PRODUCTION NOTES
Coming to Live IN AMERICA
"We looked all over Manhattan for a place to live, til we finally found the house of the man who screams."
Writer/Director Jim Sheridan's most famous films – the Academy Award winners "My Left Foot" and "In the Name of the Father"-- are set in Sheridan's native Ireland. But Sheridan himself left Ireland long before he made those films and headed to the U.S. to attempt to make it as a stage director in New York. His experiences coming to America, arriving flat broke in the sweltering heat of summer with
a family of four, were as frenzied, comical and full of challenges as anything he had ever experienced. The period was seminal to Sheridan, but way too close to home to consider as fodder for creative material at the time. It wasn't until later, in 1989, when Sheridan was an Academy Award-nominee for his debut film, "My Left Foot," that he found himself looking back.
It all started when Sheridan was in Los Angeles for the Oscars®, and unexpectedly ran into an old apartment neighbor from those tumultuous days in Hell's Kitchen. After reminiscing about mutual friends who had survived and gone on to successful artistic careers, as well as those who hadn't, Sheridan's friend reminded him about the place they'd lived in earlier, "That house was blessed."
The line struck Sheridan, and he began to envision a movie about that extraordinary time and place, one during which his family learned first-hand how the terrible and the miraculous can co-exist in life. Merging his memories of coming to live in America with remembrances of a personal family tragedy (Sheridan's brother Frankie died of a brain tumor), Sheridan began to find a structure for his story. He created the characters
not so much from actual life as from a merged-together amalgam of different family members and dozens of colorful people he met when he first arrived in New York.
To lend more authenticity to the project, he also invited his daughters – Naomi and Kirsten Sheridan, who are both rising young writer/directors in their own right – to add their creative input, especially to the scenes involving the family's two daughters. The result is IN AMERICA, Sheridan's most personal film to date, a film that celebrates the electricity and promise of New York even as it attempts to figure
out the puzzle that is grief and the power that is love to spur people forward.
"A lot of what takes place in the film really happened to us," says Sheridan, "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."
Sheridan says it took him many years to write the film because he struggled with how to write about events so scarily close to real life, and to himself. He knew it was a risk. "In traditional screenplays, you're always trying to make everything work on some kind of intellectual, logical level but real lives don't do that," he explains. "Real life tends to have a deeper logic that we're not immediately aware
of, that doesn't fit into the so-called perfect three-act structure. And then there was the issue of writing about myself, and wanting to avoid the idea that ‘well, he looked deep into himself and found nothing negative,' but also trying to make the character of Johnny more likeable perhaps than the real thing." (In the end, Sheridan sees the character of Johnny as partly based on himself, party based on his father and partly a creation of Paddy Considine).
At the same time, Sheridan wanted to reveal, as viscerally as emotion can be, that the true threat to the story's family came from inside rather than emerging from the mayhem of the city. "I always felt where we lived in New York was safe enough with the junkies and transvestites, but what is really dangerous is denial," says Sheridan. "Johnny has to face the idea that you can't protect your family from loss
and uncertainty, certainly not by hiding. But you can love them, and love itself a kind of protection."
As Sheridan wrote, the film became much more than a typical memoir and took on a life of its own, bringing something new to Sheridan's work: an unabashed sense of magical realism, of the enchantment and mystery that lies just behind everyday reality. "To me, the film is ultimately about wonder," he says. "It's about trying to see the world with a kind of child-like, magical quality. It's a view of Manhattan as
an island of dreams that helps a family rediscover their deep bonds. I also like to think of it as a love poem to my wife and kids."
To Sheridan, Johnny and Sarah are representative of a new wave of American immigrants. "As many Irish people before them did, they have left Ireland in desperation and come to a new land. But it isn't an economic or political desperation that brings them to America; it's an emotional desperation. They need a miracle, a real transformation," he explains. "They need to let the pain of the past go in order to find
their future."
Johnny and Sarah, as well as their two daughters, are hoping to break the cycle of grief that keeps them from fully embracing their new life. With its own mysterious power, grief seems to literally haunt the family, like a spectre that is always in the room with them. Sheridan came up against his own feelings for his lost brother while working on the film. "I think Frankie's illness and death had a great effect on me,"
he says. "There was a real loss of faith; heaven kind of fell out of the sky. But if anything, it made me more focused on the authentic things in life."
Yet, in contrast to the film's heartbreaking emotional upheavals, Sheridan chose to pepper the script with lots of comic situations. "I felt it was necessary to balance the story's overwhelming drama with entirely equal amounts of humor," he says. "A lot of it is really a fish-out-of-water story about what it's like to experience things such as Halloween and New York weather for the first time."
Throughout the process of developing IN AMERICA, Sheridan worked with producer and long-time collaborator Arthur Lappin. When Lappin read the final script for IN AMERICA, he was struck by how Sheridan had taken his own experiences and forged from them an entirely universal tale of finding the strength to start over. "The story is very complex in how it uses Jim's personal history without becoming biographical," says
Lappin. "As always with Jim, he wasn't afraid to adapt and change existing material in order to make a more convincing and involving story. In all his films, he has always been true to the spirit of the ‘reality' of the source – whether that be Christy Brown in MY LEFT FOOT or Gerry Conlon in IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER-- while not being hidebound by the details."
Continues Lappin: "Ultimately, I find the story of IN AMERICA uplifting. It follows a journey that many people have gone through: out of grief and into a new life. What I like most about the film is that it contains a real sense of hope, which I think we need right now, a sense of a life beyond tragedy, of heading into a better future."
A Marriage On the Rocks IN AMERICA
"And then the summer came and with it the heat and a new word: humidity."
The heart and soul of IN AMERICA lies in the film's characters – the newly arrived family of four and their mysterious neighbor, Mateo. From the beginning, Jim Sheridan knew he needed actors who could bring these characters to life with a naturalistic ease, who could embody Johnny, Sarah, Christy and Ariel as if they were a flesh and blood family facing a real-life crisis with humor, terror and sheer strength of will.
As the heat rises in their New York tenement, Sheridan wanted the audience to feel the emotional temperature soaring as well.
With his own background in the theatre, Sheridan has always had an affinity for putting together a cast. Says producer Lappin: "Jim has become known for his ability to bring out the best in an actor, or to offer an actor the opportunity to bring out the best in themselves, and I think this film is no exception, especially in the performances of Samantha Morton and Paddy Considine, as well as the two absolutely extraordinary
children."
To play Johnny, a young father who has become a living ghost searching Manhattan for signs of his old self in the wake of his son's death, Sheridan cast rising British actor Paddy Considine. Although Sheridan had been seeking an Irish actor, after seeing Considine in his acclaimed role as an obsessive loner in the British indie film "A Room for Romeo Brass," the director was sold. Relatively unknown in the U.S., Considine
has been called British cinema's "best kept secret" and is on the rise, having been seen most recently in the critically praised "24 Hour Party People."
"I think Johnny is a very hard role," admits Sheridan. "He's not your normal hero because he's a man who has withdrawn from the world, who has lost his ability to be vulnerable, to play, to engage his imagination. But he also knows he can't let his family down, because he's brought them all this way to New York for a better life, and he still has some passion for that left. Paddy managed to keep that dilemma
interesting throughout the film and show that the way out for Johnny can't be through action but can only come through something far deeper. Underneath it all, Paddy reveals a great emotional power and is also very humorous."
Considine was thrilled to get a chance to work with Jim Sheridan. "His films are always such big human stories, and I thought it would be a wonderful opportunity as an actor," he explains. "A film doesn't work for me unless it has characters you really care about, and this film was about people I recognized as being very true."
But more than that, Considine immediately gelled with Sheridan's conception of the character on a personal level. "When I read the script I understood Johnny right away," Considine continues. " I haven't lost a child or anything like that, but the way in which Johnny has lost faith was something I could identify with. I knew him. It's funny, because the film came to me at a time when I had lost faith in what
I was doing as an actor. I felt that what I was doing was pointless and that was what really drew me to Johnny…and playing him has, in a way, really helped to restore faith in myself. Because that's what the film is about: it's about how you pick yourself up off the floor, get back on track and start believing again."
He adds: "It's also not just about survival in tough circumstances, but about people really coming to terms with each other, a family finding its strength. You know how it is in life: just when you think it can't get any worse, it does, but it's in those times when people really come together and, in a funny way, find out who they really are."
Considine worked hard to embody the Irish lilt of Jim Sheridan but never worried about the closeness of the character to his director's life. "From the beginning, Jim told me ‘Don't look at me to play the character, because he's not me,'" the actor recalls. "Anyway, I had my own ideas in my head for Johnny. Still, Jim and I had Johnny worked out so well, sometimes on the set it didn't even feel like I was
acting. Jim has a way of clearing all the crap and getting to the most basic heart of a scene."
Joining the cast as Johnny's courageous wife Sarah is Academy Award nominee Samantha Morton. Sheridan was attracted to Morton's renowned quiet intensity, which she displayed in her Academy Award-nominated, near-silent role in Woody Allen's "Sweet and Lowdown" with Sean Penn. "Samantha is like emotional quicksilver," Sheridan says, "with an ability to go to amazing depths but also to stay grounded. I
think she's one of the best performers of her generation, and that's why I picked her for Sarah."
Morton had a visceral reaction to the script, finding it an engaging treatment of issues almost everyone faces in life. "I like that it's about themes like mortality, faith, survival and love, things we all experience at one time or another, " she says. "But I like that it's light as well. It's a film that keeps you laughing as well as crying. And I really cared about every single character in the film. That's
what made me want to be in it."
As a mother, Morton was able to closely identify with Sarah's struggles and also her overriding sense of joy at watching her children discover America. "I was able to see Sarah as the one who has the job of keeping the family together no matter what and that she takes that very seriously," Morton says. "But I also saw that even though Sarah seems very together on the surface, underneath she also hasn't quite
gotten over the loss of her son and is very much in the process of healing. She and Johnny are going to have to come to terms with it together."
Also important to Morton was the fact that Sheridan's script offers a portrait of a marriage in all its human complexity and frailty. "I like that this film portrays the relationship between man and wife, and parents and children, in a very realistic way," she says. "It's not a sort of cutesy treatment. You see that Sarah and Johnny are going through a lot as a couple. They have been in love, felt they had fallen
out of love, and now they're realizing all the love that's left between them – and portraying that was very hard work for both me and Paddy."
Two Girls Enchanted by Life IN AMERICA
"Mom, Dad, Christy and Ariel all together in one happy family."
Both Samantha Morton and Paddy Considine say that their roles would never have come alive without the contributions of the two young actresses who play their on-screen daughters, savvy Christy and curious Ariel, with such authenticity and heart. The girls are central to the film's power, becoming the eyes through which the audience sees both the American landscape and the family's emotional collisions with a child's uninhibited
humor and perceptiveness.
The filmmakers held extensive auditions to cast the roles, aware that it would be difficult to find children capable of being at once playful and mature, defiant and loving. It was during one such audition that Sheridan was won over by 6-year-old Emma Bolger and her unsinkable feistiness. "While Emma was auditioning, I decided I wanted to hear another actress try the same lines so I handed the script to her. Suddenly I
feel this tug on my coat from behind, and this face looking up at me with great pity because I've obviously crossed a line of etiquette, and Emma says to me: ‘Does she get to read my part?' I knew right then that she was right for Ariel. She had that same wise quality of a girl who wasn't going to back down. Then she told me her sister Sarah was in the car. Aft first, I thought Sarah was too young to play Christy, or that I might have to rewrite some of the lines, but I was wrong.
She was fully capable."
Says Samantha Morton of the two girls: "They contribute a real freshness, a real raw feeling, to the film. They're not experienced actors, but instead they convey a true love of life. You feel that when you see their faces, the world is a better place instantly." For Morton, the power of a child's view to reveal a richer, more wondrous world, was key to the film. "Children have an ability, one that most adults
lose, to see the good in people, to see past whether someone's rich or happy or on the edge – and get to their true spirit," she comments.
To keep their performances real and spontaneous, Jim Sheridan was careful to make the set as fun as possible for the Bolger sisters. "I think the emphasis with children has to be on play," he says. " You have to keep it light. If you start making it work, you can lose something. But these two girls were extraordinary, just amazing, almost miraculous in their naturalism. I wouldn't even call what they did performances,
because they go beyond that. There really is a certain magic to them."
Indeed, for Sheridan, watching the girls embody his own daughters' pasts was even eerie at times. "My daughters say that the reason I liked working with the children so much in this film is that it was just like playing with my kids all over again -- except that this time they did what they were told! But that wasn't true," says Sheridan. "They conspired against me, just like in real life."
Djimon Hounsou, who plays the girls' unlikely new friend Mateo, was also touched by the girls' enchanted quality. "They are so full-spirited and wonderful they can make adult actors look quite useless," he says. "I think the film captures their beautiful spirits.'
Mateo was perhaps the most difficult character of all to cast. The character defied easy categorization and demanded a somewhat larger-than-life treatment. The filmmakers searched for the right actor. The answer came in the form of Djimon Hounsou, who had an immigrant story of his own, having been born in West Africa and transplanted to Paris before coming to Hollywood. Jim Sheridan recalls his powerful audition. "Djimon
came in and just put a completely different spin on the character. I wasn't looking for someone like him, but I immediately realized how strong his spiritual presence was."
Hounsou worked closely with Sheridan to fine-tune the character's complex personality. "Jim really helped me to understand Mateo and create who he is," says Hounsou. "To me, Mateo's a very interesting man, one who has been rejected by his own family because of who he is, but then he finds a family with Johnny, Sarah and their girls at the last possible moment." Although Hounsou has worked on major Hollywood
epics, he was impressed with this cast's emotional daring. "Paddy and Samantha were able to bring so much even out of the smallest scenes. It was beautiful working with them," he comments.
Throughout his work with the cast of IN AMERICA, Sheridan kept the focus on performances so genuine and relaxed as to have an almost vérité or documentary feeling to them. He says: "I'm always trying to capture that invisible thing, the thing that's in front of your face that you can't actually see in the moment, but is very powerful. I'm looking for the authentic, but it's hard to say exactly how you get
to that. It's not something you can ‘direct' in the common sense of the word. You just have to keep the actors feeling like they're in charge of their lives and let it happen."
He continues: "In the end, working with the actors is always the most complex element for me, much more so than the visuals and the production design and the set dressings, because it all comes down to the human face, down to those 44 muscles that can be contorted into thousands of different expressions."
Producer Arthur Lappin notes that Sheridan works in a manner that's fairly unusual for most motion picture directors. "He has a very organic style," he explains. "He's not the type of director who has everything all mapped out precisely. Rather, he goes for a kind of honesty and truthfulness in each and every scene – and of course because he's also the writer, he can deviate from the script at any time.
So, what I try to do is build a structure around Jim that gives him maximum flexibility and freedom to let that magic happen as much as possible."
IN AMERICA's New York
"Sometimes it seemed like everyone in New York was an actor, even the stockbrokers."
Much of IN AMERICA is set in Johnny and Sarah's New York apartment building, a cavernous, graffiti-splashed building with endless flights of stairs and a Gothic sense of darkness. Despite their surroundings, the family nevertheless creates a home, and discovers a community, in the middle of urban chaos, learning to embrace the wild uncertainty and diversity of living in the heart of the city.
Ironically, Jim Sheridan and his design team created the family's tenement on a set in the middle of Ireland! For logistical purposes, the production shot for ten weeks in Ireland, mostly interiors, but also some exteriors, including the scenes at the festival where Johnny loses the family's rent money in his quest to win a doll.
"We realized it would have been hard to get the kind of flexibility we needed to shoot this film in a building in New York," says Arthur Lappin, "so we had production designer Mark Geraghty use his talent to re-create New York in Dublin."
Geraghty started with a massive old house – which Jim Sheridan calls "the Irish Taj Mahal" – and transformed its longs corridors and echoing rooms into a typical ghetto tenement, replete with the grit, grime and kinetic energy of New York. Not surprisingly, the set was rife with rumors that the house was haunted, but if so, the ghosts must have received quite a shock from watching their surroundings transform
from an Irish sea-side mansion to a Hell's Kitchen hovel.
Says Jim Sheridan of Geraghty's sets, which were based in part on Sheridan's remembrances of furnishing and maintaining his family's home on pocket change and street-smarts: "I think places are a state of mind – Dublin can be New York because it's all in your mind – and Mark's set succeeded in bringing that place in my head fully to life."
After shooting in Ireland, the production headed to Manhattan to capture the ineffable rhythm and hue of New York's lower-class neighborhoods, shooting on the Lower East Side and Spanish Harlem and grabbing the pivotal footage of Manhattan buried under fresh snow. The emphasis here was on reflecting New York as a kaleidoscope of different cultures and attitudes.
"We weren't looking for the New York of famous building and landmarks," notes Lappin. "This film is more about what's going on in the streets, in the lives of ordinary people making their way in the city, and we were looking for the chaos and grit, as well as the underlying sense of community."
In fact, IN AMERICA was one of the first productions to shoot in New York following the events of September 11, lending to the crew an even stronger sense of wanting to reveal the underlying soul of New York in the photography. To do this, Sheridan worked closely with awardwinning cinematographer Declan Quinn.
"It was fantastic working with Declan," says Sheridan. "It was the first time I've ever worked with an Irish cinematographer and we felt very at home together. He also moved from Ireland to America when he was a kid, so he has his own very personal perspective on the story."
Quinn and Sheridan agreed that the look of the film should be intensely intimate, with the camera essentially becoming caught up in the emotional turmoil of Johnny and his family. At the same time, Quinn went for an almost dreamy, heated look that evokes the magic at the heart of the film. "One thing about Declan is that he has a brilliant sense of color," says Sheridan. "He gave the film a kind of Spanish magical
realism quality that turned out to be exactly the right visual tone for a story of this weight."
Shooting in New York brought the story full circle for Sheridan, as he traveled the city he had once come to as a cash-strapped immigrant. He says: "I never could have set IN AMERICA anywhere other than Manhattan ... it's a tough city but it is fundamental to this story. This is a hopeful, loving story about New York." |
