Irish filmmaker Jim Sheridan has achieved popular and critical acclaim throughout the world, his films having garnered two Academy Awards, and 16 nominations. Sheridan has personally received six Oscar nominations, two as Best Director for My Left Foot and In The Name of the Father and three for Best Screenplay for In America (Best Original Screenplay), My Left Foot and In The Name of the Father (both Best Adapted Screenplay). Additionally, he received an Oscar nomination as producer when In The Name of the Father was nominated for Best Picture in 1993. Sheridan's last film, Get Rich or Die Tryin', was a vibrant autobiographical story of 50 Cent's journey from a youthful life of crime to his rise as one of the world's best known rappers. Prior to that, Sheridan collaborated with his daughters Naomi and Kirsten on the critically acclaimed In America, a personal tale of a family finding its soul, which was drawn from his own experiences coming to New York as a flat-broke immigrant. The film garnered three 2004 Academy Award nominations including Best Screenplay Written Directly For The Screen, and nominations for both Samantha Morton (Best Actress) and Djimon Hounsou (Best Supporting Actor). His next film, Dream House, a thriller starring Daniel Craig, will go into production in January 2010.
We've heard Brothers described as a ‘shot-for-shot' remake of the Danish film, and also that it's only vaguely based on the older film. What's the truth?
It's definitely in between. It is hard for me to know, because the momentum of them is similar, but it's not like the same movie at all. It's very hard when you are making it because when you are making it, it becomes a completely original thing. So you are aware that it was made before but it is not uppermost in your mind. I suppose there are a lot of changes in it. The cast is younger; America is more embedded in the war than the original, which feels like a UN peacekeeping group. But there has to be similarities.
Did you talk to the director of the original film, Susanne Bier?
No. I talked to the writer Anders Thomas Jensen. He was very good and he liked all the changes I was making. Whatever I told him, he liked it. I suppose people who have seen the original have a sort of ownership on it, though, and it's kind of hard to get by that.
How does it differ from the Danish film?
They are younger for a start. There is a lot more about the war and about being caught, a lot more dynamics between the two soldiers. In the original, one guy is captured by the Taliban and the other one goes after him. Whereas I had them captured together. I couldn't have a situation in a war where the soldier is caught and the guy who goes after him is caught and still nobody knows where they are. It would be hard to believe from an American perspective. They are not able to track their own guys? But if they are a UN peace keeping force like they are in the Danish movie it makes sense. So it's just a different level. In the original they feel like a peacekeeping force. It seems more tragic in a way. That original movie is a beautiful, poetic movie and while we don't do any damage to it, ours is a very different movie. Actually, it's pretty weird that, you know. There's a different scrutiny for an American film than a European movie. European movies tend towards poetry where they are not costing a huge amount of money and are closer to the freedom that poetry has, where you can make anything because the money is coming back through your TV sales and your pre sales and nobody is probably losing on it.
So it's harder to make an American version?
Well in Europe, there's the freedom to do what you want, and at the same time the lack of pressure of having to focus it outside your own particular community. So I see that there's a lot of young Irish filmmakers, and they will make a movie and I will look at it and I go, ‘None of that will make any sense outside Ireland.' But nobody is aware of that because they are just making it within the confines of their own particular country. And if you look at world cinema it has been basically cannibalized by American cinema. What's happening now is that the opening weekend is now cannibalizing American independent cinema. So the demands and dictates of the monopoly system, which is what it is, is quite crazy. It's like $300 million to make a movie and it's $10 to get in. And then it's $3 million to make a movie and it's $10 to get in. So the question is how does the $3 million movie compete? The answer is once in every ten years there will be a $3 million movie that makes a $100 million. The American movie is under such a huge different spotlight than a European movie: so sometimes that's why the other ones seem fresh and new and exciting because they are not under the kind of factory settings of an American. You have your mobile phone that says ‘restore factory settings'. That's what American movies are. ‘Restore factory settings'.
Tell us about the casting in Brothers...
I think I knew Tobey was interested. He had been interested in the story for a while and I had been interested in working with him. So once I had Tobey I found Jake was interested so I said ‘Okay'. There were a few girls who wanted to do it and I thought Natalie was the best. It was a simple process. It was one two three. It fell into place in about two weeks. The thing about stars as Hitchcock says: ‘You have a star and you get past a lot of story' (laughs). But, really, Tobey Maguire represents every man, the ultimate American Boy. That's the kind of star he is, the Jimmy Stewart kind of character.
What about the young girls in the movie...
Bailee is a sweet kid and I like Taylor too. Natalie stole her and put her in her next movie. So the kids were great. For me, the hardest thing was knowing what to do to be original. David Benioff wrote the script and then we all got together and kept changing it and reworking it; you have to give into imagining that you are doing something original. Otherwise you would go nuts. There used to be things in Ireland called Showbands who used to imitate American songs. They would always record the hits again so I didn't want to do the Showband version. You know what I mean? My daughter is always saying I don't understand the original movie and she's right because it's a woman's movie. My other daughter goes to college and towards the end of the movie, I got afraid and I said, ‘Why don't you do an analysis of both movies?' And she did an analysis of what the difference was and it was something like ‘Susanne's movie is more romantic and it's more about a love relationship and yours is more about a family.' And the thing I do is to put families together and I think Susanne is doing stories about inappropriate love. And they are just different approaches. It doesn't feel like a remake to me any more.
Tobey Maguire's character has to live under the shadow of the death. How do you do that? Did you find any answers?
I suppose the weirdest thing is that when the guy kills his comrade it's kind of what you feel like when you are in a family where innocents die. You have to be responsible for it to make sense of it. You want to believe it has something to do with you, otherwise it is a random act and the world is too scary. It is better to be guilty and to feel that it was your fault because that makes more sense of it. Whereas randomness is the thing that we find the hardest to deal with. In the movie, a kiss can be a more profound betrayal than a murder. Because a murder is within a character who is no longer in the movie where a kiss carries on in two characters throughout the movie. The kiss is more of a betrayal than the murder. It's kind of weird. The rules of drama are not the rules of life. And when looking at the original, at the director or writer - and I have no idea if this true or not so I could get into trouble - but I suspect that in one of their families there was a divorce situation, a broken home, which we didn't have in Ireland. When I was growing up there was nobody divorced in Ireland. There was not one fucking family. I didn't even know what the word meant.
Did you not come across the word elsewhere, in magazines?
No. I had magazines but they were hidden down the back of the bed, if you know what I mean! Because there was no divorce there was no stepfather and no brother who would be a stepbrother. In Susanne Bier's movies, whether it be After The Wedding or Brothers, you just feel that kind of inappropriate love and that's what sets a fire on the whole particular story. It's the kind of emotional lather, whereas in what I do it's more about the family, and putting the family back together. It is like when people reinterpret a play nobody ever goes, ‘Oh my God, they are reinterpreting Hamlet. I don't believe they are doing it. Didn't they do that last year?' (laughs) But movies are different because they are imprinted on our brain in a different way. It's really difficult to redo this one, not because there are a lot of similar scenes but because of the one major scene in the middle of the movie that is so transgressive; you can only experience transgression once. You can only see that killing once. And once you have been shocked by it you cannot be shocked by it the next day as well.
Did you feel as though it was risky to make a film that deals with war in the current political climate?
Everybody is afraid of the politics and afraid of saying the wrong thing because the boys are at war and we don't want to stab in them in the back. No one wants to be the one stabbing these poor soldiers in the back, so everybody wants to stay out of this issue. Politics are very complex because once you are involved in a war you are into propaganda territory, not into entertainment, and a lot of the danger that the audience feels is: ‘Here's these liberals dealing with a story about a war that we don't even want to know about.' So you have a double whammy. You are commenting on something that they are in denial about. But ours is a film about family; that's what I do.
BROTHERS is now showing at Irish cinemas nationwide