Not enough money to go around, but parents who did their best to get you to forget it. All are childhood memories similar to those thousands of New Yorkers have tried to repress, learned to laugh about or even treasure, or (for those lacking a sense of humor) undergone therapy to address.
Naomi and Kirsten Sheridan, on the other hand, wove these recollections of their youth into “In America,” the new semi-autobiographical film by their father, the acclaimed filmmaker Jim Sheridan.
Co-writing the screenplay for the film, with their father, turned out to be an eye-opening experience for the women.
“We wrote our own scripts and then all got together and wrote one together,” 30-year-old Naomi Sheridan said. “But I wrote down stuff and Kirsten remembered completely different things, and I was like, ‘When did this happen?’ I have no idea why people remember what they remember.”
Added Kirsten, who’s 25: “It was such a strange way to get to know somebody in like a kind of father-daughter relationship. You would never start delving into ‘How did this make you feel? And how did that make you feel?’ “
Loosely based on the Sheridan family’s immigration to the United States from Ireland in the early 1980s, “In America” follows Johnny (Paddy Considine) and Sarah Sullivan (Samantha Morton) as they settle in a tenement apartment in Hell’s Kitchen with their daughters Christy and Ariel (Sarah and Emma Bolger) after the tragic loss of their only son. Broke but optimistic, the family tries to make a home in a building populated by junkies, drug dealers, transvestites and a mysterious artist (Dijimon Hounsou), whom the girls befriend one Halloween. It’s not long before the children acclimate to their new school, Sarah gets a job to pay the rent and Johnny pursues his dream of working in a New York theater.
Jim Sheridan, who directed as well as co-wrote the film, describes “In America” as “90 percent real, maybe more,” noting he really did drag a mammoth air conditioner through the streets of Manhattan so his family didn’t have to suffer in the sweltering New York summer, and a kind soul (although not the person who does so in the film) really did save him from a $20,000 hospital bill he couldn’t pay when his wife gave birth prematurely to their third daughter.
The biggest distinction between the truth and reality, Sheridan said, was the boy who died in real life wasn’t actually his son, but, rather, his brother. In retrospect, Sheridan said, the decision to write it that was provided a profound personal revelation, though perhaps on a subliminal level.
“I made myself my own father,” he said. “Therefore, it wasn’t my brother who actually dies, it was my son, and I kind of realized, ‘Was that myself?’ In other words, the kid who died in the film — although it was my brother in reality — is also myself. It’s the child who lost innocence when that happened. So, the psychological things you don’t know, they trip you up and so you begin to realize the story’s writing you, rather than you’re writing the story.”
Given the intensely personal nature of this film, it is no wonder the 54-year-old Dubliner found himself dealing with emotions he thought he had long ago learned to control and feeling fiercely protective of his actors, particularly the children.
“It wasn’t like it was traumatic, because I’m going through the emotion of saying goodbye to my brother,” Sheridan said. “It was more like, ‘Everything’s fine here.’ I’m distancing myself from my own emotions and then suddenly something goes wrong with the kids and I’m gone. It’s like I’d go off to a place — I’d find myself going upstairs to kill the producers.”
Asked what he thought of his daughters’ characterization of him in their versions of the scripts, the Oscar-nominated writer/director of “My Left Foot” and “In the Name of the Father” confesses he was surprised to see how his offspring remembered him in his younger years. He was, in their eyes, a playful and affectionate father, but one who occasionally embarrassed them by singing songs whose lyrics he didn’t know and wearing a plastic bag on his head when it rained.
“That’s my character,” Sheridan said. “That’s all they had. That’s it. They remembered what they did in school, some very funny stuff that I wish [we could have used.] I could have made a completely other film about them in school. Fascinating.”
Although the Sheridan family moved to New York in the early 1980s, it is not clear when exactly “In America” is set, a detail the filmmaker easily explains.
“I don’t actually believe in period films; I think they’re boring,” Sheridan said, noting that it would hardly have been worth the effort to take costumes and taxi cabs and interior sets back 20 years when it would not, in the end, serve the story.
“I made ‘In America’ in the recent past? because people have no way to interrogate films other than asking, ‘Where’d you set it?’ ” Sheridan said. “You can’t expend that amount of energy on changes that are not of much value. I decided, ‘Here’s the music of the 1960s, ’70s, ’80s and ’90s? and just forget it. It’s just now and when it feels contemporary, it feels more real.”
Sheridan maintains that his on-screen daughters’ references to the 1982 film “ET” do not date the film since the movie about a stranger in a strange land was recently re-released in theaters.
Sheridan acknowledges that the “least believable scene” in his film is probably the first, when the family crosses the Canadian border into the United States by car with very little inspection. The scene is essential because it not only documents the family’s arrival, he says, but it is here the audience first learns the couple has lost a child.
“The reason that the audience accepts it,” Sheridan said, “is that reality is here, but also the mythology is here and the mythology of the Irish getting into America because of death is bigger than reality.”