Indeed, for Sheridan, watching the girls embody his own daughters' pasts was even eerie at times. "My daughters say that the reason I liked working with the children so much in this film is that it was just like playing with my kids all over again -- except that this time they did what they were told! But that wasn't true," says Sheridan. "They conspired against me, just like in real life."

Djimon Hounsou, who plays the girls' unlikely new friend Mateo, was also touched by the girls' enchanted quality. "They are so full-spirited and wonderful they can make adult actors look quite useless," he says. "I think the film captures their beautiful spirits.'

Mateo was perhaps the most difficult character of all to cast. Part fairy-tale shaman, part scary mystery, part struggling New York artist with serious problems of his own, the character defied easy categorization and demanded a somewhat larger-than-life treatment. The filmmakers searched for the right actor. The answer came in the form of Djimon Hounsou, who had an immigrant story of his own, having been born in West Africa and transplanted to Paris before coming to Hollywood. Jim Sheridan recalls his powerful audition. "Djimon came in and just put a completely different spin on the character. I wasn't looking for someone like him, but I immediately realised how strong his spiritual presence was."

Hounsou worked closely with Sheridan to fine-tune the character's complex personality. "Jim really helped me to understand Mateo and create who he is," says Hounsou. "To me, Mateo's a very interesting man, one who has been rejected by his own family because of who he is, But then he finds a family with Johnny, Sarah and their girls at the last possible moment." Although Hounsou has worked on major Hollywood epics, he was impressed with this cast's emotional daring. "Paddy and Samantha were able to bring so much even out of the smallest scenes. It was beautiful working with them," he comments.

Throughout his work with the cast of IN AMERICA, Sheridan kept the focus on performances so genuine and relaxed as to have an almost vérité or documentary feeling to them. He says: "I'm always trying to capture that invisible thing, the thing that's in front of your face that you can't actually see in the moment, but is very powerful. I'm looking for the authentic, but it's hard to say exactly how you get to that. It's not something you can 'direct' in the common sense of the word. You just have to keep the actors feeling like they're in charge of their lives and let it happen."

He continues: "In the end, working with the actors is always the most complex element for me, much more so than the visuals and the production design and the set dressings, because it all comes down to the human face, down to those 44 muscles that can be contorted into thousands of different expressions."

Producer Arthur Lappin notes that Sheridan works in a manner that's fairly unusual for most motion picture directors. "He has a very organic style," he explains. "He's not the type of director who has everything all mapped out precisely. Rather, he goes for a kind of honesty and truthfulness in each and every scene - and of course because he's also the writer, he can deviate from the script at any time. So, what I try to do is build a structure around Jim that gives him maximum flexibility and freedom to let that magic happen as much as possible."

shooting in america
Much of IN AMERICA is set in Johnny and Sarah's New York apartment building, a cavernous, graffiti-splashed building with a endless flights of stairs and a Gothic sense of darkness. Despite their surroundings, the family nevertheless creates a home, and discovers a community, in the middle of urban chaos, learning to embrace the wild uncertainty and diversity of living in the heart of the city.

Ironically, Jim Sheridan and his design team created the family's tenement on a set in the middle of Ireland! For logistical purposes, the production shot for ten weeks in Ireland, mostly interiors, but also some exteriors, including the scenes at the festival where Johnny loses the family's rent money in his quest to win a doll.

"We realised it would have been hard to get the kind of flexibility we needed to shoot this film in a building in New York," says Arthur Lappin, "so we had production designer Mark Geraghty use his talent to re-create New York in Dublin."

Geraghty started with a massive old house - which Jim Sheridan calls "the Irish Taj Mahal" - and transformed its longs corridors and echoing rooms into a typical ghetto tenement, replete with the grit, grime and kinetic energy of New York. Not surprisingly, the set was rife with rumors that the house was haunted, but if so, the ghosts must have received quite a shock from watching their surroundings transform from an Irish sea-side mansion to a Hell's Kitchen hovel.

Says Jim Sheridan of Geraghty's sets, which were based in part on Sheridan's remembrances of furnishing and maintaining his family's home on pocket change and street-smarts: "I think places are a state of mind - Dublin can be New York because it's all in your mind - and Mark's set succeeded in bringing that place in my head fully to life."

After shooting in Ireland, the production headed to Manhattan to capture the ineffable rhythm and hue of New York's lower-class neighborhoods, shooting on the Lower East Side and Spanish Harlem and grabbing the pivotal footage of Manhattan buried under fresh snow. The emphasis here was on reflecting New York as a kaleidoscope of different cultures and attitudes.

"We weren't looking for the New York of famous building and landmarks," notes Lappin. "This film is more about what's going on in the streets, in the lives of ordinary people making their way in the city, and we were looking for the chaos and grit, as well as the underlying sense of community."

In fact, IN AMERICA was one of the first productions to shoot in New York following the events of September 11, lending to the crew an even stronger sense of wanting to reveal the underlying soul of New York in the photography. To do this, Sheridan worked closely with award-winning cinematographer Declan Quinn.

"It was fantastic working with Declan," says Sheridan. "It was the first time I've ever worked with an Irish cinematographer and we felt very at home together. He also moved from Ireland to America when he was a kid, so he has his own very personal perspective on the story."

Quinn and Sheridan agreed that the look of the film should be intensely intimate, with the camera essentially becoming caught up in the emotional turmoil of Johnny and his family. At the same time, Quinn went for an almost dreamy, heated look that evokes the magic at the heart of the film. "One thing about Declan is that he has a brilliant sense of color," says Sheridan. "He gave the film a kind of Spanish magical realism quality that turned out to be exactly the right visual tone for a story of this weight."

Shooting in New York brought the story full circle for Sheridan, as he travelled the city he had once come to as a cash-strapped immigrant. He says: "I never could have set IN AMERICA anywhere other than Manhattan . . . it's a tough city but it is fundamental to this story. This is a hopeful, loving story about New York."