In 1996, the French film producer Sophie Toscan du Plantier was murdered while holidaying in the village of Goleen in County Cork. The chief suspect for her murder was the eccentric Mancunian journalist Ian Bailey, who resided near her holiday home.
For nearly thirty years, Sophie’s murder has gone unresolved, and with the sudden death of Bailey two years ago, we may never know the truth. But that hasn’t stopped people from speculating.
Sophie’s case has been theorised on by journalists and “true crime” podcasters for years, and the story came to international attention with the release of the Netflix docuseries, Sophie: A Murder in West Cork, in 2021.
In the same year that A Murder in West Cork was released, another docuseries on the same subject, titled Murder at the Cottage: The Search for Justice for Sophie, from the acclaimed Irish filmmaker Jim Sheridan, was broadcast on Sky Crime.
But Jim was ultimately unhappy with that series. “That one was done with Sky, and I had limitations on what I could say, and I learnt stuff towards the end that I couldn’t get into the documentary,” Jim tells Totally Dublin.
“So, we had a lot of new information, and a different way of approaching it, and we wanted to take all the opinions that we had around them and give them an airing, rather than, This is a fact, this is a fact, this is a fact.”
While Jim was interviewing people who were suffering the injustices of homelessness at one of Focus Ireland’s Rock Against Homelessness benefit concerts, he met David Merriman, a socially-conscious documentarian, who was shooting footage of the event for Virgin Media.
David, a Dublin City native, had been a fan of Jim’s work for decades, having seen In The Name of the Father several times at the Savoy in 1993. Jim had informed him that he was interested in crafting a narrative film around the Sophie Toscan du Plantier case, and inquired if he would be interested in helping.
“It was huge!” David says of getting this opportunity. “I made my first movie ten years ago, which was a self-funded documentary about homophobia in America, and I suppose I spent a lot of years doing different things, and thinking that I kind of understood what I was doing, and then, when I started working with Jim, I realised how little I understood!”
The two spun ideas about how to approach the subject and faced a lot of initial false starts. The one consistent agreement throughout each redirection was to eschew the satisfying narratives that they detested in the true crime boom and offer something ambiguous to force audiences to consider their own beliefs and biases.
“It’s deconstructing all that stuff,” Jim says of their intent. “Like, you can see all the narrative, and plot points, and twists in most of this stuff, and it’s just like trying to find a demon and pursue them. In this case, the difficulty with true crime and documentaries is that you have to have somebody you can relate to, and it was very hard to relate to Ian.
“He was such an odd character; he wanted to be the centre of attention. So, in this, he doesn’t say anything, and he’s silent, and he’s the opposite of what he actually is, and that allowed a new kind of, I hope, view of him; a more abstract one. Not so emotional, not so based on his own stupidity and putting himself centre-stage, you know?”
The film that became Re-creation began to materialise when they took inspiration from the director Sidney Lumet (particularly his 1957 debut feature, 12 Angry Men) and the 2023 French legal drama Anatomy of a Fall. Produced on a shoestring budget, Re-creation depicts a fictional jury deliberating over the meticulous details of the real-world case, in an attempt to highlight its complexities, contradictions, and nuances to the audience as they engage with the narrative.
With this envisioned set, actually making the film was relatively expedient, with both the writing and production taking only about three weeks, respectively. “The fictional aspect of the movie is that we’re taking the evidence that’s been out there, and allowing the actors to explore them,” explains David.
“When we started this, there was no cold case review. Sophie’s family have been brilliant about keeping her memory in the media and keeping the story alive, because that’s the only way you can keep interest, to force an actual outcome.
“So, from an ethical point of view, I didn’t have any qualms about what we were doing, because we weren’t misrepresenting or creating a narrative. Of course, we were creating our version of what we believe, but it’s examining what happened, and the fictional stuff is really the characters’ back stories and that kind of thing.”
While the production was primarily financed by Sheridan’s own Hell’s Kitchen Films, the Luxembourgian-Irish co-production was supported in part by Fís Éireann/Screen Ireland and the Luxembourg Film Fund. Despite the pedigree of Sheridan and the film’s litany of established on-screen talent, such as Vicky Krieps, Aidan Gillen, Colm Meaney, and John Connors, once Re-creation was complete, they faced further difficulty in finding a distributor willing to take a chance on the challenging material.
“The only way that we can get this film out is through Omniplex,” asserts Jim. “We can’t go to RTÉ; they’re not going to put it on. We can’t go and put it on the internet; we don’t have the resources right now. So, we have to get you, and push it out, and advertise it.
“We did a deal with Omniplex because nobody else wanted to distribute it. We’re self-distributing it, not because we have an ego, but because people didn’t want to do it. We’re making the movie that nobody wants you to see, and it’s in Omniplex. That’s the pitch!”
Words: Aaron Kavanagh
Feature Image: Rich Gilligan
Re-creation is available exclusively in Omniplex Cinemas nationwide now. See omniplex.ie for screen times at your nearest branch.
