The right notes in August Rush

In the new Warner Bros film August Rush, a boy stands in a wheat field conducting a symphony that only he can hear. As the wind picks up, the stalks of wheat bend and sway in rhythmic harmony, each sound of nature becoming a note flying off instruments in the boy's mind.

But how to translate that cinematically? “The huge challenge for me was to capture something visually that is as intangible as music,'' said director Kirsten Sheridan.

Her solution? The boy, played by Freddie Highmore of Finding Neverland, not only directs the music, but as with the waving wheat, he seemingly directs the camera as well.

“The camera is the music,'' Sheridan said. “He would move his hand to the left and the camera would sweep to the left with the wind. ... I'm the kind of director who hates films that have plain shots and complicated shots just for the sake of it. In this case, I was able to go a little bit crazy and be able to go with the character and the movement.''

Sheridan, a 31-year-old mother of two, is speaking by telephone from her home in Dublin, Ireland, where she spends most of her days caring for her 4-month-old son, Seamus, and ferrying her 5-year-old daughter, Leyla, back and forth to school.

“If you kind of divorce yourself from your own life,'' Sheridan said, “what are you going to write and direct?''

Sheridan said living in Ireland keeps her rooted in reality. “There is no better country to keep your feet on the ground. People tell you quickly if you get airs. I actually live in the same area where I was born in the 1970s. I kind of moved back to where I grew up the first five years of my life.''

Irish immigrants

She has followed in the footsteps of her father, six-time Oscar-nominated writer-director Jim Sheridan, whose films include My Left Foot, In America, The Boxer and In the Name of the Father.

Like her dad, she both writes and directs movies. Indeed, with her father and older sister, Naomi, she received an Academy Award nomination for best original screenplay for 2002's In America, a semi-autobiographical story about Irish immigrants living in a modern-day New York City tenement.
“We all moved to America first in 1981,'' Sheridan recalled. “We were in one of those railroad apartments. We lived in each other's back pockets.''

Although the Sheridan family is scattered today, they remain close. “My dad, at the moment, is shooting a movie in New Mexico,'' she said. “My sisters live in New York.'' Naomi continues to write, she noted, while youngest sister, Tess, attends New York University.

Sheridan said she knew from the age of 12 that she wanted to become a director.

“I was working as an extra on the set of My Left Foot, running around getting tea and got totally caught up being with actors and with the crew,'' she recalled.

“It was like a very intense bubble. We were almost like a family for a while . Daniel Day-Lewis was Method acting, so you'd see him eating lunch and he'd still be in character (as cerebral palsy-stricken Irish writer Christy Brown). He never got out of the wheelchair.''

But rather than singling out any nuggets about filmmaking that her father dispensed on the set, Sheridan said she learned much more from simply observing how he treated people on the set — in particular, the actors.

“He is exactly on the set as he is at home, or giving a speech before 1,000 people, or sitting in a taxicab talking to the cab driver,'' she said. “He never changes. When I see him with actors, I see that complete honesty. ... If he sees that the actors are completely honest and vulnerable, he has to come up to that mark himself.''

Before In America, Sheridan had directed only five short films and in 2000 made her first feature-length movie, Disco Pigs, which premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in 2001 to critical acclaim.

It was a scene in that film, in which two infants in separate bassinets reach over and clasp hands, that caught the attention of producer Richard Barton Lewis, who was looking for a director for August Rush, a story inspired by the birth of his own son. Nick Castle and James V. Hart received screenwriting credit on the film, while “story by'' credit went to Paul Castro and Castle.

What Lewis found in Sheridan was a kindred spirit.
“We made this instantaneous connection,'' he said. “She really captured the voice of August Rush, this quietly driven child who hears music in his head and is determined to get it out and find his parents.''

August Rush is a fable about a child prodigy who is raised in an orphanage and then goes into New York City on a quest to find the parents he never knew. Unknown to him, his mother and father are both musicians and the years have been unsettling for each.

The film stars Keri Russell as a sheltered cellist named Lyla and Jonathan Rhys Meyers as an Irish rock band singer-songwriter named Louis, who meet by chance and have a romantic encounter on a moonlit rooftop above New York's Washington Square.

Years pass with neither of them knowing that the child Lyla thought she lost in a car accident was actually given up for adoption by Lyla's strict father, who wanted nothing to distract his daughter from a rising career as a classical musician.

Sheridan said the 46-day shoot in New York City went better than expected. There was a coyote scare in Central Park one day, and on another the cops were out in helicopters “the whole afternoon,'' but when they needed snow on the first day, “We got the biggest blizzard New York had seen in 40 years. We all arrived on the set and it was just a blanket of white perfection,'' she said.

“At the end of the movie, when we needed to film a concert outdoors, in the movie it's supposed to be the height of summer, but it was April and we didn't want it to be raining. We would have been truly up the creek if it rained. But it turned out to be the hottest four days in April on record.''
Serendipitous, to be sure. Or, just call it the luck of the Irish.