Sheridan bemoans state of Hollywood film-making

Veteran film director Jim Sheridan has described a lot of Hollywood’s output as “crap”.

Sheridan appeared yesterday at the launch in Dublin of Digital Biscuit, an initiative by the Screen Directors’ Guild of Ireland (SDGI) which will showcase the latest movie technology at the Science Gallery later this month.

The irony of turning up at an event which celebrates technological advances in film only to decry how such advances have ruined the process of story telling was not lost on Sheridan.

The director, whose films include My Left Foot, In America and In the Name of the Father said special effects were becoming the be all and end all of so many Hollywood films.

“The popcorn movies, I don’t just get them a lot of the time. Is there a story here? Maybe I’m an auld fellow,” he said.

“The movie system is breaking down. The studios definitely aren’t making serious movies. They are just making big effects-laden movies.”

Sheridan is looking to make an autobiographical picture about growing up on Sheriff Street, Dublin and is also looking to make films of his daughters’ screenplays. In particular, he hopes to film his daughter Tess’s screenplay about an incident where a school in Blackrock was closed as a result of an anthrax scare after 9/11.

He predicted that Lincoln, the new film starring his old protege Daniel Day-Lewis, will win a slew of Oscars next month.

“He’s not bad, he’s getting there,” he joked. “This guy is so technically gifted. There’s never been an actor like him.”