Irish filmmaker Jim Sheridan has long been known as one of the top dramatic directors thanks to his early movies My Left Foot and In the Name of the Father as well as his most personal movie, In America, the three of them having collectively garnered him six Academy Awards nominations.
Sheridan’s last movie teamed him with rapper 50 Cent for the biopic Get Rich or Die Tryin’, and it must have seemed very much like a departure, but the director’s latest, a remake of Susanne Bier’s Brothers, returns Sheridan to more familiar (and familial) territory. It also teams him with an amazing cast of Hollywood’s finest young talent in Tobey Maguire, Natalie Portman and Jake Gyllenhaal, three actors who have been appearing in movies since their teens and are now tackling more adult fare.
Maguire plays a soldier who goes missing and is presumed dead while on a mission in Afghanistan, leaving his wife (Portman) and brother (Gyllenhaal) to help each other through their grieving, only to have to deal with paranoia and suspicions when Maguire returns home a completely changed man.
Like some of the greatest directors, Sheridan is one of those enigmatic filmmakers who you never quite know what to expect, but he’s also very open to talking about his process, as you’ll learn in this exclusive interview with ComingSoon.net. Some of the things we discussed with Mr. Sheridan include:
* How he’d feel about having one of his own movies remade
* How the project was presented to him
* What appealed to him about the story
* What he felt he could bring to the script/movie
* Remakes whether or not to watch the original?
* How he approached the casting, especially casting younger actors
* Balancing the lighter aspects of the movie with the intense drama
* Some of the changes he made to the screenplay
* Shooting the movie during the writers strike
* Where and how improvisation fit into the mix
* Working with the actors and working with kids
* How he’d love to do a kids’ movie
And More!
Brothers opens nationwide on Friday, December 4. Also check out some thoughts on the movie from the cast at the New York press conference.
