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Like many people in Ireland, John Crowley knows people who immigrated to America.
"We had relatives who we affectionately called 'The Yanks,' " Crowley said. "They would come back once a year. They would go in search for whatever they wanted from their trip. We wondered why they would be shopping for Irish sausages when they could be having a hot dog on Fifth Avenue."
That sense of having one foot on each side of the Atlantic — caught between Irish roots and American hopes — is at the heart of the movie Crowley directed, "Brooklyn," which opens Wednesday in Salt Lake City.
"Brooklyn" is adapted from Irish author Colm Tóibín's 2009 novel of the same name. Set in the 1950s, the story follows Eilis Lacey (played by Saoirse Ronan), a young shop clerk who leaves her small Irish town for New York and a chance at a better life. After getting a job and enrolling in night school, Eilis meets and falls for Tony (Emery Cohen), an Italian-American plumber. When she receives bad news from home, she must sail back to Ireland — where she is courted by Jim (Domhnall Gleeson), a local pub owner.
Crowley, who directed the legal drama "Boy A" and the conspiracy thriller "Closed Circuit," initially read Tóibín's novel for pleasure. "I found it profoundly moving," he said in a recent phone interview from Los Angeles. "I think it's a very, very important story about Ireland, and about Ireland's relationship with America."
When he was approached about directing the film version, Crowley read the screenplay, adapted by Nick Hornby — who has successful careers as a screenwriter ("Wild," "An Education") and a novelist ("High Fidelity," "Fever Pitch," "About a Boy").
Before reading the screenplay, Crowley said he worried, "Oh god, what if it's a quarter of what it needs to be." When he read it, he said, "I was stunned by how clear-sighted it was, how true it was to the spirit of the novel. … Everything that was important, that was dramatizable, was in there."
He points to an early scene, when Eilis first enters America through Ellis Island.
"She goes through that door, and it's dreamy and mythic — a land that's totally about possibility," Crowley said. "Then she sees those guys [in a soup kitchen] who built the tunnels and bridges. They have nothing left, but they can't go home, either."
The story is also about how Eilis blossoms in America. In the third act, when she returns to Ireland, "she has a confidence, an outgoing ability, far away from the quiet mousy girl she was before," Crowley said.
To capture Eilis' evolution, the director's first thought was of the 21-year-old Irish actress Saoirse Ronan, the star of "Hanna," "The Host," "The Lovely Bones" and "Atonement" (for which she received a supporting-actress Oscar nomination at age 13).
Ronan holds dual citizenship in Ireland and the United States (she was born in the Bronx to Irish parents and raised in Ireland) and, according to Crowley, had an experience similar to Eilis' just before shooting the movie.
"She had moved out [of Ireland], went to London, got a flat, got a boyfriend and she got homesick," Crowley said. "That's one of the things the film gets from the book: Homesickness is a universal condition. [You feel like] you're not from the country you're from, but you're not from the country you move to, either."
The same thing happened to Crowley, he said, when he left Ireland in his late 20s to direct plays in London.
"When you go to a city and you no longer have your return ticket, it looks very different," he said.
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