©Courtesy of Tribeca Festival
Re-creation : In a fictitious trial, twelve members of a jury must decide whether British journalist Ian Bailey is guilty of the murder of French filmmaker Sophie Toscan Du Plantier in 1996. Based on real events, the film reconstructs, through the discussions between these twelve people, a case that ultimately invites the viewer to draw their own conclusions.
Photo by Nobuhiro Hosoki
Q&A with Directors Jim Sheridan, David Merriman
Q: Let’s start at the beginning. You two have been researching and working on projects, what was the piece of the case that drew you to it?
David Merriman: I met Jim right after you guys. Skype was just coming out and we ended up spending a good deal of time talking about it. Jim was obsessively talking about it and then he started showing me some material. I started to be obsessed about it as well. We pretty quickly came to the conclusion that [the accused] Ian [Bailey] had done it and we just started working to figure it out and find the truth. That’s really what we were doing for a couple years — walking around doing that.
Jim Sheridan: I read the police statements and was four or five statements in. From my point of view, I didn’t believe he did it. Initially, I was trying to trap him. I gave him a camera to record himself and seemingly, the police have now got all those recordings and everything he said on tape. Of course they said they can go back to the phone call. It’s been three years now. They’re going to call that dead man talking because they’re going to have him saying probably crazy things that he was crazy about. But there’s no evidence, it’s a media trial in my opinion.
There’s been so much the other way about how he did it in the press. It’s just too hard for me to believe that you can batter a woman, choke her, and leave no evidence. The Garda police force is probably the most sophisticated police force in Europe. They dealt with a war for 30 years. They got very sophisticated. Why would they suddenly be nincompoops in this one?
The same man who found Mountbatten’s killer was the head of forensics. It was almost like the evidence blew up, but he still found some paint or something on the guy’s shoe and was such an amazing person. The head of forensics was a very interesting guy. The police perform a function in Ireland, they’re more like the big fuse and above them is obviously the Attorney General Minister for Justice.
It used to be that the Minister for Justice met the police commissioner every Friday and they were political for whatever government was in. They were that. Now that doesn’t happen as much, but this case goes back a long time. I became interested in other cases like Frank Murphy who were arrested for knocking down somebody and spent a good time in prison. His father pursued the case and it turned out [he had] nothing to do with it, but overnight, the mount was not made up at 1 in the morning and by 8 in the morning everybody in the town said Frank McCreary did it.
Q: Is it your sense that there were political pressures on the Irish police that prevented them from investigating the case as it should have been investigated?
David Merriman: For sure, zero question about that. She’s [Sophie Toscan du Plantier] a person of consequence in France. Her husband hung out with all the French aristocrats and the police very quickly came to the conclusion under pressure. The wrong conclusion, I believe by Jim.
Jim Sheridan: It’s the same as if you told the person that New York police couldn’t go to New Jersey. I mean it takes four years [just] to get a request across Interpol through the French system. It’s just whether this case only illustrates that Europe has an economic union but not alleged, not a legal one. I just got obsessed about legal stuff through this and through other stuff I did in Ireland.
Q: This film connects with your previous work because it does, it is of a piece of something like “In the name of the Father” and “My Left Foot” and things like that. Were you conscious of that when you were approaching it…
Jim Sheridan: Well me and Terry George wrote “My Left Foot.”
Terry George from audience: No, we didn’t,
Jim Sheridan: Sorry, we didn’t — [it was] “In The Name of the Father.” Sorry, Terry. But that was a story that was like… It was a case [where] the guy was wrongly accused. In this one, we didn’t have any conclusion. It’s not as if you can ever get the same ending. It’s more heavy, isn’t it? It’s more like a detective novel. I put it this way in America now, the crime thing that’s sprouting everywhere.
It basically follows the “In Cold Blood” method, which is a method of finding a killer, they get killed, we’re all happy. It’s a revenge story. A genius book, but you know Truman Capote saw himself, I think, as one of the killers and he couldn’t write at him after it. Whereas true crime before that had been Thomas de Quincey, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, they had to be two opium addicts who, when they didn’t do opium, were very clear. And de Quincey wrote about the art of [murder] and showed you that the killer was such an artist.
How did he do it and get away with it? What he was shown was that he couldn’t have done it. The empathy for both the victim and the suspect is important and revenge is easy. Shakespeare did it once and the guy couldn’t revenge himself. He’s trying to tell you the structure of this is not a philosophical structure. “Make my day” is not a philosophical way of dealing with things, but it does make the audience happy.
©Courtesy of Tribeca Festival
Q: Talk about some of the research that you did in preparing the film. Obviously we’re watching them go through the actual case. What was that process like on a day-to-day level, but also emotionally? How did that impact you as you were going through the police files, the recordings and things like that?
David Merriman: When I came on to work with Jim, he’d done a great deal of work with it. I was going to catch up on all that. That also allowed me to look out [with] fresh eyes and find things that Amy has been, so much stuff had been there.
We just went through it and found information, hired new experts, [made] friends with people, [got] blood analysis, and somebody from the FBI’s behavioral science unit. Obviously looking at the crime scene images is important when we’re doing it. I think most of them felt like we were, as I said, just trying to find the truth. But you’re always going to tell the same story. I think you’re projecting your own stuff into whatever you’re doing.
Jim Sheridan: For me, I always feel, unless the story really relates to my life or something that I can get an anchor [into], it’s harder for me to do an American story than an Irish one for that reason. But I tell this story about during COVID, I went to this graveyard on the 28th of May, 2021, and was looking for the grave of my grandmother. When I got there, there were a bunch of flowers on the grave. Now this grave hadn’t been used for 50 years, but that was the day she died 100 years exactly before.
She died giving birth to my mother. I always felt like this woman, we wouldn’t be here without her. I’ve never been to her grave, never really known about her, and I was just obsessed with her story. My mother, throughout her life, never celebrated her birthday. I never knew when her birthday was, didn’t know she had a birthday and I think she blamed herself for killing her mother. She was the first wrongly accused of my life. When I hear “wrongly accused,” I go, what? Fuck that. It just twisted a few. Those I think everybody’s driven by.
If you’re making a feature, you’re projecting onto the screen, but if you’re making a doc, you’re pulling out the air, you’re pulling out your life and you keep asking, “why am I doing this?” When you’re making a feature, you know from the beginning why you’re doing it, but when you’re doing a doc, it’s like, “Oh, I’m extracting the information.”
Q: Talk about it as using the real life facts of the case. What about the writing process and finding that balance between using real facts but also combining it with this sort of dramatized conversation in the jury room. Talk a bit about what that writing process was like and finding that balance between the case and the fictionalized conversations?
David Merriman: We were actually to make notes like a docudrama, and we ended up, instead of having many steps, we were only going to have one. Myself and Jim, he was on a plane, while he was there, [he was] trying to figure out what we were going to do. Then he landed and put it in one room. We went to the hotel and wrote it very, very quickly. We used a lot of the conversations we would’ve had.
Jim Sheridan: Then [there were] other people like John [Connors, Juror 3] and Maja [Juric, Juror 11] and Zahara [Moufid, Juror 6] and who else. Everybody had a personal story in it and it was just like I was trying to get people to tell me their backstory and use that rather than trying to go off and invent some story.Who else had the story?
David Merriman: Tristan [Heanue, Juror 2].
Jim Sheridan: Oh yeah, Tristan had the police story and it was great working with all the actors because we weren’t really like Vicky [Krieps, Juror 8], that’s true of our grandfather who was in a concentration camp. That started it when Vicky said that. She’s totally very good, easy to work with and a really great person. That’s kind of the way we did it. We just outlined the story and then let people go.
Q: One of the things about jury room films, for lack of a better term, is the ensemble aspect of it. Talk about the casting, what was the rehearsal process like because it seems like that’s [was necessary]…
David Merriman: Short, two days.
Q: Did that put a lot of pressure on you two on set? What was that like?
Jim Sheridan: It was tough the first few days, but that limitation and pressure helps in film. I need the limitation that you have with help. Yeah, no, just we work. Just don’t worry about it and just have a go at it. It’s just, I like things that are close to documentary reality, whatever and what else…
David Merriman: We had John [Connors] in mind obviously, and then you actually looked, John or Jim looked at a lot of actors on set and we knew a lot of them and we picked them and then Jim said, we improvised quite a bit on set, the actors were phenomenal. We shot it in 11 days. So [it was] a very, very short period of time.
Jim Sheridan: In a film, people misunderstand sometimes that you’ve got all this emotion coming from the actors and performance, but the person observing, like the director, if they have the correct way of looking, it helps the actors a lot. The emotion that’s coming from behind the camera is as important as the emotion coming to the camera. But that’s hard to quantify and it’s hard to understand why there’s chemistry and why certain people relate to certain directors, you know.
Q: Did it help that you were also part of the cast?
Jim Sheridan: Yeah, I think so. They could see how I was making the most mistakes.
David Merriman: That’s not true. He was fantastic.
Jim Sheridan: Once again, I want to take the real actor [who played] Frank Buttimer [Denis Conway], who’s here. Frank, would you stand up? [audience clapping] Thanks it was great fun.
©Courtesy of Tribeca Festival
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