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IN AMERICA'S JIM SHERIDAN AND THE CINEMA OF EMOTION
by Tom McCurrie
"I never really had the patience for writing. I actually don't have the patience for writing anything, to tell you the truth." Now this is an odd way for a Q & A session about screenwriting to start, especially when it's said by noted writer-director Jim Sheridan (MY LEFT FOOT, IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER). But Sheridan was full of surprises at the latest edition of the Writers on Writing series, sponsored by the Writers Guild Foundation. He was there to discuss IN AMERICA, his semi-autobiographical take on Irish immigrants in New York.
Of course, this wasn't so much a Q & A session as a series of wild tangents on whatever crossed Sheridan's quicksilver mind. He would zig to a story about getting pulled over for speeding in the States, and how the cops helped him pay the fine since their "grandparents were from Kerry in Ireland" (that's when Sheridan realized he "hadn't left home" by coming to America). Then he would zag to how the Irish identified with Southern Blacks in the Civil Rights movement, but "didn't have [a] spiritual leader" like Martin Luther King to galvanize their quest. Then he would zig to linking the Irish and Arabs in their unhealthy "addiction to the death culture" (hunger strikes for the former, suicide bombers for the latter). Then he would zag to the maxim that "little guys are like women in one condition: they have to be able to predict violence...they have to be able to read the emotional temperature of the room." Then he would finally zig to how his hapless father soldered the minute hand of the family clock to the clock, forcing him to use an equation bordering on quantum mechanics to figure out the time.
Here's the surprising part. This free-form looseness is actually part of Sheridan's creative process -- and he makes it work. MY LEFT FOOT is a good example: Sheridan wrote the first thirty pages, co-writer Sean Connaughton wrote the next sixty, while Sheridan finished the last thirty, each guy contradicting the other the whole way. After reading the draft, Sheridan "thought this was the biggest mess [he'd] ever been involved in" -- that's before everybody loved it and it was nominated for an Oscar.
Sheridan wrote IN AMERICA in a similarly free-form manner. At first, he wrote two drafts, but it wasn't working, with no discernible story and a vain quality about the whole thing as it was centered on the dad (a fictional version of Sheridan himself). So he gave the story to his daughters Naomi and Kirsten to write and they took off on their own to do so. They proceeded to knock out a script that in Sheridan's own words "basically eliminated my character." Not surprisingly, Sheridan wasn't too happy: "It's a very humbling process to get your kids to write a script about you. I recommend it to any parent. In fact, I think it should be conditional on all writers to get their children to write a story about them. It's a good school of repoire if you need one." Unfortunately, the daughters had no story, either. Worse still, it was so depressing the audiences would've stoned the director. Much of it was about the girls crying as they left Ireland for America: saying goodbye to relatives and crying, saying goodbye to friends and crying, even saying goodbye to their house and crying. ("What did I do to these kids?" Sheridan said guiltily.) Miraculously, the Sheridan family was able to combine these drafts into a workable script, "chang[ing] the perspective of the film into a double perspective," and making IN AMERICA a much richer experience for the audience.
Sheridan approaches filmmaking with the same looseness as his writing. How did he cast the Bolger sisters for IN AMERICA? He picked one girl on the spot, then chose her sister since she was waiting in the car outside. As far as directing itself, Sheridan doesn't try to control his films through storyboards and meticulously worked out camera moves. For Sheridan it's emotional truth, not cinematic technique, that matters: "The building blocks of film are...emotions," especially the "invisible" ones beneath the surface. This trumps all other considerations, including camera placement. For if "you create reality as well as you can...then it doesn't matter where you put the camera."
So how do you capture these emotions in a screenplay? To Sheridan, good writing "sculpt[s] away everything that's not necessary until you can reveal emotions that are invisible...and the more information you put in (dialogue, scene description) thinking you're communicating the less communicating you're doing." In fact, Sheridan once spent all day removing an "it's" from a character's dialogue to make it communicate better.
Writers also have to realize that when they do communicate, they are doing so in more than one way. As Sheridan says: "[Story] exists on two levels. It exists on the level of realistic scenes and then there's another kind of thing that's running parallel with it which is mythological." The first scene of IN AMERICA is a mythological scene. It shows some border guards letting an Irish family into the States because they sympathize with the death of their son. Sheridan: "[This scene is] based on the public assumption that the Irish got into America because of death, because of the Famine." And although this opening "played in America...in England it was universally panned as an unbelievable scene." On a realistic level, the English thought the family should have gone to England because it was closer. And on a mythological level, England was in denial that the Famine even happened (or that they had any responsibility for it even if it did), so the scene flopped in that way as well.
Despite Sheridan's focus on emotions and mythology, he still recognizes the need for structure. For "how you start and the structural organization [of a script] is very important." Again, MY LEFT FOOT is a good example for Sheridan. By starting with Christy Brown and his cerebral palsy at 28, then flashing back to his childhood with that very same palsy, "you've told the audience what the story is not...this is not a physical disability story...this is an emotional disability story." If MY LEFT FOOT was told chronologically (like original director Richard Harris wanted), the film would've started with the palsy in childhood, creating the false impression it was a physical disability story. The audience then would've demanded that the hero grow up to overcome his disability and walk at the end, as is the genre expectation. And when that didn't happen, they would've turned their back on the film (which they did to a similar film called GABY: A TRUE STORY two years prior that told its story chronologically). Structure dictates certain emotional expectations; a writer ignores them at his own peril.
IN AMERICA doesn't make that mistake, and that's why it's a perfect example of cinema as emotion. Despite a predictable storyline and rather sanitized view of New York's Hell's Kitchen, the film succeeds because its emotional arc rings so true (the parents transcend the death of their son, metaphorically choosing life over death as we all must). Sheridan is right: your story will live or die by the emotions you produce -- and by how truthfully they come across to the audience. ?Nuff said.
Responses, comments and general two-cents worth can be E-mailed to gillis662000@yahoo.com.
(Note: For all those who missed my past reviews, they're now archived on Hollywoodlitsales.com. Just click the link on the main page and it'll take you to the Inner Sanctum. Love them or Hate them at your leisure!)
A graduate of USC's School of Cinema-Television, Tom McCurrie has worked as a development executive and a story analyst. He is currently a screenwriter living in Los Angeles.
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