Foot and later achieve similar success with films such as The Field and In The Name Of The Father, setting Irish cinema on the world stage in a way that eclipsed even the work of his nearest rival, Neil Jordan. These films also reveal Jim Sheridan to be doggedly determined to set the Irish psyche on celluloid, and expiate his own personal demons as he explained in the first part of this interview when he spoke about the relationship with his deceased father which shapes, he said at least 90% of my work , and the death of his brother as a result of a brain tumour, an experience with which Sheridan admits he has still to come to terms.
And yet, as was also obvious from the last issue of Hot Press, Jim Sheridan is not without his detractors. Basically, Jim is a decent guy, but he s ruthless. His behaviour with Gabriel, was open to the whole world; he didn t stab him in the back, he stabbed him in the chest, suggested Sunday Independent journalist and scriptwriter, Mick Sheridan. The Gabriel in question is actor Gabriel Byrne, who allegedly received these less-than-mortal body wounds during the making of the movie In The Name Of The Father. So, let s begin part two of this interview with that very question.

Joe Jackson: Are you ruthless? What about these stories that you shafted Gabriel Byrne? Firstly, by fucking him around on the set of In The Name Of The Father, not having the balls to tell him that you wouldn t be using him in the movie. And, secondly, that he originally had the option on Gerry Conlon s book but, because of all this screwing around, let that option lapse and you moved in, behind his back, and bought the rights to the book. Which is why apparently, he still refers to you as a little bollix . True?
Jim Sheridan: Partly. What happened between Gabriel and me is sad. And we shouldn t have fallen out, as we have. But the truth of the matter is that we were doing the film with Gerry Conlon. Gabriel had a two-year option with Gerry and that option was up, let s say, in June and in July the studio were saying to me so everything s fine, you have the rights, and I say yeah . Then I say to Conlon, the studio were asking do we have the rights? and he says, no, you fucking don t. And I said, Gerry, I thought we had a contract? and he said, no, that contract s run out, so at that point it became a situation of who would get the rights. And me and Gabriel were doing this together so I sent Gerry a note asking him to assign the rights but not to either me or Gabriel and told him we could fill in later whether it was Gabriel s company or my company that did the deal. But in the middle of that Gabriel was on the phone to Gerry and said, don t sign anything and I got annoyed at that. But there was never a situation that I bought the rights.
And, on the other question, Gabriel had a contract to do another movie and when the filming of In The Name Of The Father got put back he said I can't do that, because I ve to do another film. And I said, well, wait a second, you are the producer of this movie so can you produce a film if you re going to work on something else? And it wasn t till the day he was leaving that I found he had a contract to do another film. That s what happened. But he never made his position clear.
But you guys had been working together since the days of the Project Theatre, in the 1970s. As old buddies, why can t you make up?
Part of the problem is that we do go back that far and maybe Gabriel felt there never was any need to explain things. But, of late, he has sent me a few notes, suggesting that so-and-so would be great for the Behan film, so maybe it s just that we haven t met recently. But probably because Gabriel lost his temper a lot before he left the film he got a lot of stuff out of himself, whereas I didn t. I do think he s one of the good guys basically.
Yet, on a deep level, I think it comes down to the question of respect. I respect Gabriel as an actor but as a producer I didn t think he was that interested, or that good at it. Maybe I didn t respect him enough as a producer. And Gabriel bought the book with the idea that he would play the father, because I think he thought he was too old to play Gerry. But we never had the fucking conversation to focus that. And if he d have played it we would have had to get someone younger than Daniel to play the son, so although Gabriel went along with that, I think it was difficult for him, because he had to let go either playing the father or son.
Is it true that Gerry Conlon bit your hand at the wrap-up party for In The Name Of The Father and called you Judas because he didn t approve of what you d done with his book?
I think he did that but, at the wrap-up party, Gerry was flying, and, besides, events like that produce strong, strange emotions, y know? And, imagine if you were responsible for your father going to jail and he dies in jail? Don t tell me you re not going to be on edge about how this is portrayed. And there was a scene in the film where Gerry is saying, they pissed on your name and when his mother read that she didn t see it as dialogue, or an expression of emotion. They physically saw that scene Gerry Conlon pissing on his father s grave.
So you had his mammy going, Gerry, do you know what s in this script? and then you had Gerry going off the edge. So it was a complete misunderstanding and that time between the wrap-up of filming and when I showed them the edited movie was very fraught. But, in the end, they loved the film and Gerry is more than proud of it. He knows, as I said earlier, that through that film his father lives again. And, on a spiritual level that really is all that matters.
Would you describe yourself as a spiritual person?
Yeah, but it s hard for me to access because of a crisis of faith at 17. I remember going to confession and telling the priest I didn t believe in God and he d freak, couldn t deal with that, at all. Yet before that I was caught up in all that Catholic shit. Like, at 14, I d go to confession and say, I had bad thoughts then go to a different confessor than the one in Seviller, and couldn t get from there to my home without thinking more bad thoughts about a girl! So, I d go back, and I d say, It s an hour since my last confession and the priest d say get out of here! But the impossibility of not having bad thoughts in that sense, allied to the death of my brother and all the questions that brought forth, just made me say I can t believe in all this anymore because the stress of it was too much!
Can you make that walk home nowadays without thinking bad thoughts about women?
No! Every six seconds it s the same old thoughts! I guess, there s no hope for me, right?
So it s likely you ll never make it back to either Church?
Probably not! It is like I m still on that walk and will remain there for the rest of my life.
Does this leave you with a sense of spiritual hunger? There are those who describe alcoholism as a debauched attempt at a spiritual experience, so was that ever the option you took? Or drugs?
I would agree with that kind of analysis, definitely. And I did a fair amount of drink, but I was never an alcoholic. And though all my mates were taking acid back then and smoking, I was too afraid of the turmoil inside me.
Did you ever have a moment, when you were drinking, or doing drugs, where you touched maybe the rim of that turmoil and had to jump back?
I didn t have it with drugs. But it was Jung who said that drink and drugs are a low-level spiritual experience and probably the closest I came to that was once when I was at the dentist and he forgot to give me injections and sitting there in his chair I suddenly felt I was outside in the garden. And I also felt I was in the world for the first time in my life. It was as if the only thing that made me worthy to exist, was the pain I d gone through, because he didn t give me that anaesthetic. So I now do believe you have to go through this huge level of pain in order to feel real. That s why the thing with drink is that the hangovers are the time you feel real, because that s when you feel the pain. The rest of the time it is, too often, just trying to escape from those feelings.
Any out-of-body experiences with drugs?
I never had it that bad, though I m a kind of weirdo with drugs. I wouldn t take that much. I could never do a Shane MacGowan or anything like that. But if there was coke around and I took a few lines, I d be like wow! I d talk a lot and keep going until a point where my heart would start thumping faster. Because I m obsessive, though I m not addictive. I have an obsessive personality and will follow something to the end. So drugs take me away from the pain, rather than help me feel it. Probably because I m very afraid of that pain. And maybe I ll only feel it when I finally make that film you said I have to make, about the death of my brother, Frankie.
I also told Pauline Kael a story about my childhood and she said that s the film you should make. It was the story of my father trying to put up an aerial on the roof and all he can get on the TV is snow because, basically the Church, which was four houses down, was blocking the signal to our house! And that s a metaphor for what happened to the entire world, in the last 30 years. The pulpit we used to have words from, has been replaced by television, from which we get images. But, the image we get is eternal presence. We don t have the Jesus death-and-resurrection mystique anymore. We have the Elvis mystique, as in he s not dead.
So fame now is one surface variety of the new form of spiritual awareness. But the other variety of it is non-death, the notion that once you become famous you ll never die. That s the aspiration of people. It s not to be Jesus and die and be reborn and go through pain. They want the eye candy, the reassurance of a language that s mute. In other words, no words. As in television. So, in this context, the original film I wanted to make was about Sheriff Street, the house, the aerial and, in that way, highlight how images break through an oral culture, and destroy this oral culture. That s what happened in Ireland.
But are you, yourself, driven by a sense of spiritual hunger?
Maybe just hunger, in the broadest sense. But to tell you the truth, even trying to answer you honestly, I must say, I really don t know. But whatever my drive is, it definitely has to do with what was originally religious longing, trying to feel whole or complete again. And even in terms of drama, there s nothing as dramatic as hell, right? Or as theatrical as the rituals in religion, which also, obviously, influenced me. After all, I also was an altar boy, so there s all that stuff.
As in experiences of being abused?
We were all sent down to where the football gear was, but I think I was one kid they wouldn t do that to. Because my parents had a certain kind of standing in the community. Yet I saw it happen to another kid or two. Nothing heavy, just hand-down-the-trousers-stuff. I mean, if you didn t get the hand down the trousers when you were going to a Christian Brothers school there was something wrong with you! And what I really remember from the Christian Brothers was this teacher who used to say (adopts heavy, rural accent): History, boys. Let s start. In Ancient Ireland the Fianna walked around in the nude, Bollock naked. That was his opening line, in our history class!
And you haven t looked back since!
Absolutely not! So don t get on my back about the interpretation of history in my films! When you start off from a point like that you re obviously fucked!
Seriously, though, your Christian Brothers upbringing seems not to have affected you as deeply as it did others. You joked earlier about suffering from guilt over bad thoughts about women, but did any of that cast shadows over sex? You seem to be sexually liberated, free from all that nonsense.
I am, now. And I think I probably imposed more shadows on myself than the Christian Brothers were capable of imposing. That whole base to my sexual education, in terms of Catholicism and school, probably made me tense and armoured, to begin with.
But did you have sexual hang-ups? Like the first time you made love?
No. Fran was the first real girlfriend I ever had. Though I had one before that, Patricia, who was a lodger in our house. But that was innocent stuff. And I met Fran when I was 17, 18 and I was married when I was 22. But there was no sexual problems, in that sense. And even if I had the priest s hand down my pants, I really can t remember. So things like men coming on to me I can deal with.
Ever fancy a guy?
I thought a lot about that, but it s not something I d be into trying. And I don t say this through any sense of self-denial.
A lot of guys d think Daniel Day Lewis is a bit of a ride, so did you get the hots for him?
If I was fancying anyone it would be Daniel! (laughs) Yet the real point is that when you are married it s very difficult to develop emotional relationships with other women, so you do develop them with men. 90% of the time all my bondings are with men. And it s all infantile stuff, going around together, me an Terry, me an Daniel. But I do get on with Daniel very, very well.
But would you marry him?
No. He d be hard to marry! Because he s so romantic! He makes things desperate for himself, by being so true to himself. He doesn t leave himself much room to manoeuvre, though he obviously taps into that for his art. In fact, I probably think he is the best actor out there. There s two things that go into what you see on the screen, there is the movie star and the actor. And, usually, the more you move towards movie star, the further you move away from actor. Because the audience want to buy the personality of what they see, like the Sean Connery thing. Yet, as an actor, Connery has limited his own palate, deliberately. He became James Bond and then was smart enough to move away from that. But he didn t move far enough. Like, you re never going to see Sean Connery in a dress.
On screen?
(laughs) Yeah.
What s your view of Richard Harris, as an actor?
He s a good actor.
Donal McCann once suggested he was the opposite, because he is too egotistical, doesn t allow the part to move through him in the purest sense, has to bend it to suit his own psychology or aspirations, as in the Bull in The Field.
There is a point to that, definitely. And one thing about Harris is that on screen he has four stages of aura, whereas on stage, he has five or six. But some people, like Richard, are exhibitionistic children and when they get a big room they are in the centre of it. Whereas someone like Daniel Day Lewis is hiding in a corner. And you have to go in and look at Daniel s eyes to see the pain. For him to get centre stage is like a job of astronomical proportions. So he s not going to fill that space in the same way Richard will. Richard fills that space in the same way an exhibitionist child performs. And it was no secret that when me an Richard did The Field it was like a war, as far as I was concerned. For him that was par for the course: he seems to go by that conflict.
Actually, he has claimed, rather angrily, that at least part of his rage was rooted in the fact that some of his better scenes were cut.
That was part of the battle. There was like five minutes of stuff he wanted put back in. But my fear was when you do a close-up it s like being in a bar with someone who s in-your-face and the audience can only take so much of that. And I was afraid we d crossed that line so I cut.
But he still got nominated for an Academy Award, right? And he was happy enough about the film, in the end. But I really like him and would work with him again. In fact I love him in a strange way. He s really adorable. He has that madness.
So would you marry him?
He doesn t want to get married again, unfortunately!
Okay, so how did you measure up in his Dick-ie-Harris competition on the set of the movie when he, apparently, challenged anyone to slap their dick on the table to see if it was as big as his?
(laughs uncontrollably) He had that Big Dick competition thing all right, doesn t he?
But did you measure up?
No. And I don t think any of the rest of us mere mortals can. At least as far as Richard is concerned!
So apart from penis envy, what were the other layers to your battle with Richard on the set of The Field?
It was just that it had been seven years since he was on film, and him and Peter O Toole had this thing about being fucked around by the studios back then. O Toole had his way of striking back, he told Harris: Don t give them anything they can use in the wide shot. So, it s like if you re in a wide shot and you don t do anything they have to go close up, so you get the full screen, right? That was their system. And the director was a functionary of the studio in most of the films they did. So suddenly Harris is thinking I was like that, which created great tension. But a lot of the time other directors wouldn t take him on. And it s very hard for a director to take on an actor like that. Because you ve got one person in front of you disagreeing with you, and a hundred people around who just want to just start shooting the film. But I was probably as bad as Richard, I was happy to fight.
Indeed. I ve heard you described as a bloodhound when you re going for something you desire. This ties in with the notion that you are ruthless .
In those circumstances I am really ruthless, yeah. But, so what? This, too, does go back to what we were talking about earlier. When you have a loss of faith, in a spiritual sense, you then have to create a faith in a fantasy world. If you have heaven and hell in your head for 18 years as I did and you let them go, then they have to be replaced. There has to be a new house. That s what cinema and theatre is, to me. And that s what I go for. And a lot of it has to do with fantasy. In fact, I m not very good at all the other things, like getting my money, getting paid, the practical stuff. These things have never been paramount to me.
Which leads us to another accusation: the suggestion that, because of this, you have been fucked over, financially. I ve heard you were really pissed off when Noel Pearson sealed up the deal, to his own advantage, on the Irish distribution of The Field. And, furthermore, that you and he got into a head-to-head battle over the #3 million advance deal you both got from Universal Studios. And that, as a result of this, you remained bitter enemies, until recently.
I didn t make much money from In The Name Of The Father but as for all that other stuff all I want to say is that, initially, Noel and I locked ourselves into a deal with Universal and it took me about two years to get my money. And then I did In The Name Of The Father and that kind of paid off all the money we got. But I really didn t make anything out of that. So the point is that, yes, I have made money, but not as much as I could have done.
But if there was bad blood between you and Pearson, is that now sorted out?
I think so. And we were at war, maybe more from my side. Because Noel has a bigger ability than I have to distance the business from the friendship. I wasn t able to do that. So we did have a falling out, over many things. Noel has an ambition to be more creative than just a producer. And he is a very creative producer. He has a charisma and a talent that is unique. He can work a table or a room, in a way that is awesome. But he also has a thing in relationships that you can t get too close to him.
Yet there is a deep-seated urge in him to be the creator of what he does. Particularly, when we went to America: I d be introduced as the most important of the two of us and I had no idea that was affecting him so much. But it did. And I didn t like it. And I didn t like how much the producer is demeaned in the American system, whereas, here in Ireland, Noel WAS my Left Foot.
So when he was cast into the who-cares-who-Noel-Pearson-is thing in America it really got under his skin. I got empowered through My Left Foot from being a one on the scale to being a nine. And Noel went from being a ten to a three. I really wanted us both to be a ten but I don t think he s capable of sharing that equal thing. But we were good together because he had that entrepreneurial thing that d make him say, get the money, rob it, raise it, put on the show , whereas I was full of all this left-wing bullshit about saving the world through theatre and all that, for years. But Noel needs to be Mr Something, like head of the Irish Film Board. He d be great in a role like that. And if I was the head of the government I d give him that job. Noel needs a position like that.
If you were head of the Irish film Board what steps would you take to save the industry? Apparently, not one major film is due to be made here for at least the next year and a half.
For me and Neil and, say, John Boorman, to get involved with the Irish Film Board and take money off them would be stupid, because we can just go to the studios and get the money. But, on the other hand, there is no point in the Film Board trying to make an industry outside the people who are the industry. And you could create, in Ireland, a huge film industry. We have English, so our films should be understood anywhere. And we should be able to bring in people from England, America, Europe, to work here. But the real point is that film doesn t work off small-term investment. So there s no point in playing around with a few hundred thousand pounds here, and there. That doesn t fucking work. You need big companies.
Like, John Boorman could start one and the Irish Film Board would say to film-makers, Boorman, Section 35, go through him, he can develop the ideas, though we ll keep an eye on him to see what he s doing is worthwhile. Have big companies working at this, instead of having every cowboy in town coming in trying to get Section 24 money for every little project. You don t give every fucking body ten, 20 or 50 grand think they will go off and write a great script. That s what went wrong. A lot of people made a living out that. But I would love to, at some point, be involved in moving the whole thing on a new level. Yet you need the tax incentive thing to be very tough and rigorous and only go where it should go.
So are you saying that a huge part of what went wrong is the fact that there are maybe hundreds of cowboys out there with their little scripts, films in development and a healthy bank balance while, at the same time no films are being made?
Yeah. Exactly. And the first thing you should so, if you build a studio is get a reader, like William Goldman, who knows about film, and people talk to him and he says 99% of this is rubbish and bins it. Mostly because such films have been done 10,000 times, and better. And it s tougher than that. You have to pay your dues. In this sense what really stood to Neil and I was doing theatre, especially street theatre, where you re out there seeing if you can get 10p off a passer-by, grab their attention and hold it. But a lot of these would-be scriptwriters just don t live in the real world.
What else went wrong? The Divine Rapture fiasco, the cap on investment, television producers who didn t deserve it getting Section 35 money, Irish crews pricing themselves out of the market?
All that, but two of those things, in particular. At one point it was seen to be you could come in and get Section 35 and be Robin Hood. That had to change. But then they cut it by 2% and people thought it s all over. It s not over! A 2%, 3%, 4% drop is not a 50% drop! Yet, combined with that, the unions had put up their prices, to meet the money coming in. So there was not much actual benefit to film companies to film here. And Irish crews did up their prices very high at one point, though that doesn t mean they d priced themselves out of, say, a film Neil or I would make. And the failure of Divine Rapture of course, didn t help.
One of the major problems is that we have no film and TV industry. In every other country, films are made, go out on the local TV and 70% of them pay their way back. Whereas RTE can only give out #100,000 and are not involved in the same sense as, say, the BBC or Channel Four. RTE can t make a film themselves so they are always depending on outside finance. So the way out is to privatise RTE, force them to put money into film. You have to bring the TV and film sectors together, to fully develop an Irish film industry. Major films operate at the level of can you raise $20 million? not can you get Section 35 breaks in Ireland? for Christ s sake.
Apart from that the Irish film industry is basically fucked, to a great degree, because we tend to make the same movie over and over again like the really-serious-art-is-obscure stuff. And a lot of us Irish do go for that serious-art stuff because we re snobs. We need to say our-culture-is-really-important .
If so, surely it s because for centuries Britain has been telling us our indigenous culture is shit. And before that Rome similarly forced us to relinquish our ties to our pagan past.
I totally agree with that, on both counts. But my argument is that some of these cunts who talk about culture don t see that our culture now is Shane MacGowan, not just in the far-off past before colonisation by either Britain and Rome. So we need to shake off all this shit, look to the future and, instead of saying please, how can we get in the door with our little film? say we re going to, in Europe, buy 600 fucking cinemas and release only European films in those. Including our own. We have to think big and stop all this fucking around.
And you really have to combine Telefis Eireann with a culture that is rock n roll, not with a Channel 4 culture of bores! And there is going to be a studio in England that will do all that. They see the potential, we don t. After they saw what happened here with Braveheart, Britain has put in place all the extra structures it needed to grab the stuff we won t now get. That s why I m afraid the Irish film industry we almost got started is going to finally fall apart. I just pray there is a few more guys out there like Neil Jordan, though they really should have shown their faces in Ireland by now. Maybe the best thing Neil and I could do is start to buy bigger cars and bigger houses and make everybody so sick they ll have to get off their asses and do something about all this!
In the TV documentary about Irish cinema, Ourselves Alone, you said: A lot of the time we ask the question, Irish, Irish, Irish and it s a mantra, to me, of a lack of self possession and self-centredness. We re always trying to find out who we are, always trying to find out our identity because maybe somewhere deep down inside, we feel we don t have one. Do you really think that is true of all Irish people or is it just an externalisation of your feeling that you, yourself, don t have an identity that is complete?
It s true of us all. Yet if you are an artist, writer, or whatever, you are like a big antenna and you have to be open to picking up signals. But, most of all, you have to be open to the signals from where you came, or else you are nothing. And in terms of Irish identity I really think it is a case of us protesting too much. Definitely, in time, I have become less unsure myself, about this whole question of national identity. And my own identity. Though, obviously, I m not as secure as I could be, on a personal level.
You suggested earlier that Irish identity is very much rooted in our position as a colonial force ruled by Britain and Rome. But, if both now are loosening their stranglehold, isn t it inevitable that the question of who we are, as a people, be paramount as we near the end of the 20th century? And that protest, for a time, has to be part of this process of redefinition?
That is true, but not to the exclusion of other forms of exploration. And there s no doubt that we have defined ourselves, for centuries, as an oppositional force. As n the GAA forming in opposition with English games. But as part of the challenge of change we do now face, the GAA should say, this is the national stadium and embrace Englishness. Not just accept our Englishness, but take over England, in that sense! In other words, instead of continuing to define ourselves by playing the victim and saying, this game is here because the English did so-and-so to us, let s go at it from another tack, be victors.
Same with the hunger strikes. That s what I meant earlier when I said we were in denial during the time of the hunger strikes. Somewhere deep inside we must have thought, we know they know we re right but, because of politics, they re afraid to say it. The truth is that the English will never say they re sorry for anything because they define themselves as an oppressive force, as opposed to the Irish, who define themselves, still, as oppressed.
But have you embraced your Englishness, your dual-identity? You re seen as a knee-jerk, fuck-the-Brits reactionary. Could you make a British nationalist movie, for example?
Very easily. And I would endorse the part of English culture that held the line on civilisation, whether that is Florence Nightingale or against Hitler. And, even in terms of acting, there is no actor more loyal than a British actor, like Emma or Daniel. They have such a self-centred assurance that they don t need to be in opposition with you, as, people like Harris are, almost by instinct. And they communicate in a direct way. They re not playing the game of, if I say this what will he think? Whereas we, the Irish, say what we hope will make us look good a lot of the time. And that s one of our greatest drawbacks, as a people.
But surely the current success of Irish people such as yourself, U2, Seamus Heaney, Michelle Smith and so on, should make us feel far from culturally inferior?
Definitely. In the main section of Ulysses James Joyce is saying, I m me own fucking father. And that s what we have to do, as a race. Because, until now, we didn t have role models that we respected because they didn t take on what we thought they should take on, to liberate us from Britain and Rome.
That s what I really meant earlier. That s what I see happening in Ireland right now. And if I, and bands like U2 added to that, that definitely is our greatest achievement. Either way, I do definitely believe that in the music of U2, and in rock n roll in general, there is the greatest energy in Ireland.
But despite all these claims made for U2, you, Neil, Riverdance, and so on, isn t there the danger that this could be a false dawn for Ireland, culturally speaking as has happened with the Irish film industry?
I don t think it is a false dawn. There is great energy, and great artistic activity in this country at the moment. And I feed off that. Though, having said that, my problem right now, is keeping a hold of something to believe in. On a personal level, in the deepest sense. that s why, to go back to that question of me being a bloodhound, if I see someone acting wrong I really am murderous, as I said earlier. And though I don t want to over play this because, as Terry George says, right, you d one brother who died, I saw 40 people die in relation to my brother, I do always go back to that image of him eating that ice cream, before it was in his mouth, that I explained when we started this interview. And though, as I said, I obviously didn t know at the time that he had a brain tumour I knew, somewhere deep inside me, that something was wrong. That s why, when someone is acting in a way I feel is wrong I go ballistic. I really want everything to be fundamentally right.
To put it bluntly, at the centre of my picture is a person and I don t want to let any of those people die. So that comes from (points to gut) there. And so, obviously, my curse also is what makes me. I told you earlier how Gerry Conlon felt he was responsible because his da went in to prison and died. But he also wondered if he ever could look at his mother again. So all through the making of In The Name Of The Father I m thinking wouldn't it be great if I make this film and, at the end of it, Gerry and his ma talk? And they did.
so, as with my dad forming that drama group, to put our family back together, this is a big part of the driving force behind what I do. But it really is hard to keep believing in that, in what I do. Sometimes I wonder is the whole thing just too personal, relevant to only myself. But then that s usually when I fight like fuck to make it more than that.
You talked earlier about how your father was frozen at a particular point in his life, emotionally, when Frankie died. What about yourself. Are you frozen at any point in time?
Probably. And probably if I could break that dam there d be far more to me, as a man, as a film-maker, than there is at the moment.
But, to steal an analogy from that chart on the back of Frankie s hospital bed and that diagnosis of his brain tumour you are going to have to drill further, aren t you? Can you do that?
I don t know. I didn t think of that analogy, but you re right. I will have to do that. But maybe it s not the brain I have to drill into, maybe it s more the heart.
And until you do that maybe you are going to merely tap-dance around the perimeter of your full potential.
I agree with that, absolutely. And listening to you brings to mind this recurrent image I have of President Kennedy, with this kid. And his father is up in bed, telling the kid to come in. But what the father is watching is just snow on the TV, which is something I explained earlier. But what I didn t say was that when we had all that snow on the TV, I loved the fact that only now and then did we get the image coming in clear. We had to fill in the gaps. That s why I want that to be part of the end of a film, where the father is knocking on the floor, telling the child to come up to bed, and the child doesn t move. So, the father comes down sees, eventually, that this is President Kennedy. So, Kennedy looks out the door and it s snowing, in actuality, and Kennedy goes out and makes this snowman. And in the head of the snowman he puts this marble. Then, it starts to snow really bad. And the kid can t see Kennedy, because it s like an image fading in and out of view. And then the kid says, you re going to leave me, I know. And as the kid backs out of that part of the screen into a part of the picture that isn t covered by snow, Kennedy reaches across, puts his hand on the kid s head and says, I ll see you. I have to go. And the kid says, don t go. And Kennedy says, I have to, but tell everybody I m dead, will you? Now I don t know what that means, but it s an image that haunts me all the time and I must use it somewhere.
As you describe it, the scene has echoes of Citizen Kane and Camelot. Citizen Kane because it is similar to that pivotal moment where the boy s life is signed away, while the snow is swirling ever-heavier, as he plays in the background with his sleigh, Rosebud. And Camelot in two ways. Partly because Kennedy apparently played that song nearly every night in the White House leading to his thousand days being labelled the age of Camelot and partly because at the end of the movie Richard Harris puts his hand on the shoulder of a boy and says, go tell the world, don t let it be forgot/That once there was a spot/For one brief shining moment/That was known as Camelot.
Then, obviously, that s not a bad structure, or idea for a movie, is it? And though, of course, I am familiar with Citizen Kane, I hadn t realised that s how Camelot ends. But it is only when I start talking to people like this that I realise I need such conversations to bring out the real ideas, separate what s false from what s true. And communicating like this as in film-making is, I really do believe, my way of connecting, rising above a fear of loneliness. And a feeling of loneliness.
That s why I believe that one of the best, and most political, films I ever made was My Left Foot because it has at its centre something that was so difficult to do. It s easy to be against authority, like England. Give me an authority and I ll lash it! But when that authority is your father and mother that s much more challenging, for me. Yet the externalisation of doing that through Christy Brown was good because I could step back ten paces, while, at the same time, still get closer to myself and my own family than I feel I did anywhere else.
And the way I wrote that script was totally unique. I was on a plane coming back to Ireland and was halfway through the script. Being in the plane was like being back in the pram, the womb, though there also was the primal fear that the plane could crash. So I had both those sets of conflicting feelings and started writing the second half of that script, completely in tears, for the full flight. That s when I wrote that scene in the restaurant which is my favourite scene where Christy loses it completely and becomes enraged. To me that scene was just like if you have a dog and you re fucking around with it for a long time and suddenly it growls and you know when you hear that sound it s for real.
You can t fake that sound, man. Listen to Kurt Cobain and you ll hear that growl.
Why did you cry that much?
Because I could see myself as him. I realised I was crippled. I probably am crippled, emotionally.
So you allowed him to express the rage and the pain you ve rarely felt; set the wolf free, as it were?
Yeah. And from the beginning to the end, and beyond, that is what film-making and writing and all this crap is about to me. And the other film I m writing now focuses on my daughter who, as I say, is me going to America and she has a brother that is dead. So maybe when I do that film I will finally set myself free from all this shit you said pollutes everything I do. But the point is that you can drill deeper and deeper and all you find is that it s lonely. Then you come out at the end of it all with nothing. That really is my deepest fear. But maybe I am going to have to meet this challenge, before I can become complete. And, maybe, in the end, this is not that different from the challenge many Irish people are going to have to meet, in their own way. On a personal level, and as a nation.