Six-time Oscar nominee Jim Sheridan revealed how his own personal heartbreak has spurred him on to seek out the truth in his Sophie Toscan du Plantier documentary.
The My Left Foot director is to make his documentary series debut with Sky’s Murder At The Cottage: The Search for Justice for Sophie later this year.
And the award winning director revealed how the grief of Toscan du Plantier’s family, who for 25 years have sought definitive answers, echoes of his own family’s greatest loss – the death of his younger brother Frankie from a brain tumour, 54 years ago at age 11.
“Frankie’s death is like a roundabout that everybody keeps going back to and can’t get off.
“One road says life, another says death, and people don’t often take either; they just go around and around in a limbo.
"I go up there, to my parents’ graves, and I don’t have much emotion because they died of an age and there was justice, but with the kid you feel, my god, we will never get over it.
“I am obsessed with him and, to me, Sophie is connected to that because [Sophie’s family] are on that same roundabout and they can’t leave it until there is justice,” he told Irish Independent’s Life magazine.
The Dubliner, who is planning to make a movie about his brother’s tragic death, also told how other aspects of the case that have been reminders of his own story.
He said: “You always feel God is unfair and, in the story, you’re looking for the divine in the face of justice to reveal itself.
“I think that’s what the family are doing. When my mother’s mother was giving birth to her, she died in childbirth. My mother considered herself an outsider and guilty of the death of her mother, so from inception I carried this feeling of injustice in my DNA.”
Looking back at his wide-spanning career, Sheridan, 72, who debuted his first feature film, My Left Foot in his 40s said he’s glad his success came later in his life.
He said: “I should have made movies earlier in my career, some of my plays were very visual, but if that had happened maybe I would have OD-ed at 45.”
Meanwhile, discussing his past dealings with the movie industry’s most notorious figure, Harvey Weinstein, he claims he would have ‘decked’ him, if he had known what he was doing.
Asked if he was surprised at how things turned out for Weinstein, he said: “I am surprised that he is sitting in a jail in upstate New York.
“I knew [producer] Laura Madden, who was one of the first to come out against him, but I had no idea that Harvey was pursuing her like that — a posh, Irish girl. I think we would have decked him if we had known, but that is all easy to say in retrospect.”
