The climactic fight sequence in Jim Sheridan's new film, The Boxer, takes place in the ornate ballroom of a London hotel, recreated on a vast set at Ardmore Studios in Bray. A dozen chandeliers hang from the ceiling, and bottles of wine litter the tables below where over 300 extras are seated in evening dress. All eyes are focused on the brightly lit boxing ring in the centre of the room. In the ring are two fictitious middleweight boxers, Akim Muhammed (played by former professional boxer Clayon Stewart), and his Irish challenger, Danny Boy Flynn, whose surname is emblazoned on his black trunks. He is played by the versatile Daniel Day-Lewis, looking impressively muscular and in the peak of condition - as he needs to be, given that he is doing all his own boxing for the film.
Ringside are the film's writer-director Jim Sheridan and its cinematographer Chris Menges, and they watch intently as the two boxers manoeuvre around the ring, protectively covering their faces as they aim their punches. As the blase, well-fed audience follows their movements, the bout evokes parallels with gladiatorial combat in the arenas of ancient Rome.
"Absolutely," concurs Day-Lewis later. "Those people eating and drinking and smoking and placing wagers on fighters they don't even know the names of. Often they're not fight fans, just fat bastards on a night out."
A once promising boxer, Danny Boy Flynn became involved with the IRA in his late teens and ended up serving 14 years in a British prison. Returning to Belfast and determined to change his life, Flynn makes a comeback in the ring, and as he regains his fighting prowess, his victories begin to rekindle hope in the city. Topically, the film, which takes place in the early 1990s, is set against a backdrop of tensions within the IRA - between factions opposed on the question of seeking a peaceful solution to the conflict. Day-Lewis describes his character as a quiet man: "He feels that, through the decisions he has made, a large part of his life has been thrown away, and he wants to do something to set the record straight for himself, just to feel he's done something in his life that's okay and has some value to it. He was tremendously idealistic as a younger man and there remains a seed of optimism which remains untainted but is harder to reach and harder to believe in after what he's been through."
The Boxer is Jim Sheridan's fourth feature film as a writer-director and his third with Daniel Day-Lewis in the leading role. Their first collaboration, My Left Foot, earned Day-Lewis the best actor Oscar in 1990 for his remarkable portrayal of Christy Brown. Their second film together, the factually-based and controversial In The Name Of The Father, in which Day-Lewis played the wrongly convicted Gerry Conlon, received seven Oscar nominations in 1994, including one for its star and three for Sheridan as its director, co-writer and co-producer.
"I think Jim and I understand each other very well," says Day-Lewis. "He has such an openness to anything that might happen. And not just openness, but underneath a facade of scattiness, a resolute will to create the circumstances where things will happen. He sets things up in such a way that you have no option but to be on the edge all the time because the story is revealing itself as you're going along."
The admiration is mutual. "Daniel's an amazing actor, one of the best in the world," comments Sheridan. "His energy is very focused. I probably get more out of working with him than he does because he, on his own, is always going to be the great actor he is. I think it's really hard for him to act - the pleasure in it is so short-lived that the effort for that pleasure is not an equation that works out."
Now 48, Jim Sheridan says that his ideas for The Boxer have been gestating since 1984 when he was living in New York and working as a theatre director at the Irish Arts Centre. "It's a completely different perspective when you're living in America and you see news from Ireland," he says. "All you see is bombing and the latest shooting, and nothing else. I began to feel that this is what they think Ireland is."
Watching TV one day, he saw Barry McGuigan winning the world featherweight boxing championship, which inspired him to develop a screenplay about an Irish boxer. "I set out to make a film about a man who, having been a rebel and been to prison for it, decides to fight only within the rules. Finally, the film became three stories: a love story, an IRA story and a boxing story."
An actor renowned for his attention to detail and intensive preparations for his roles, Daniel Day-Lewis says he has been training as a boxer for about three years. "With the film in mind, I've been preparing for it for a year, and with the film as a tantalising half-possibility, for a couple of years before that. But most of the training I was doing before we decided to do the film was purely for its own sake."
When the movie began to become a reality, his trainer was no less than the former world champion, Barry McGuigan. "Barry's a wonderful man," he says. "I followed his career to some extent and had been so enthralled by him as a fighter. To actually have the opportunity to train with someone like that is something else, and I trained with him the whole time. Barry was tremendously encouraging all the way." How does he react to McGuigan's recent comment on RTE radio that Day-Lewis is now such an accomplished boxer that he could take on any of the top ten middleweights in Britain? Somewhat embarrassed by that claim, the actor laughs a lot before replying, "I don't know about that."
Day-Lewis says the training and the boxing bouts were always tough and that it never gets any easier. "With any sport or athletic endeavour, the stakes go up as you get fitter and better at what you're doing, and that makes it even more interesting. But it's not something you want to be doing when you're also working a 12-to-14-hour shooting day."
Because of the schedule of the film - which was shot virtually entirely in sequence and with a fight at the beginning, middle and end - the star had to stay in readiness for a fight throughout the whole schedule, which he found unnatural. "It's not what fighters do," he says. "Like all athletics, you train towards a peak of fitness and then there's the event and you go into a little trough afterwards. You move with that kind of ebb and flow. I found it very hard to keep up to scratch the whole time."
Day-Lewis suffered physically for his art. "It was nothing serious," he says. "Just the usual black eyes and bloody noses. I got stopped in my tracks once, just for a couple of standing counts, by a young amateur fighter who caught me with a few good left hooks in a gym in London." How does he respond to anti-boxing campaigners who insist that the sport is too dangerous and ought to be banned? "There is no doubt in my mind that for every fighter who gets hurt, there are hundreds and probably thousands of fighters whose lives would have ended up in the garbage can if they hadn't gone into a gym one day and learned some kind of discipline and camaraderie and respect for other people."
The degree of discipline and respect in boxing gyms is unparalleled, he believes. "Except in the army where it's forced into people," he adds. "The point about boxing is that it's a daily discipline people choose to go along with, and not just at the professional level. Ironically, boxing gyms can open up little pockets of tranquillity, as they do for my character in the film. They're very often places where all arguments are settled and what remains is a huge sense of community and serenity which you don't find in the same form anywhere else." He salutes, in particular, the dedication of trainers at amateur level, citing Phil Sutcliffe who runs a gym in Crumlin where he trained while he was in Dublin. "Behind all those gyms you always find one or two men for whom it is an act of devotion, a lifetime of devotion, and Phil gives over the best part of his life and energy to bringing on kids - not because they're going to be great boxers, but because he believes it's a valuable thing to be doing. By a strange coincidence, the first night I walked into the gym in Crumlin and there was Eamon Brown, who works with Phil - and Eamon is Christy Brown's brother!" Day-Lewis cites John Huston's 1972 movie, Fat City, as the most powerful film he has ever seen about boxing. How about Martin Scorsese's 1980 film, Raging Bull, which Jim Sheridan cites as "the big hurdle we had to get over"? "I don't really think of that so much as a film about boxing," says Day-Lewis. "I believe Raging Bull to be one of the greatest films I've ever seen, but as for boxing itself, I suppose Fat City addressed a level of the game that no other film did. Nothing else quite tells the story of that dreadful, decaying world where physiques are beginning to get run down and they're in places that are falling apart." As for the "big hurdle" of Raging Bull, Jim Sheridan says that he watched it shot by shot and that it was really intimidating to watch. "Not only is it a great film but after a while you realise that (a) it's very difficult to do, (b) you can't repeat it and (c) Martin Scorsese's used up all the options - slow-motion, black-and-white, close-ups, amazing camera angles. So somehow it can never be as good again and I didn't want to go down that road."
Sheridan says that his cinematographer on The Boxer, Chris Menges, was "incredibly thorough" and did "some really innovative work" on the boxing scenes. Menges, who has won Oscars for his work on The Killing Fields and The Mission, says that The Boxer was the most challenging film he has worked on. "Because the script was evolving as it went along, the style was more to grab the moment," he says. "For the fight scenes we did some very exciting work with the camera suspended from a 26inch piece of rubber, which gave a really raw, vibrant feel to the boxing and afforded so many options for change. A lot of the film was shot with hand-held cameras, which added to its nervous energy."
For the love story within the film, Jim Sheridan cast Emily Watson as Danny Boy Flynn's teenage sweetheart, Maggie. Now wanting her to wait all those years for his release from prison, he refused to allow her visit him and she married his best friend. On his release, he becomes clandestinely involved with her. "From Breaking The Waves I could tell that Emily's got this big, generous heart," he says. "She's breaking the banks now, she's overflowing, so I thought she and Daniel together, that's perfect. I think it was hard for her initially, coming into me and Daniel, these guys who have been doing this together for almost 10 years. I think she found that intimidating for a while, but then it all clicked into place. She underacts so well. Even when she's playing big, she can underact."
Turning to the political element of The Boxer, Sheridan says that it was "deliberate" to tackle another IRA story after the flak he and Terry George received in Britain, in particular over In The Name Of The Father and Some Mother's Son. "I made In The Name Of The Father and I believed in the truth of it - forget the incidental details. I'm not nationalist; maybe I'm republican. Then the IRA set off a car bomb in England and that focused my thoughts. "I think violence, taken out of the moral sphere, is a stupid way to solve things. It's f***ing neanderthal, so I thought `I don't want to endorse this' and maybe I should make the film about someone who fights within the rules. At some point we have to accept that there are rules for discourse and rules for politics. But that implies activating ourselves politically to take on the wrongs. Most people who say `I'm against the IRA, I'm against violence' do nothing about the wrongs, and I think that's bad. At the same time, if you're always a rebel, always against something, you're never going to have a vision for change.
"In the film it's never specified why Flynn's in jail and it's important, I think, that it's not. It's enough to know that he was deep into the IRA, probably in on one of the first car bombings, and he didn't carry it through. There's no moral ground for putting a bomb in a car in any situation, and I suppose it's that he objected to."
Does he anticipate that The Boxer may prove politically controversial nonetheless? "Maybe," he says. "I think In The Name Of The Father was an intervention in a war, and I think Neil (Jordan) suffered from that, too, on Michael Collins. When the war starts up again the product, the artefact, becomes a part of the war. You can't help it. "Life and death are more important than movies, so people are judging it on the impact it might have on people in the streets. That's the tragedy of us in Ireland making these stories. They shouldn't have that effect. It should have been all over years ago." He touches wood as he expresses the wish that the present ceasefire holds. On Boxing by Joyce Carol Oates is the best book on the subject of the game, Jim Sheridan believes. "She says that men will change their allegiance in a boxing match from the guy they're supporting to the winner, and maybe not even be conscious about changing sides. She believes women are always on the side of the loser and don't change sides. Men find that hard to understand and the dominant society finds that hard to understand - going with the victim, the underdog - except in Ireland which, because of its history, always will go with the underdog. That's why the outside world sometimes finds it hard to understand our affinity with the underdog and our stories about them."
The Boxer is tentatively set to have its Irish premiere in Dublin on December 16th, with a release to follow in January. It opens in New York and Los Angeles on New Year's Eve, to qualify for Academy Awards consideration.