Even though Jim Sheridan turned his childhood home into a war zone when he went home to shoot his new film The Boxer, his former neighbours welcomed him with open arms: with one major exception. 'They did not like the helicopter,' confesses the acclaimed director who chose his native Dublin to stand in for strife-torn Belfast. 'The helicopter was coming out at night and making them mad.' For those Dubliners, it was an unwelcome taste of daily life in Northern Ireland. As Sheridan points out, 'people in Belfast live with the helicopter all the time'. There was no chance he would cut the helicopter, though, despite the complaints. The aerial shots were too important to the message. 'I wanted to get above the violence and look down at it from a distance, put it away from you. 'The problem is: am I the helicopter? You know what I mean? That's where you get close to it. It's like looking down at this situation and you're not involved and you're kind of looking at it. In a funny way, it makes it more real than anything.' Like Sheridan's last film, In the Name of the Father, The Boxer explores the human side of the Irish troubles. It attacks English indifference, the Irish Republican Army, and violence on all sides. It is the story of Danny Flynn (Daniel Day-Lewis), a once-promising Irish boxer who went to prison after being convicted for participating in an IRA bombing, a crime he may not have committed. As the story begins, he emerges after 14 years behind bars. The IRA wants him to rejoin the war and is suspicious when he refuses. Worse, he slowly rekindles his love for his old sweetheart, Maggie, who is 'a prisoner's wife' married to a jailed IRA soldier and under constant scrutiny. Amid growing danger, Danny tries to build bridges between the Catholic and Protestant communities through a boxing club. By the end, his refusal to let the club be used by the IRA, his love for Maggie, and his determination to find a peaceful path through the troubles put him in mortal danger. The film is unlikely to win Sheridan any friends in the IRA, who are portrayed as being part of the problem, not the solution. He is the first to admit 'the film was probably more anti-IRA than anti-English'. He is not worried about how the IRA will react, though. 'When you're in a conflict like this, in a ghetto, all that matters is how it plays in the ghetto.' He admits: 'They'll be p***ed off when it plays Belfast. A lot of them won't like it, yeah, but I think, for me, it's like saying we've had enough of this. Violence isn't a way to solve anything. 'I understand what they're doing - what they think they're doing and all that - but it just seems to me we're fighting about . . .' he holds up two fingers close together, 'this difference.' The tensions of the conflict worried Emily Watson (Breaking the Waves ), who plays Maggie. The English actress travelled to Ireland to talk to real prisoners' wives and other women caught up in the troubles. She says they gave her no problems 'because they knew why I was there'. She gets very quiet, though, when she talks about them and imagines them watching her portrayal. 'I'm quite nervous about what they're going to think. It's a funny thing, that. You sort of use somebody, in a way, in your research and you then move on to your next job and they've got to go back up to Belfast. It's quite a hard thing to do.' She worked especially hard with a dialect coach, explaining that 'the emotional quality of the place and the people is in the sound and the voice and in the circumspection of the language and the lack of trust and the paranoia. Someone'll say something and you say: 'What? What do you mean?' There's no direct, open, honest communication. It's about being in a situation where you're always potentially surrounded by enemies.' Watson also developed a powerful empathy for all women swept up in violence and warfare. 'Maggie is defined by the men in her life - by her father, by her son, by the man she loves. And her relationships can't quite be natural. So the language is not clear. There's a lot repressed and held inside.' If Sheridan is tough on the IRA in The Boxer, that hardly means the English get off lightly. One of Danny's fights takes place in a London boxing club where men and women in formal dress watch silently from their tables, sipping drinks from fine crystal as boxers from all over the Commonwealth beat each other bloody. It is a scene of almost surreal decadence. Even Sheridan shakes his head, saying: 'The London scene is wild, isn't it?' Yet it is more fact than fiction. Such boxing clubs are an institution in England, and are taken for granted. 'I've been at the matches,' says Sheridan, remembering one fight which helped inspire The Boxer - a match in which one of the fighters died. 'They had no stretcher, so they took him out on a tablecloth and put him down on a table. It's mind-boggling for anybody outside it, but they don't see it there. For them, it's more civilised than a normal boxing match.' Sheridan remembers thinking: 'Man, this is it for me. This is the metaphor,' as he watched the matches. He sees the English watching the Irish conflict, clucking about the violence, 'but they're detached from it, like the helicopter, like the fight. And what I'm saying is don't get detached, get involved'. The Boxer, Panasia circuit
