There's a reason Jim Sheridan calls his Dublin-based film company Hell's Kitchen.

As his family drama In America recalls, it was in that New York neighbourhood that Sheridan's career as a filmmaker began.

Sheridan, his wife and daughters emigrated to New York in 1982.

"The only place we could afford to live was in Hell's Kitchen and even at that I could barely make the rent some months," says Sheridan, who's been to the Oscars twice with his Irish dramas My Left Foot (1990) and In the Name of the Father (1994).

It was during his first Oscar visit that the idea for In America, opening in theatres tomorrow, was born.

"I was going to a party at the disco Rage, all dressed up in my tuxedo, when this African American guy yelled at me.

"He said: 'Hey, Jim, you made it and I made it. That old house was blessed.' He was a struggling painter in our apartment back in our Hell's Kitchen days."

Sheridan says he stopped to chat with his old neighbour, who suggested their stories would make a great movie.

Sheridan agreed and began working on the draft of a story of an Irish actor and his family who try to make a new start in America.

"After I finished a couple of drafts, I let my daughters read them because I wanted input from them. It was as much their story as mine."

To Sheridan's dismay his daughters "got together and rewrote the film, essentially tossing my part of the story out and concentrating on theirs.

"I became a minor, minor character, but it helped me see that the only way to tell our story was from two points of view. It had to be told from the parents' point of view and the children's because they saw it in two different ways."

Sheridan says In America morphed into "the story of an artist who comes to terms with his feelings.

"He can't heal properly until he deals with those feelings emotionally as well as intellectually."

Even with its new approach, the script for In America languished for almost seven years.

"I didn't have an ending. It seemed so plastic to have the story end with me going to the Oscars.

"Then my brother died in 1996 and I suddenly had not only the ending this story needed but its beginning and middle as well. My brother's death became the ghost that haunts the whole story."

In the film, the dead brother becomes the son of the actor and the brother of the two young girls.

Sheridan lost his brother at the time he was directing Daniel Day-Lewis in The Boxer.

It took him two years to finish the new screenplay for In America and as many years to get financing and begin filming.

The movie premiered at the 2002 Toronto International Film Festival.

"There wasn't enough time to give it a proper Christmas release in 2002. This was never meant to be a spring or summer movie so we held it back a full year.

"It's a film that needs to be nurtured, which means releasing it gradually instead of on thousands of screens at the same time."


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