My Left Foot

He said he knew Christy Brown personally and had been anxious to see his story become a film for some years. "Noel (Pearson, producer of the film) was the agent to Christy Brown for 10 years and I had met Christy and known him.

"Noel and meself were running a little theater in New York and he got a show on Broadway, but it lasted only one night. So we got together and thought we should do a film (about Christy Brown). This was about 1986 and Noel asked me to write it.

"I suppose it was ideal because I knew Christy and knew Dublin and had been interested for five or so years. And I always knew film was the medium I wanted to work in. Theater is more difficult because of the abstract nature of it. I knew I could direct it (the film), but we looked at a few potential directors anyway. But I knew I could do it and became obsessed with it."

It was the casting of the lead actor, however, that firmed up the deal.

"We knew when we got Daniel Day Lewis that we had a better chance to get the backing. We sent it to him, or maybe we rang his agent. But he read it, he loved it. He rang us back within a week."

Day Lewis is an obsessive actor who immersed himself in the role of Christy Brown with remarkable abandon, Sheridan said. "He went to cerebral palsy clinic in Dublin where he worked with disabled people for three months. He painted all the pictures in the film with his foot.

"He used to have someone feed him at lunch time, and I think there was a good reason for that. He didn't want to break out of character and make it into a circus act."

Given the nature of the material, how did Sheridan avoid sentimentality in telling the story? "That's a hard question. We picked some stuff out, like he drinks a bit, so there are undercurrents.

"The one thing cerebral palsy people will tell you is that at birth the umbilical cord catches around the neck, so you're actually dying, you're killing yourself — in the attempt to live, one is killing oneself.

"I think there are dark strands that never come to the surface."

How did Christy Brown's surviving family react to the film? "Christy's mother died, but his brothers are in the film as extras in the bar scenes.

"They loved it. They felt (Ray McAnally as their father) was very good. They liked the father."

And what about that amazing performance by young Hugh O'Conor as Christy during his youth? "He's really intelligent, and he has great eyes, a great brain — he's a born actor. But I think he wants to be a lawyer."

The movie's one conspicuously absent fact, however, is that Christy Brown passed away eight years before the movie was made. But Sheridan said that was a justifiable omission.

"Christy died in 1981, but he'd overcome so much that we didn't want to put that he died in the end because the biggest thing in his life was getting married, and we wanted to end on his biggest victory, an emotional victory rather than the natural emotion of saying that he died at 49."