AT THE MOVIES - Trying to strike the perfect notes - The musical context was a special challenge for 'August Rush' director Kirsten Sheridan.
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, 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?"
Sean McDonald, her significant other, is an accountant who is studying psychology. "We're Kurt Russell-Goldie Hawn people," Sheridan says of their decision not to marry. "We plan to spend the rest of our lives together."
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 '70s. I kind of moved back to where I grew up the first five years of my life."
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."
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