Sheridan Takes a Hard Look at Irish ‘Troubles’ : Director: His new film recalls the potato famine and looks at Northern Ireland, Irish-Americans and the Catholic Church.

NEW YORK —  To put Jim Sheridan’s “The Field” in motion, there’s an early scene in which actor Richard Harris plucks a dandelion gone to fuzz: “This is what we’d be without the land, boy,” he says to his surviving son, and blows the seeds to kingdom come.

Set in the ‘30s, and recalling the potato famines that blew the Irish to America, “The Field,” could have simply shed a tear for lost worlds--like the current film “Avalon,” for instance. But Sheridan, instead, means to smack Ireland for its fixation on “the troubles in North Ireland,” and to have his say with the rest of us on the cost of obsession.

“The Field,” which co-stars John Hurt and Tom Beringer, has torn up the boxoffice in Ireland, doing “three times the business of ‘My Left Foot,’ ” Sheridan’s 1989 debut film (for which he received an Oscar nomination), and “more than ‘Crocodile Dundee,’ ” he said during a recent interview.

Powered by Oscar winning performances by Daniel Day Lewis as the crippled Christy Brown and by supporting actress Brenda Fricker, “My Left Foot” was suprisingly far more a sensation in the United States than in the British Isles.

What is surprising about Jim Sheridan is, that when he pops up from his seat to full height, he is one wee Irishman, around the five-foot mark. However, like his two small, but beguiling feature films, Sheridan projects big.

At 41, this street-smart son of Dublin is different from the Irish poets, playwrights and politicians who have burned over the question of Northern Ireland: “The age old Irish-English conflict is played out,” he said. Now Sheridan wants to know, if, outside Ireland, audiences will see not only beyond “The Field” ’s metaphor for the north but respond to the film’s mining of “the deep desire to be rid of a hurt.”

Sheridan sees the role played by Harris (originally intended for Ray McAnally before his death last year) as parallel to modern Ireland. Harris plays Bull McCabe, a man who has something of the Lear about him, and who is the last of the landed patriarchs.

“He can’t grieve for the death of his son,” said Sheridan, “because he can’t accept the fact. And that’s the problem with Ireland: we won’t allow the dead to be dead.”

“We don’t always have to be in conflict to maintain our traditions,” Sheridan said. “In the end, you say, ‘Look, if you weren’t so obsessive, if you looked inside you wouldn’t be so upset about an external thing.’

“People in Ireland want the conflict to end,” he said, landing on the last word with all the force he can muster. “They just want it to be over.”

Sheridan anticipated the wrath of Irish-Americans, who in the film are dismissed as weak for having fled the famines and resented for returning rich enough to buy the land out from under those why stayed. Berenger, who plays the American son of an Irish emigrant, returns out of “Roots” nostalgia at best, and parking-lot progress and economic pillage, at worst.

Said Sheridan, “I thought we might have a trouble with them. But it hasn’t been like that.”

Sheridan was also leery of the response by the Catholic Church, shown in the film as susceptible to the friendly persuasion of money. “The funny thing is that there’s been no controversy. Not one word,” he said, but recalled the day he froze when a nun rang him from the Catholic News Agency.

“Oh now, I’m in trouble,” he thought, “but she was devastated by the film and didn’t see an anti-Church thing in it. That surprised me.”

“The Field” ’s American run is a worry to its director. Currently in limited run, it’s playing at only one Los Angeles-area theater, the Music Hall in Beverly Hills.

At $6.5 million to produce, it strains for the record books as Ireland’s costliest indigenous feature. “If it’s not commercially successful,” he fears, “it’ll be very difficult to make a film over $2 million to $3 million in Ireland.”

Can Ireland absorb more than the cost of a film’s production, but the impact of its art?

“The Irish attitude to any form that they work in, whether novels or plays and films, is to ask,” Sheridan said, “how do we destroy this form? How do we end it so nobody else can write? How do we take this authority, this structure, and push it so far that there is no basis left for it?

“You always have that feeling in Joyce or Beckett that they’re trying to end the form they’re working in.

To Sheridan, film is stringing together bands of time, and dialogue “is utterly irrelevant. Not that it’s unimportant, but it’s like somebody on an escalator going the wrong way.”

The problem in making a film he said, “is to get rid of the literature without becoming a barbarian.”