Brothers

Jim Sheridan has coaxed some of the best performances from some of the finest actors in the business, so it is no surprise that he elicits career-best work from Tobey Maguire, Natalie Portman and Jake Gyllenhaal in his US remake of Susanne Bier’s Brothers.

“I think one of the reasons I work well with actors is that I have been doing this since I was 17,” he muses. “My little brother died when I was 17. He had a tumour which slowed his motor functions and I became very attuned to his micro facial expressions.”

“I’m like that with my actors. I can see when facial expressions aren’t right. Even when someone is doing an accent from a different country, they bring with them facial expressions from their country. I can hear them talking from another room and know that it’s not right. I have to stop them acting.”

Sheridan adds that he loves his actors. “I love everything about them,” he says. “I want to protect them like I wanted to protect my little brother.

“I spend a lot of time talking to them and relentlessly going for deep character,” he says. “I’m always looking for the invisible. I’m never too worried about surface things like what hats the character should wear. Emotions are invisible, and when you’re trying to catch the invisible, the visible gets in the way.”

Brothers is set mainly in one house, with a few other locations and a subplot in Afghanistan, and Sheridan says he loves the intimacy of small spaces. “I used to do theatre, and I was never really good in a theatre with more than 1,000 seats. I remember when I worked with Richard Harris in theatre that I realised he was bigger-than-life and aristocratic. He would control crowds with the grand gesture and costumes. The democratisation of life has led to the close-up and more intimacy.”

As for the Danish original, he is somewhat baffled by how much his film is constantly compared to it. “Every day I do a remake,” he laughs. “I look at the scene and I remake it the next day. I’m always remaking what I have in my head. [Screenwriter] David Benioff moved this story really well into an American milieu, but families are the same everywhere.”

Mike Goodridge