Jim Sheridan Quotations

We were always walking the line between reality and fiction.

I was going to everybody and saying, 'You've got to stop this,' and nobody was saying no, so I just lost my head.

He was very good. Very charismatic, funny, relaxed. I think he could do another movie. And he was able to show vulnerability, totally different from the image in the rap world.

He works very, very hard - he's determined, very focused and has huge self-esteem,

He had a Muhammad Ali-kind of self-confidence, ... There's something in that culture, that if you're very confident, very expressive, you must be close to death. Because for hundreds of years, you weren't allowed to be like that. So when you repress people, and they can't express their natural soul and you keep them back and push them down, down, down -- you're going to get the diamonds that come up. And 50's one of them. He's like Muhammad Ali.

He's funny, he doesn't take himself too seriously. I think that's one of the secrets of his success, that it's a contradictory image.

I thought city government was bad. It doesn't have anything on FEMA.

I think there's an affinity with the Irish and black culture in many ways. I think tap emerged from Irish dancing when we came over with our hard shoes. Blacks watched it and developed it with hands and body and made it a different thing. There are many ways in how the cultures cross each other.

Everybody was wearing bulletproof vests. But I've filmed in Belfast; you get used to it, you know? I never felt threatened on the set.

I've liked rap music for 10, 15 years,

It was like I'd known him for a hundred years.

At the end of the movie people will wonder: Is this the real 50 Cent? Has he changed? Is he acting a part? All three are true,

I kind of grew up in a neighborhood like that, so I felt I knew 50, ... to go inside the ghetto and see what's the cause of the rage.

I had that feeling the minute I met him that I could do a movie about somebody coming back from the dead, ... One of the times when I was getting a little hyperbolic and melodramatic, I wrote down, 'A black-gangster Jesus with the wounds to prove it.'

I just knew his world. It was like the world I grew up in in Dublin. I knew gangsters and drugs and I was even in a band. It was like he was a long lost brother.

The first few days, I worked about seven hours on each scene with him. He just kept wanting to do it better. He never went to self-pity or said, 'What do you want from me?' even though it was difficult. I knew he had resilience and self-confidence. He worked very hard, never complained, never was in a bad humor.

The kids were going insane, 50. I thought someone was going to get injured.