“AMERICA WAS WHERE THE IRISH GREW UP”

More than 20 years ago, well before he earned critical acclaim for films like My Left Foot, In the Name of the Father, and The Boxer, a little-known playwright and director named Jim Sheridan moved with his young family from his native Ireland to New York City. The Sheridans were part of the final wave of an epic transatlantic passage that had brought more than four million Irish to the United States in the 150 years following the Great Famine. Those Irish had dug the nation’s canals and laid its railroad tracks, built the largest and most powerful church in the country, and left an enduring imprint on American politics, letters, and art.

Jim Sheridan has now come full circle. After a career making movies about Ireland, in his next two films he brings his famously keen eye for nuance and emotion to bear on chronicling the Irish experience in America. Fox Searchlight will release the first of the two, In America, on Thanksgiving weekend. Set in Hell’s Kitchen in the 1980s, it is a semi-autobiographical account of Sheridan’s own experience as an immigrant father in a city of immigrants. He co-wrote In America with his daughters, Naomi and Kirsten, who are up-and-coming directors in their own right. As he explains it, they lend the film a critical perspective missing in many immigrant tales. “The film is ultimately about wonder,” he says. “It’s about trying to see the world with a kind of childlike quality. It’s a view of Manhattan as an island of dreams that helps a family rediscover its deep bonds.”

In America is also an American romance. “As many Irish people before them did, its characters have left Ireland in desperation to come to a new land,” Sheridan explains. “It isn’t economic or political desperation that brings them to America; it’s emotional desperation. They need a miracle, a real transformation. They need to let the pain of the past go in order to find their future.”

I spoke with Jim Sheridan about his new film and about the unique bonds that have joined Ireland and the United States over two centuries.

It’s all rooted in experience. I came to America in 1981, across the Canadian border on a holiday that turned into a seven-year stay. Our intention all along was to make a go of it in New York. You can draw your own conclusions. I’m not sure if the statute of limitations has run out on me yet. But I was young at the time, and we had these ideas about America from the TV and films, that it was paved with gold and all that. I thought I’d come here and get a Broadway job, become a big Hollywood star. I found out that it’s very tough. My wife and I really struggled to keep our heads above water and provide for our daughters. My character in the movie drives a cab to get by while he looks for work in the theater district. In real life I mopped floors. We never could have survived without the everyday kindness of our neighbors. Our landlord was a really nice guy, for instance, which surprised us. We came from Ireland, where there was a culture of hating landlords. And we found out that people in New York were very generous and kind most of the time, once you stripped away the veneer of toughness and brusqueness. Once you were a New Yorker, you became part of a large family.

Well, there’s something universal about it. When I came here, I didn’t gravitate to the Irish immigrant community. If I’d wanted to be only an Irish artist, I could have stayed in Ireland. But my family, like the family in the film, interacted with people from across the globe: South America, Africa, Asia. There was a tremendous amount of diversity in Manhattan back then, as there still is. Yet there is still something different about the I Irish experience in New York, 150 years ago or today. For one thing, Irish immigrants, unlike other groups—Italians, Jews, Poles, and Puerto Ricans, what have you—had already lost their own language. Many famine immigrants in the 1850s still spoke Gaelic, but by the late nineteenth century most Irish spoke only English. And that really shaped the immigrant experience. When other groups arrived, they were armed with a strong sense of national history and culture: native-language newspapers, theater, film, music. The Irish lost a lot of their identity and memory when they lost their language. So they had to recreate that identity. It made their experience different. Maybe harder, but certainly different.

It’s hard to say. The Puritan settlers left England because they sought a better life, a “city upon a hill.” The Irish came because they had to, because they were forced off the land either by blight or by politics. From the start this made us different. But the American Irish are also a compelling story because they were so brilliant and adept politically. America is the place where the Irish learned to excel within the system. They never had the opportunity to flourish politically in Ireland—at least not until very late in the game. I think that’s where you see one of the critical divergences between the American Irish, who became masterful politicians and were able to control their destinies here, and the Irish, who felt they had to turn to violence to effect political change. And I think some of the intense attraction to Ireland probably comes from the American fascination with the underdog.

The script of that one is still in its rough stages, but it’s the story of an Irish-American political family. It’s not based on the Kennedys, but nobody will ever believe me when I say that. What I’m trying to do is write a version of Oedipus, set in America. It’s an ambitious project, and it can’t work in Ireland. In order to reconstruct Oedipus, you need a strong, functional father figure, and you don’t have that kind of character in Irish letters. I used to ask this question: Name a good father in Irish literature, before 1980. Nobody could. Leopold Bloom is a good father, but he’s kind of excluded because he’s Jewish. In Irish literature and film, you traditionally have a very powerful father who is a drunk. Not an Oedipus at all. He’s not dysfunctional; he has been socially and politically disempowered. He’s been pushed into a place where he can’t survive logically. But for the Irish in America, that situation was often different. America was where the Irish grew up—where they came of age, where they gained a kind of control of the world for five minutes. In Ireland, if the father puts his head above the parapet, he’s going to get killed. So they teach the kids to keep their heads below the parapet. Whereas in America, there’s a frontier mentality. Go on out there and win. To write an Oedipal story, you have to kill the domineering father, and you can’t kill the domineering father if you don’t have one to begin with. That’s a pretty long answer to a short question.

I think the Irish are proud of their position in America. Ireland loves America because we’ve always been accepted there in a way that we weren’t in England. There is nativism and anti-Catholicism but never to the same degree as in England. And America’s still a magic place to the Irish. In 1966 a lot of Irish people were afraid even to commemorate the anniversary of the 1916 rebellion, but in 1967 people in Northern Ireland started marching for their civil rights. Northern Ireland didn’t even have a bill of rights. They all thought they were living in America, because we all live by television, for better or worse, and they thought they were followers of Martin Luther King. They saw themselves as the Northern Irish equivalent of black men and women in America. The problem was, marching didn’t produce results, and eventually the whole thing got horrific and the violence burned itself out, and the Americans had to come back in to help solve it. Because it started as an adjunct to an American problem. I think a lot of the Irish understand this.

I think the situation took a violent turn in the 1970s because the political process was stuck. It was dead in the water, and the IRA was waiting to exploit that. And the Protestant establishment was irresponsible; it didn’t take control of its own society, rein in the extremists, and work toward a compromise. The IRA was able to capitalize on all that. The situation has changed a great deal, so the IRA has more political legitimacy than it did 30 years ago, but obviously anybody who sends money to violent groups like the Real IRA needs his head examined. It’s always seemed kind of cowardly to me to send money from 3,000 miles away to help other people indulge your revenge instincts.

It was great. They were really young when we came to New York in the eighties, but they were able to bring an important perspective to the project. They experienced the whole thing as kids, and though they’re grown up now, they’re still able to remember our lives from a kid’s perspective. In the film you see their difficulties fitting in at school, dealing with peer pressure, learning to walk and talk like Americans, which was especially important to them as kids. I couldn’t have written that, because I didn’t live it. They also knew the early eighties vernacular better than I did, the slang, the pop culture.

Well, it really happened. I brought my girls to see E.T., and a little later we were at the San Gennaro festival in New York. My daughter wanted to win the doll. So I started playing, and at first it went pretty well. I just needed to put one more tennis ball into a slot, and I had to keep doubling my money to buy another ball. I actually lost a few hundred dollars, which was a lot of money for us then. I won’t tell you how the scene works out in the film. You’ll have to see it in the theater.

In the film the lead character can’t stand for his daughter to see him lose. He has come to America and can barely provide for his children. They’re smart, educated people, and now he’s driving a cab, his wife is working at an ice-cream parlor, and the family is living in a slum. It’s just very difficult for him. He needs to win that doll to keep his dignity around the kids. Fathers are supposed to win. They aren’t supposed to lose. It’s a terrible thing when kids see their parents’ vulnerabilities.

Yes, I love New York. We shot most of In America in Manhattan, and I’m told we were one of the first production crews to film in the city after September 11. It was a powerful experience. We were coming back home. I’ve lived in Ireland now for many years, but New York is part of who we are.