A director to survive the final cut

PROFILE: JIM SHERIDAN:IF YOU PRESS your nose to the window and listen carefully, you will, this week, catch a few interesting snippets about the inner workings of the film industry. Yesterday the latest movie from Jim Sheridan – this country's most celebrated film-maker, along with Neil Jordan – made its way relatively quietly into Irish cinemas.

Dream Houseis a spooky thriller starring Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz. Until recently the only scandal associated with the picture concerned a romantic liaison between its stars. Weisz has since parted from her then husband, the film director Darren Aronofsky, and settled down with the current James Bond.

Shortly after Dream Housewas first seen in US cinemas in September, the Los Angeles Timesreported that, unhappy with the finished film, Sheridan had considered attempting to have his name removed from the project. Such things do happen. Before 2000, when the procedure was discontinued, directors, when disturbed by studio tinkering, could replace their names with the infamous pseudonym Alan Smithee. Movies released in that fashion include Hellraiser: Bloodline, The Shrimp on the Barbieand a television edit of Michael Mann's Heat.

The newspaper claimed that, following a less than satisfactory series of test screenings, the production company took "control of the film in the edit room". To get his name removed from Dream House, Sheridan would have had to convince the Directors Guild of America that the version on release differed significantly from the film he was trying to make. He subsequently abandoned his bid to prove this. (There was no response to messages left for Sheridan by The Irish Times. Such conversations with the guild are normally conducted in the strictest secrecy.)

Aside from anything else, the unusual story – the details of which remain murky – confirms that even Oscar-nominated directors can be denied final cut by the Hollywood studios. The supposed auteur is almost always working as one of many collaborators.

The most admired film-makers have found their work mangled by the men in suits. A year after releasing Citizen Kane, regularly acclaimed as the greatest film ever made, Orson Welles saw the studio append an appallingly sentimental ending to The Magnificent Ambersons. The original denouement has never been located. Sup with a long spoon when dealing with Megacorp Pictures.

Still, few observers would suggest that Sheridan is about to lie down and roll over. He has had a few setbacks over the past decade, such as Get Rich or Die Tryin', his surprising 2005 film with the rapper 50 Cent, which did not go down well with critics or audiences. But he remains admirably determined. He bounced back in 2009 with a moving American version of Susanne Bier's Danish drama Brothers. The film was not a box-office hit, but it showcased his extraordinary talent for drawing fine performances from younger actors. Tobey Maguire picked up a Golden Globe nomination for his turn as a soldier returning from war to encounter domestic disharmony.

Sheridan, now 62, developed that talent while working at Project Arts Centre in Dublin in the late 1970s. Flavours of his early life can be drawn from his engaging 2003 picture, I n America, a cunning fictionalised treatment of his own experiences and those of his parents.

Sheridan is the eldest of seven children – one brother is the writer Peter Sheridan – who were raised near Sheriff Street in north inner-city Dublin. His dad, Pete, was a railway worker who also ran an amateur theatre company. If In Americais any guide, a formative moment in Sheridan's life came when his younger brother Frankie died from complications following a serious fall.

Sheridan began acting while at University College Dublin: after graduation, he formed a company with Neil Jordan. In 1976 he was instrumental in the creation of Project. Bolshie when he feels himself to be in the right, he resigned from the arts centre after a dispute about a gay-themed play he had produced. (Heavens, this makes it seem a long time ago.)

He moved to the US and, after a few hand-to-mouth years in Canada and New York, began directing plays at the Irish Arts Center.

His real breakthrough came with My Left Footin 1989. It is worth remembering quite how unlikely that success was. Having taken only a brief film course at New York University, Sheridan had very little experience of film-making. Making an internationally successful film in Ireland at that time was almost as difficult a task as building a space station here would have been. Produced by Noel Pearson, the film starred Daniel Day-Lewis as the inimitable Dublin writer and painter Christy Brown.

In many ways it looks like a film made by a theatre director. Although My Left Footwas nicely shot by Jack Conroy, and buoyed by a fine score from the veteran Elmer Bernstein, it is most notable for a series of flawless performances. The lovable Hugh O'Conor was superb as the young Christy, Brenda Fricker offered us a definitive Mother Dublin, and Day-Lewis, playing a man with severe cerebral palsy, was immediately established as the new Brando. Both Fricker and Day-Lewis won Oscars.

In retrospect, we can see that My Left Footcame at an interesting time for the nation. The years of backwater poverty were still with us, but reinvention as a trendy, wealthy nation, with all those oddly fashionable Irish-themed bars, was just about to creep over the cultural horizon. Along with Alan Parker's The Commitments, released two years later, the film helped nudge the nation in a new direction.

Stubbornly supported by his wife Fran, Sheridan went on to develop a series of successful films on Irish subjects. Day-Lewis (John Wayne to Sheridan's John Ford) played Gerry Conlon, a wrongly convicted member of the Guildford Four, in In The Name of the Fatherand Danny Flynn, a former IRA man, in the slightly muddled The Boxer. The Fieldis a strong cinematic version of a play by John B Keane. Audiences will look in vain for any distinctive visual signature in those films, but all of them demonstrate Sheridan's extraordinary gift for extracting impressively naturalistic performances. "Sheridan the director is still rather hidden," David Thomson, the distinguished film critic, wrote at about this time.

A full eight years elapsed between The Boxerand the 2003 release of In America. Something seemed to have changed. Now working with his daughter Kirsten, already an acclaimed film-maker, Sheridan was suddenly at home with a degree of visual experimentation. The film, starring Paddy Considine and Samantha Morton as versions of Jim and Fran Sheridan, has a sleepy, gauzy look that suggests the breaching of a new frontier.

Maybe Sheridan’s career has spluttered a little, but few directors are better at drawing taut drama from ordinary domestic situations.

So what next? That rather snooty Los Angeles Timespiece suggested that "a person familiar with his plans" claimed that Sheridan was returning to Dublin to shoot an autobiographical film called Sheriff Street Stories. Every actor with half a brain will fight bloodily to get a part. Let's just hope the director secures final cut.

Curriculum vitae

Who is he?The acclaimed, Oscar-nominated director of My Left Foot, The Fieldand In America.

Why is he in the news?Murky reports suggest that he has tried to have his name removed from Dream House, his new spooky thriller.

Most appealing characteristicAn unpretentious, unreconstructed Dublin wit. Working in America has not softened his accent one jot.

Least appealing characteristicA surprising and hitherto unlikely willingness to make films with the politically incorrect rapper 50 Cent.

Most likely to say"Give it hell, Daniel!"

Least likely to say"I think we need more CGI space cruisers in this sequence."