Sheridan: 'It puts the picture right up there now'

After a mostly sleepless night, Jim Sheridan arose very early yesterday morning to learn the very good news that his latest film, In America, had collected three major Oscar nominations - for Samantha Morton as best actress, Djimon Hounsou as best supporting actor and for Sheridan himself and his daughters, Naomi and Kirsten, in the best original screenplay category.

"It's great news," he told The Irish Times from his Los Angeles hotel yesterday afternoon. "I'm thrilled, over the moon, and Naomi and Kirsten are delighted. It puts the picture right up there now. And I'm really glad that the actress playing my wife, Fran, got nominated."

The semi-autobiographical film is a comedy-drama inspired by the experiences of the Sheridan family when they arrived as penniless immigrants to New York in the 1980s. They struggled to get by, as Jim worked in odd jobs and as manager of the city's Irish Arts Centre.

It was in New York that he received his only formal education in film-making, when he took an eight-week film production course at New York University, and where he wrote his early screenplays for Into the West and My Left Foot.

"Because it's basically my own life," he said, "I approached each scene knowing it had happened. I wanted to get as close as I could to our experience, but the problem is that truth is stranger than fiction, so a lot of the time I had to take out some of the more extraordinary things that happened."

In America is Sheridan's fifth feature film, and his fourth to receive Oscar nominations. His first film, My Left Foot, earned five nominations and won Oscars for Daniel Day-Lewis and Brenda Fricker. He followed it with The Field, for which Richard Harris was nominated, and In the Name of the Father, which collected seven Oscar nominations.

This year's nominations were revealed yesterday at 5.30 a.m., local time, and Jim and Fran Sheridan watched the televised announcement in their Los Angeles hotel room.

"I went to bed at 11 o'clock, but I woke at two in the morning and I was so nervous I couldn't get back to sleep," he said. "It is a very competitive year for the Oscars, so I'm still a bit shocked that we did so well." He was surprised, he said, that the film's closing song, Time Enough For Tears, did not get a nomination as it had been hotly tipped. Performed in the film by Andrea Corr, the song was written by Bono, Gavin Friday and Maurice Seezer. "But the nominations we got are great and will give the film a big boost in America," he added.

Arthur Lappin, who produced the film with Sheridan, described the nominations as "a remarkable achievement for Jim".

Speaking from Los Angeles, he said: "It vindicates the decision of the Government to retain the Section 481 tax incentive for film-making in Ireland. "Even though the film is set mostly in New York, we shot there for only two weeks and shot for 12 weeks in Dublin, and that could not have happened if Section 481 had not been in place."

Michael Dwyer