Neil Jordan

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0:10Welcome to This Cultural Life, the series in which leading artistic figures reveal the most significant influences and experiences that have inspired their own creativity. I'm John Wilson and my guest in this episode is the Oscar-winning director, screenwriter and novelist Neil Jordan. He made his name in the 1980s with The Company of Wolves and Mona Lisa, for which its star Bob Hoskins won a BAFTA and Golden Globe Award. Jordan scored an even bigger critical and commercial hit worldwide with The Crying Game, which earned six Academy Award nominations, including Best Screenplay, which was won by Neil Jordan himself.

0:49His 20 feature films made over the last 40 years include Interview with the Vampire, Michael Collins and The End of the Affair.

1:01Neil Jordan, welcome to This Cultural Life. Thank you so much for having me. You were born in Sligo in Ireland in 1950 and you grew up in North Dublin. As somebody who has worked as a novelist, as a short story writer and a screenwriter as well as a director, stories are very much your trade, aren't they? Did you grow up with stories being told to you? Well, I did, yeah. I mean, I grew up in a place called Ross's Point and we moved to Dollymount, middle class district? I would say lower middle class. I'd say kind of poverty stricken middle class. Your father was a teacher wasn't he? He was a teacher yeah then he became a teacher's inspector which was kind of terrifying actually because I realised all the teachers that taught me were terrified of him you know so I had a childhood full of multiple terrors.

1:45Then children of school teachers have specific problems. There's always some measure of failure there you know. My father was full of all these educational theories and I was the absolute abnignation of all those possible theories, you know. He used to tell us ghost stories. He used to terrify the life out of me with some of them. And they weren't particularly good ghost stories. You know, they were about headless horsemen. We lived on the just edge of a huge abandoned Guinness estate. It was a kind of a tangled, overgrown, wooded area. And he used to enjoy terrifying me about strange men who would walk these places and ask you strange questions, say things like, what are you doing out at night?

2:29The day is for the living, the night is for the dead, you know, this kind of thing. Stories he was making up. Well, you know, you're a kid, you don't know what's made up or not, do you? You kind of believe everything, don't you? And I think the Ireland I grew up in was still not entirely civilised, you know? I mean, it was this kind of blasted Catholic church kind of universe, you know, wedded to a total bed of superstition in a strange way, you know. So you never really lived in a real world, really, you know. I never felt the real world impinged on me at all until I came to England, you know.

3:02I realised, oh, this is where people finish their sentences. This is where people actually make sense, you know. This is where real things happen. You've worked in a diverse array of filmic styles, including fantasy, especially with Company of Wolves an interview with the vampire. Does that go back, do you think, to your father's stories? Yeah, I think, you know, I was always impatient with reality. I've always chosen stories that actually start with realistic beginnings and kind of plough through to totally unrealistic landscapes. You know, I like to find something that begins in one place and gradually, through the manipulation of the characters or the narrative, leads into some territory that you're not prepared for, really, you know.

3:43Were you a big reader as a child? Huge, yeah, right. I grew up in a house full of books. I remember my father had entire works of George Bernard Shaw. One of them which was called Man and Superman, which obviously is a play by Shaw. I thought it was about Superman, the character, you know what I mean? So I used to read these things without understanding them when I was a kid. And I think I used to read too much. So I think I destroyed the experience of some pretty great works, you know what I mean? So by the time I was in my 20s, you know, some of those Russian things I had kind of dabbled in and misunderstood and misread probably, you know.

4:23On This Cultural Life, Neil Jordan, I asked my guest to choose the most significant creative influences and experiences that have inspired their own work. And on your list that you gave us is, I'm going to quote, my grandfather's and my mother's paintings. I grew up surrounded by them. So two generations of artists before you. Tell me about that. Well, my grandfather, I never met him. He's a very handsome man. The pictures I've seen of him, he seemed impossibly elegant. I remember going to the house. My mother grew up in Bray, which is kind of a dowdy, kind of Brighton-esque town. To the south of Dublin.

4:58South of Dublin, yeah. And I remember walking into the house and seeing a stairs, because we lived in the house without a stairs at the time, so a stairs to me was magnificent, yeah. But this stairs was painted with a mural, and there were hills of Jerusalem. I think the mural was called Christ Weeps Over Jerusalem or something like that. To me it was like entering a Marvel fantasy, you know. I mean, you know, the walls are painted by somebody with dramatic kind of vistas and kind of... It was very interesting. He also illustrated versions of Irish myths and legends for publications around 1920, 1930, yeah.

5:33And what sort of work was your mother doing? She was a very, very good landscape painter. She was nurtured by her father. She went to the college for art. When her father died, they all ran out of money, so she had to work in a china factory, you know, kind of painting. Plates. China plates and cups and stuff like that. But she regarded the art life as the only life, really. Did you want to paint yourself? I did it when I was younger, yeah, I used to paint. Were you good? I was okay, not too bad. What happened? Why didn't you continue? Because I got a beating out of me in secondary school. Literally?

6:06Literally, yeah, yeah, it was weird. They used to think you were pretentious if you were good at things, you know. And I probably wouldn't have pursued it anyway, you know. But my sister's a painter, Ethna Jordan. She's a very highly regarded painter. You've worked as a novelist and as a screenwriter as well as a director. So how important is the visual conception of a film when you're planning a new one, given this sort of artistic heritage? Well, it's kind of the first and the last thing, really. When you write a script, you start with images, you know, and you start with a series of scenes that you can actually see very clearly.

6:35Then you cast it, then you do everything else. But I mean, I started out as a short story writer. I wrote a collection of short stories called Night in Tunisia. And I wrote a novel after that called The Past, which was about a photographer. And it struck me that what I was writing was so overlaid with visual kind of description and imagery, which many people would say is not appropriate for a novelist at all. And also, I grew up in a culture that was entirely literary. And part of me wanted to escape from that, you know, because you have... I mean, I was born in Sligo. I grew up in Dublin. OK, so I was born in the Yates country, basically, you know, in the world of WB Yates and Jack Yates.

7:12I grew up by Dolly Mound Strand in the world of a portrait of an artist, a young man. So there's a kind of expectation. Well, there was both Yates and Joyce and you think these bloody crippling monsters. How do I escape them, you know? But having made 20 feature films, but also having written 10 novels and short story collection, what determines whether a story in your head becomes a screenplay or a book? Images, really. I think in the end, you know, whether something presents itself to you with kind of a set of dynamic, dramatic situations that you can see, you know. So if they're stronger visually, they become the film?

7:44Well, it's very hard to describe. I mean, I wrote a book called Mistaken. It's kind of a doppelganger story set in Dublin. And it's in a way it's about myself. It's about a kid who's from the north side has constantly been mistaken for a kid in the south side. I could never make a film out of that. You know, I just couldn't because it was so internal. I wrote another novel after that called The Drowned Detective. which I would love to make a movie out of, but nobody has given me the money to do that yet. That's interesting, isn't it? Because you have adapted so many other people's books by Graham Greene or Angela Carter.

8:16And Anne Rice. And Anne Rice, of course, with Butcher Boy. With Butcher Boy, yeah. But you haven't adapted any of your own novels. No, but I'm about to do that. The last novel I wrote was called The Well of St. Nobody, and I'm about to make a movie of that in September, I hope. because maybe I'm at the stage now where I don't know whether it's a bloody novel or a movie when I write it. Do you understand what I mean? It's like maybe they've blended in my mind in some strange way. So they've finally coalesced, the two forms. Well, I don't know. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

8:53Let's find out how you move from the literary form into the cinema. And you've chosen the Astor Cinema in Eden Quay in Dublin. So this was a place where you went to see films as part of your introduction to cinema. My father used to love movies and he used to say to me, don't care too much about the actors when you go to see a movie. Think about the directors. I had no idea what a director was. So that's in my brain in some weird way. We used to all get the bus into town. And the first film that I ever saw that I thought there's something going on that is more than pure escapism and entertainment, I think was the first Sergio Leone movie I saw.

9:29one of his spaghetti westerns. Yeah, it was a fish full of dollars. That's the first time I thought there's something going on here that's more than just pure escapism.

9:41I don't think it's nice you laughing.

9:47See, my mule don't like people laughing. It's the crazy idea you're laughing at him. Now, if you apologise like I know you're going to, I might convince him that you really didn't mean it.

10:18My parents, they used to try to supervise what I could see. So I could see a war movie, I could see a space movie, or I could see a western, okay? And there was a movie that came out called The Battle of the Sexes. I thought, this must be a great science fiction epic, you know, about these two warring planets called the sexes. You know, I said, Dad, can I go see The Battle of the Sexes? She said, no. I said, well, why not? They wouldn't explain to me. But I think the first film my mother brought me to see was called Them. Have you ever seen Them? It was a Warner Brothers epic about giant ants kind of taking over.

10:53I remember seeing it as a kid. It was absolutely terrifying. Terrifying. Like a B movie, though, wasn't it? It was a total B movie, yeah. But I remember the soundtrack chilled me. And I don't know, I think maybe in some way, I mean, Ireland was a very conflicted society. There was a lot of books being banned and all that sort of stuff. But maybe movies weren't taught to be serious enough to partake in that kind of oppressive kind of cultural monitoring of things. Did you have filmmaking ambitions at this time? I mean, as a kid. No, I didn't. I mean, nobody Irish could have at the time. I mean, because they didn't make them there.

11:21So you were soaking all this up, but it wasn't even an option that you would go into cinema. But as you say, I think you studied, didn't you, English at University College Dublin and then worked in theatre for a while alongside... I studied... Jim Sheridan as well. Jim Sheridan and myself, we had a theatre group. We used to dream of movies. And in fact, the productions we put on were always derided as being too cinematic, as if that was an insult, a term of insult, you know? Really. And Jim Sheridan, of course, went on to make Minor Foot with Daniel Day-Lewis. and made many great movies. But I did apply to the National Film School.

11:55So I'm in Dublin, living in my parents' house, and I had written some stuff, written some plays, and I applied to the National Film School. I actually got a place. I couldn't believe it. I said, oh, they're giving me a place here. But I couldn't afford to go because being Irish, you couldn't get any grant aid. Do you understand what I mean? So it was impossible. Because you were working as a labourer, from what I understand, for a long time. I was, yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, I was your average Irish dude, you know. I mean, there's no jobs available, so you do whatever comes up. And that was in London you came to?

12:21In London and Dublin, yeah, but mainly in London. And were you still writing at the time? And were you seeking inspiration or did you find inspiration? Well, there was nothing to do but write, really. I mean, we're talking about the 70s. 1970, I would have been 20. Every Irish person either went in the dole, became an alcoholic, or went to England, became a labourer, or ended up somewhere in between. Most of them ended up scribbling, scribbling stories. I mean, it's the cheapest thing to do, isn't it? it's always been the Irish kind of escape, hasn't it? Writing. Because it's not like architecture or cinema or theatre.

12:56You don't need any substructure to do that. But it's a romantic conception that Irish labourers were all writing poems and plays in a spare time. Is that true? We were all writing poems. Every bloody labourer, every guy you saw working on it. I have no idea. I have no idea. But you had a highly educated workforce. There is truth in that, actually. There is a certain amount of truth in that. How difficult did it get at that time for you? For me? Yeah. Well, very difficult. You know, you feel you've failed, don't you? You know, you've got a terrible sense of failure. And I was homeless for a brief period in London.

13:30And you feel a great sense of shame. And you get filthy. You get very dirty. And you feel so full of shame that you don't want to contact even the people that can help you. I do remember that very, very vividly. and find yourself in compromising situations, I imagine. Sometimes, yeah. But enough about that. Do you want me to go through that thing? Huh? Up to you. I was bought. I was bought into sexual slavery, yeah. I didn't quite get there. The exchange didn't happen correctly, let's put it that way. But you found yourself in a situation where somebody had presented you to a potential customer who thought that you were for sale.

14:12in some way. Well, obviously, I was standing on the... Do you want me to say this? OK. OK, so I had come over to get a flat for a bunch of people who had strange political kind of designs, which I wasn't aware of. Anyway, the money quite ran out and I ended up sleeping on the street. I think I was standing on the tube on Tottenham Court Road and two Scottish hippies comes up, a guy and a girl, and they say, you look lost, Harry, all right? I counted the action right. He said, you need a crash pad? I said, I'd love that. Yeah, I'd love somewhere to sleep tonight. I said, OK, come with us. Yeah, so they brought me to the end of the northern line or whatever bloody line I was on.

14:52We're walking down this horrible street, and we walk into the door, and they knock on the door, and there's a kind of a guy in a kind of a toweled suit with a big hairy chest. Like a kimono. Kimono kind of thing. And we walk in the door, and I say, oh. and I turn and the two Scottish people are gone. The hippies have vanished. And I realise I've been sold. There's some exchange that's taking place that I wasn't aware of, you know. Anyway, it ended up fine, but these kind of things happen, don't they, when you're... Just to be clear, you didn't go through with the part that they had envisaged...

15:28I didn't have sex with this guy. Nor did I stab him either. I didn't do either of those things. No, I got out of it yet. But I've always hated hippies since then. I never trust them, you know. How old were you at that time? I would have been 19. But I put a lot of that experience into a movie I made called Breakfast on Pluto, which Cillian Murphy plays a trans character. And one of the reasons I made that movie was because it reminded me so much of those experiences that I had when I was kind of on the skates in London a bit, you know.

16:07your next creative breakthrough was meeting the filmmaker john borman who had made point blank and deliverance and was in 1980 when you met him making his arthurian fantasy film excalibur yeah um in county wicklow when you got this call from him so what did he want from you well john John had read my short stories and he asked to see me. So I got the bus out to Ardmore Studios. Which he was running. He was based in that. Yeah, he was based there at the time. So I remember walking up this avenue and there's a bunch of porticabins there and there's a kind of a Rolls Royce that's covered in muck.

16:42I thought, oh, this is weird. I don't think I'd ever seen a Rolls Royce before. And I walk in and there's John and he proposed that we write a script together, which we did. He hired me and he paid me, actually. and I thought this is extraordinary, I'm being paid to do something that I've loved so much. He had bought the rights to a very eccentric French novel called Le Voyage de Jean au Flaherty or something like that, it was a very strange thing. And we began to write and tore it to shreds and came up with some futuristic kind of fantasy that was absolutely rather wonderful and he fell in love with it and wanted to make.

17:17But he couldn't get the money to do it. And then he said, look, I'm making this film Excalibur and he gave me this 400-page script and he said, I'd like you to go through the last draft of this with me. So I began to research all the Arthurian legend and all that sort of stuff and we began to refine his script together. Then I went to see Star Wars and I said, OK, there's a reduction of myth there. Somehow George Lucas has reduced all of this mythical kind of archetypes into something that lasted about 90 minutes. And I went to John and I said, John, look, you know, we can really get this down into a really coherent kind of nut.

17:56And he said, no, I'm off to make the movie now. I said, you can't, it's 400 pages long. He said, no, that's what I'm doing. So off he went. And I said, well, why don't I make a documentary on you making the film? And he very generously gave me a budget and I got a camera crew together. And we followed John around as he made this epic. And I made a parallel movie to his. It was kind of an extraordinary experience. It was my first time ever on a film set. Wow. That's like Hearts of Darkness 2 Apocalypse Now then, isn't it? Yeah, well it's also like being given the best film school you could ever have wished for, you know?

18:26But that's interesting, so he gave you the money, he gave you the crew. Was he still, as you were sort of a protege of his, was he checking on your rushes and what you were doing, or did he just leave you alone totally to make it? He left me alone, but he wanted me to document him. And if I take some weeks off or something, I'd say, hey, you missed a lot, where were you? He wanted me to document him doing it. I could observe the spectacle of someone wrestling with a massive project that they've dreamed of for years. Because the finished film is about three hours long, isn't it? Yeah, it's very long, very long, yeah.

18:56Too long? Well, too long, yeah, yeah. Well, I bring you back to the point of, I just saw Star Wars saying, John, John, come on, let's keep working on this. But anyway, he made this rather magnificent comic strip epic, which it was. I made my little documentary, and he didn't see it, actually, until about four years ago. Three years, three years ago. So I had a screening for John and for some of his collaborators. John had never seen it before. Until very recently, because he's now, what, 92? He began to cry watching it. He really did. He found it so emotional, you know. And it's never been released, this film?

19:32No. They used bits of it as promotional material, you know, it fell into that kind of EPK world and stuff like that. But I still have a copy of it. If anyone wants to see it, they're welcome. I used Excalibur to change that verdict. I've lost for all time the ancient sword of my father's whose power was meant to unite all men not to serve the vanity of a single man I am nothing

20:04what did he teach you about filmmaking that you then carried on into your own movies well the first thing you taught me was I was going, are you really going to do that? I'm sorry. Are you really going to, you're going to have people having breakfast in suits of armour, really? But it was, you know, the first thing you realise is the enormity of the kind of, the range of choices one has to make, you know. I suppose the second thing you realise is choice is everything. And there's something magnificent about, you know, seeing the construction of a set of dreams that individual person had it's kind of great so it wasn't about practical advice or how to frame or how to create tension or whatever it was actually about the freedom well he he just let me free in a set you let me run around his set like with bloody camera on my shoulder and so generally on somebody else's shoulder and I could photograph exactly what I wanted it was kind of amazing

20:59your next choice for this cultural life is the 1943 novel Notre Dame de Fleur Our Lady of the Flowers by the French writer Jean Genet. So when did you read this then? I read that when I was working in a railway yard. So I got a job as a porter on a train depot. And then I left that job and I was claiming the dole in Gardner Street. In both contexts you always had to hide your books. There was nothing to do on this train depot here. Absolutely nothing. So I'd say to the supervisor, look, can I just crawl into this carriage here and read a book for a bit, they'd say, OK, but don't let anyone catch you, you know, keep your book in the paper bag.

21:39So pretend it's your lunch. So I'd do that, yeah. And then if you go to Gardner Street to collect the dole, you also can't have a book because if you have a book in your hands, you're either a student or an aspirant writer or you have a possibility of another employment. So again, you have to pretend your book is your lunch and keep it in your brand paper bag, you know. That book kind of ripped apart the veils of narrative for me in a way. you realise that Jeunet was the great outlaw, wasn't he? Well, it's a sort of autobiographical novel about the French... It's a novel about a guy in a prison having sexual fantasies about people that he then writes about and skipping between the fantasised characters and the real characters.