Escape from Planet Earth

It’s a story that will echo through the ages. So like, this one time, I was walking up Grafton Street and broke a heel. Devastated, alone, not to mention lopsided, I slunk into the nearest shoe emporium. And that, my friends, was the momentous occasion when I first set eyes upon my favourite ever red stilettos. You see, failure can be inspirational and improving. Not though you’d necessarily know it at the time.
“I was in a band who thought it was The Band. I played the mandolin, saxophone... I couldn’t tell you what we were up to,” admits Neil Jordan, tellingly glancing shoe-wards as he does so. Pat McCabe and Mr. Jordan are swapping war stories from early forays into the music business.
“I was much lower rent than that,” explains Mr. McCabe. “I was in an ordinary pickup band. Just country and western standards. They had really taken hold in 1963 after ‘Come Down The Mountain’ was a hit and that strain of sentimental storytelling song was suddenly everywhere in southern Ireland. You could dance to it – but it wasn’t naughty dancing, so it became acceptable.”
These early musical incarnations may not have propelled the chaps into the glitzy showband stratosphere of the ‘70s, but they did provide useful background detail for Breakfast On Pluto, their latest screen collaboration. Based on McCabe’s Booker nominated 1998 novel, the film travels alongside Patrick ‘Kitten’ Braden, a transvestite Pollyanna whose fabness is decidedly out of sync with his grim border town. Essayed with an impressive simper by Cillian Murphy in a Golden Globe nominated performance, Kitten’s haphazard misadventures unfold against a purposely and ruthlessly icky backdrop. Before you can say “Eew... it’s ‘the Troubles’”, the self-proclaimed ‘gamine’ protagonist has fallen for a bargain basement glam rocker with paramilitary connections, a desperate romance which begins with terrifyingly twee showband serenades and ends with Kitten watching helplessly as a Down’s Syndrome affected childhood friend is blown up.
Departing for '70s London in search of a mother he envisages as camp icon Mitzi Gaynor (absentee father is Liam Neeson’s parish priest), our ingenue depressingly drifts into the sex-industry, almost gets strangled by Bryan Ferry and winds up being questioned at Her Majesty’s pleasure in connection with a bombing. And, oh dear, just to add to these unfortunate circumstances, there’s the decor – a period palate which runs the gamut from beige to taupe.
“My daughter is 19 and she’s asked me if the '80s was just one great big lump of brown,” says Pat. “But in terms of creature comforts and opportunity, the stonewall '70s were far more grim so it’s not surprising it looks that way. We were on the brink of a modern world but options were still limited. You could do teaching or accounting or you could join the civil service.”
“But even now you look at Cavan where the film begins,” adds Neil. “And it’s brown, green and black. So that’s the basis for the entire visual style – adding candy colours into that earthy mix.”
“The sex is in the candy colours,” chimes Pat. “And in the parish priests.”
There is that. Regardless of tragedy or colour scheme, Breakfast On Pluto revels in the grotesquerie before throwing a feather boa on the proceedings in the manner of its Candide informed ‘heroine’. Would-be tormentors are dismissed with a bat of fake eyelashes, British interrogators are given the full Blanche Dubois treatment and those engaged in the grubby business of armed struggle are, during a memorable fantasy sequence, disabled with a purse-sized Chanel No. 5 atomiser. Life may have lumbered Kitten with a largely superfluous penis but there’s nothing to say that you can’t tuck it between your legs, don a flouncy pink baby-doll dress and march to personal victory.
“That was the thing about the culture of that time,” offers Pat. “Everywhere you went people talked about nutting that guy or stiffing this guy. It made you want to vomit. The Kitten character was a way of incorporating all the glam stuff of the era and as an affront to that tiresome, lumpen male mentality.”
As one might expect given the singular nature of the film, Breakfast On Pluto has taken a roundabout journey to cinema screens. Pat’s first draft of the screenplay proved far too strong meat for tastes at Dreamworks and the film was ultimately made with the backing of French major Pathe and a script rewritten by Neil. Surely, somewhere in this fraught pre-production period, somebody felt their toes were being tread upon? Apparently not.
“Nothing like that,” explains Neil. “I had a deal with Dreamworks and I bought the rights to this book. And they were good about it. They paid Pat considerable money to write a first draft. We sent it to them and they were gobsmacked. But we knew that already. We knew it wasn’t their sort of thing at all. And I wouldn’t have wanted to do the film with them either. We did The Butcher Boy with Warner Brothers so I knew if we went with a big American studio they would have released it badly.”
“That business with Dreamworks was insanity,” continues Mr. McCabe. “I don’t consider myself a screenwriter at all. I’m very weary of it. I don’t like the structure. I don’t write drama anymore for the same reason. I’ve devoted myself totally to language now. And I’ve no problems walking away from something once I’m getting paid.”
As with The Butcher Boy, their previous collaboration, Breakfast On Pluto is a natural marriage of sensibilities.
“It’s very simple for me,” says Neil. “When I read The Butcher Boy and I read this book, it was that kind of writing that describes things about your childhood you weren’t even aware of before. That’s what it’s all about. You look at most descriptions of Irish childhood, they follow the template provided by Frank O’ Connor or maybe Joyce, but nobody ever talks about Mars Bars or The Lone Ranger. For me, that’s what made it an extraordinary book – it demonstrated things that were around you all along.”

Breakfast On Pluto is released January 13th