The Mighty Quinns

In the beginning it was the Lumieres, later on the Warners, and more recently the Coens, the Hugheses and the Farrellys. Brothers sometimes collaborate to make movies, and in a business known for being cutthroat, working with a sibling is like having a comrade in arms.

Enter the brothers Quinn--Aidan, Declan and Paul--and their tragically romantic drama “This Is My Father,” which opens in theaters today.

Aidan is, of course, the most famous of the three. He’s been acting in films for 15 years and has garnered praise for his turns in “Michael Collins,” “Avalon,” “Legends of the Fall” and the 1985 television movie “An Early Frost.”

Declan, a noted cinematographer, is known to cineastes as the artist behind such visually stunning films as “Leaving Las Vegas,” “Kama Sutra” and “Vanya on 42nd Street.”

The youngest of the three, Paul, is making his writing and directing debut with “This Is My Father.”

The film stars James Caan as a middle-aged Chicago schoolteacher who goes to Ireland in search of the father he has never known. Aidan portrays Caan’s father, a poor tenant farmer’s stepson, in the flashback sequences that reveal the 1939 courtship of ill-starred lovers Kieran and Fiona.

It opened in Ireland to great acclaim in January and has grossed more than $1 million.

“We thought the Irish would be our harshest critics, but the response has been fantastic,” says Aidan. “And it’s still running after 16 weeks.” (The film won the best first feature award at the Galway Film Festival last summer.)

Declan, 41, describes how the project came together. “Paul sent me the script, and I’m always a little bit reticent; I get a lot of scripts that don’t get made. But I loved it and told Paul I wanted to make it, and so did Aidan.”

Paul, 39, acknowledges the risk his brothers took in collaborating with their less-experienced brother. “Because it was a family project I really sensed that the work Aidan and Declan were doing so went beyond any other film they’ve worked on in terms of time and effort and love. It was never just a job.”

The brothers, sons of Irish immigrants, grew up in Rockford, Ill., and, for a few years, in County Offaly, Ireland. They have two other siblings, Marian, an actress who lives in Sligo, Ireland, and Robert, a landscaper who lives in Illinois.

Their father, now retired, was a professor of English literature, specializing in Irish literature, at Rock Valley College in the Chicago suburbs.

“You couldn’t go far in our house without tripping over some book by O’Casey or Yeats or Joyce,” muses Aidan, 40.

Their father instilled in them a love of literature and a penchant for high standards, but their mother was the storyteller in the family.

“My mother was great with the stories. She kept us entertained with her memories of growing up,” says Paul.

In fact, it was one of these stories from his mother’s youth that inspired Paul to write “This Is My Father.”

“I started writing this script in 1984 based on a story my mother used to tell us about a man and a girl she knew when she was a little girl. It was a relationship that the girl’s mother, a widow, was against, and there was a curse involved. I went to Ireland to do a little research, but nobody in the village would talk about it, even though it had happened 45 years earlier.”

With so little to go on, Paul set the script aside and moved to Chicago, where he roomed with fledgling actor Aidan. The brothers attended the drama workshops of Byrne and Joyce Piven, where they met John Cusack and the Pivens’ son, Jeremy.

“John and I created a theater company in Chicago, New Crime Productions,” Paul says. After John brought the film branch of New Crime to Los Angeles, he adds, “I joined up with him about a year and a half later and worked as John’s script reader /development guy for four years.”

The experience of being a “D-boy” and reading piles and piles of mostly dismal screenplays is what prompted Paul to pick up the script he’d started almost 10 years earlier.

“Once I developed the character that James Caan plays in the film, it gave me a context to tell this 1939 Irish love story to a modern audience.”

They shot the film, which was financed in part by the governments of Ireland and Canada, on location in Ireland during the summer of 1997 in County Wicklow.

Paul, who initially was more at ease with the actors than with “blocking” and setting up shots, looked to Declan, who has the most technical filmmaking experience, for guidance during the shoot. “Declan’s got a gift, and his connection to Ireland is really intimate. He was able to capture, visually, the interior soul of the place.”

“I’ve worked with a lot of first-time directors, and it’s a different experience each time. Paul has a strong theatrical background. He listened to a lot of suggestions from me and the assistant director and Aidan. It was an accelerated learning experience, and by the middle of the film he really got it.”

The film has received strong word of mouth among their group of high-profile friends that includes Liam Neeson, Meryl Streep, John Lithgow, Sandra Bullock as well as Cusack (who has a small role in the film).

But it was the reaction at a very intimate Thanksgiving evening screening that Paul most cherishes.

“I showed my parents a rough cut at Declan’s house, and I watched them very carefully. I could see my mom crying and nodding. My dad was silent, and when it was over he got up, walked into the kitchen and, with his back turned to me, I could see his shoulders shaking. He went into the kitchen to have a cry. I went behind him and gave him a big hug. They were thankful and proud. It was a world that they remembered, and they didn’t expect that.”