Six-time Oscar nominee Jim Sheridan’s fictionalised film about the unsolved 1996 murder of French film producer Sophie Toscan du Plantier is to have its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York in June.
Sheridan and his co-writer and codirector, David Merriman, have spent the past 2½ years working on ‘Re-Creation’, which looks at the murder of 39-year-old Mrs Toscan du Plantier, a mother of one, at her remote holiday cottage near Toormore, west Cork, in December 1996.
The 90-minute docudrama looks at the murder through the prism of a courtroom drama and imagines a jury’s deliberations if the main suspect in the case, the late English journalist Ian Bailey, had been tried in Ireland for Mrs Toscan du Plantier’s killing.
Mr Bailey, who died in January last year aged 66, was twice arrested by gardaí for questioning about the murder, but was never charged. He was convicted in France in absentia of the voluntary homicide of Mrs Toscan du Plantier and sentenced to 25 years in jail. He remained in Ireland and vehemently protested his innocence.
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The film features Commitments and Star Trek actor Colm Meaney as Ian Bailey, while Game of Thrones and Love/Hate star Aidan Gillen plays a lawyer. Sheridan plays the jury foreman and Luxembourgish-German actor and Cannes winner Vicky Krieps plays a juror.
Sheridan said he was inspired by Sidney Lumet’s classic 1957 courtroom drama 12 Angry Men starring Henry Fonda. He told Variety that Krieps plays jury member number eight, “which is a kind of proxy for Sophie, a kind of voice for her in the film”.
He said that after finishing his five-part documentary series for Sky on the killing, called Murder in the Cottage, he felt he was finished with the story. However, he met his codirector and his passion for finding out the truth motivated him to get involved.
“Having done In the Name of the Father, a move which castigated the British legal system over its treatment of an innocent Irish man, I thought I should do a movie which castigated the Irish legal system with whom I believe to be an innocent Englishman,” he told Variety magazine.
“The big crime, the disgusting crime, if he didn’t do it, is the police still convincing the French family that Bailey did it – that’s inconceivable evil to me, abusing the grief of people and saying, ‘No, no we solved it’.”
Some external shots were filmed in west Cork, but much of the interior scenes were filmed in Dublin. Mr Sheridan told Variety that while they did use a screenplay as a guide, the film also involved a degree of improvisation.
“True crime is about facts … well, the legal world is supposed to be about facts and evidence, and it’s not supposed to be about emotion. It’s supposed to reduce emotion out of the argument, so people can decide in a kind of abstract way what the truth is,” he said.
“That never happens; emotion plays a big part. I usually deal with emotion. The documentary was very constraining for me, so I needed to release myself and find the emotional truth of what I felt, which is this one.”
The original murder investigation is the subject of a cold case review, started in 2022, by the Garda Serious Crime Team. The unit has reinterviewed most of the surviving witnesses from the original investigation, as well as new witnesses.
