Saturday, March 05, 2011

Martin Sheen and Emilio Estévez film promotes ancient Spanish pilgrimage

Hollywood film star, Martin Sheen, and his director son, Emilio Estévez, were in Dublin last week to showcase their new film, The Way about the ancient pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in northern Spain, where the remains of St James the Apostle are believed to be buried.

Speaking about the film, which opens in Ireland and the UK in Holy Week, seventy-year-old Sheen described the Camino as “a metaphor for the walk through our lives” and added, “We’re all constantly making an effort to unite the will of the spirit to the work of the flesh.”

The star of The West Wing and Apocalypse Now, who is a committed Catholic, was presented with the 2011 Jameson Dublin International Film Festival Career Achievement Award by film director and friend, Jim Sheridan at the Savoy Cinema in Dublin last Thursday evening.

The Emmy and Golden Globe winner told the audience, “Work is one thing; to work with the people you love the most – your family – that really makes me as ‘happy as Larry’,” he said, referring to his collaboration with 48-year-old Estévez, who wrote, directed and co-stars in The Way as Sheen’s on-screen son.

In the film, Sheen plays Tom, a widowed Republican-voting ophthalmologist from California who has a fraught relationship with his son, Daniel.  The Way begins as Daniel is departing the US to begin the 800km Way of St James.  

Within days of their last conversation, Tom hears from a policeman in St Jean Pied de Port in the French Pyrenees that Daniel has died in a tragic accident.

Arriving in France, grief-stricken Tom places Daniel’s cremated remains in a battered steel box and starts walking the Camino, spreading his son’s ashes along the route as a gesture towards his deceased son’s ambition to walk the Way of St James.

The trek provides Tom with three co-pilgrims, who add a sense of camaraderie and a means for bringing each other out of their respective ruts.  

In Dublin last Thursday, Emilio Estévez explained that his film was “At the core, a father-son story but we were also retelling the Wizard of Oz.” 

According to the film’s publicity, “the main protagonist of the film is the conflict we each have within ourselves of choosing a life versus living a life.”

Estévez told ciNews that he and Sheen are currently collaborating on a book entitled Along the Way, which will be published by Simon & Schuster for Father’s Day 2012. 

“It is not only about the making of this film but about our relationship and how we have come to know each other as friends, as father and son and as contemporaries.”

Estévez’s son, Taylor worked as an Associate Producer on the film and according to Martin Sheen brought about the film’s first miracle.  

In 2003, Sheen, his grandson and another friend, who stars in the film, were researching the 800km pilgrimage when they stopped in the city of Burgos for a meal.

According to Sheen, “During supper, a beautiful young lady walked in.  She was the daughter of the owner and Taylor took one look at her - and they have been looking at each other ever since.”  

The couple married last August and now live in Burgos.

“So when I got home I couldn’t stop telling stories about the journey, I was trying to urge Emilio, who was in the middle of another project, to drop everything and come to Spain and check it out – because he had lost a son on the Camino but he had gained a beautiful daughter in law.  That was the start of it!”  Sheen said.

The Way is dedicated to Emilio’s father, Francisco Estévez, who was born in the Galician village of Parderrubias, near Santiago de Compostela.

When Sheen finished the filming of The Way last year, he was quickly involved in another project, this time located in Ireland, the homeland of his mother.  

“After I finished The Way, I got a call to come to Ireland last Fall and do a film about a guy from my mother’s village – Borrisokane.”

Stella Days, which is directed by Thaddeus O’Sullivan, is based on Martin Doorley's book, Stella Days 1957-1967: The Life and Times of a Rural Irish Cinema.  

The film tells the story of Borrisokane parish priest, Fr Daniel Barry, who sought to set up a small cinema in the town in the 1950s.  

The venture brought him into conflict with locals who maligned his motivations, and his bishop, who wanted the money spent instead on a new church. 

The filming ended in mid-December. 

So for now both Sheen and Estévez are busy promoting The Way, which will open in Ireland and the UK on April 15 and in the US on September 30.  ¡Buen Camino!

For more information: http://theway-themovie.com/