Hot Press interview: Neil Jordan

Neil Jordan wholeheartedly agrees with the smoking ban, but that doesn’t stop him bumming a cigarette from Hot Press. “I actually think it’s a very good idea,” he admits, abstractedly picking the cardboard ‘No Smoking’ sign off the coffee table in front of him and expertly flicking it into the empty fireplace of his Shelbourne suite. “I mean, most people want to give them up, don’t they?”
“But not you, obviously,” I comment, giving him an illegal light.
“I don’t really smoke very much,” the 54-year-old shrugs, his lightly tanned face crinkling slightly as he inhales. “It’s really only when I’m doing this sort of thing.”
“This sort of thing” is the promotional round for his just-published novel Shade – his first book since 1994’s critically acclaimed Sunrise With Sea Monster. Although primarily known as an award-winning filmmaker (he picked up an Oscar in 1993 for his script for The Crying Game), Neil Jordan actually began his stellar artistic career as a prose writer.
Born in Sligo but raised and educated in Dublin, he worked briefly as a teacher in London in the early 1970’s before returning to Ireland and setting up a writers’ co-op. When he was just 26, his debut collection of short stories Night In Tunisia won the Guardian Fiction Prize. Dabbling for a time in theatre, he went on to publish two acclaimed novels – The Past and The Dream of a Beast – before turning his considerable talents to film-making.
His 1982 cinematic debut Angel (which starred Stephen Rea and Honor Heffernan) was one of the first internationally successful Irish productions and, over the last twenty years or so, he has been responsible for a string of dark, edgy, provocative and, according to his friend John Banville, “slightly sick” movies – The Company of Wolves, Mona Lisa, In Dreams, Interview With The Vampire, Michael Collins and The Miracle being just a few. His most recent film was The Good Thief – a remake of Melville’s Bob Le Flambeur – released in early 2003 and starring Nick Nolte.
More recently though, he’s returned to his first vocation – writing prose so dazzling you’d almost need to wear, ahem, shades reading it. As the title hints, Shade is a ghost story – though, unsurprisingly, not one of the Stephen King variety. It’s more the tale of a haunting. The story is narrated by the ghost of Irish actress Nina Hardy, who’s murdered in the book’s opening paragraph on the 14th of January, 1950 (the author’s own birthday, as it happens).
We gradually discover that, following a successful acting career on both sides of the Atlantic, Hardy had only recently returned to her childhood home on the Boyne Estuary. Unfortunately, when she’s brutally murdered by her mentally unbalanced childhood friend, she doesn’t find peace in death, but is instead forced to revisit the most painful moments of her life – and essentially winds up haunting herself.
Written in a highly stylised and literary fashion, Shade is a superbly dark and mesmerising portrait of an Irish childhood and a sad tale of innocence lost.
It’s also a powerful and tragic love story but, needless to say, coming from the pen of one of Ireland’s most intelligent and provocative artists, it’s far from being a conventional one.

OLAF TYARANSEN: It’s been ten years since you last published a novel. How long did it take you to write Shade?
NEIL JORDAN: About two years. I started it shortly after I’d finished The Good Thief. I finished it a while ago but it takes a long time for books to come out – longer than movies. What happened was I was about to make a movie – about the Borgia family – and the financing fell through. The financing fell through for a lot of movies after 9/11. But I’d been making notes for this book and writing bits and pieces. So when the film fell through I decided to just go for the book.
Obviously script-writing is very sparse and dialogue-driven, whereas the writing in Shade is very literary and poetic. Do you prefer writing fiction to scripts?
I do, yeah. Well, no. They’re different. It’s like an engagement with language. I suppose when I come from a movie and a gap of 10 years in my fiction, I just welcome the immersement in the English language.
Does it flow easily for you?
Yeah, it does. It flows very naturally. But I mean, with a novel it’s a matter of finding what it’s about. There’s a lot of luck in these things. You know, you could start with a premise and it could lead everywhere or nowhere. And in the case of Shade, I started with an image of a haunting and a bit of a sense of a woman who’s killed and realises that she was the ghost of her younger self. So time wrapped around itself, in a way.
It reminded me at times of John Banville’s The Newton Letter – just that whole dark, gothic, countryside feel.
Probably, yeah. I like Banville’s work a lot. He’s a great writer, John. But I set it in a totally nondescript part of the country – around the Boyne Estuary and stuff like that – which hasn’t any particular beauty, but I do remember as a kid. And it stuck in my brain somehow. So the book was like a reinvention of that landscape and scenery that I could remember as a child. But it was a great pleasure to set it there.
Did you visit it while you were writing?
No. I did it all from memory really. The landscape has changed entirely anyway.
Is there a huge difference between writing a script and a novel?
Huge, yeah. It’s very hard to explain. With a script, you can see it in your head. You can see the entire shape of the thing. And often I write scripts very, very quickly.
How quickly?
God, I’d be embarrassed to say really. Less than a week? Sometimes. I mean, sometimes I sit down and don’t stop writing until I’m finished. Work all day and night, the whole way through.
Do you use any stimulants to keep working at that pace?
No, no [laughs and shakes head]. But it’s just the way it happens. I think it’s something to do with the fact that most movies are a bit like a piece of music really – you know, you can see the beginning, the middle and the end. Whereas with books, you really don’t know what it is until the novel tells you what it wants to be. I start with a series of images . . . and obviously the urge to write a book.
In the case of this one, it was when I began to find the voice of the woman, Nina. She was describing her death and it seemed like an educated, oddly observant voice. Then I realised that she was an actress with this way of looking at herself as if she was a third person, you know that kind of thing? And it gradually came together in that way. But I’d written a hundred pages before I realised what period it was set in. At one stage I was gonna have her born in 1950 and die in the year 2000.
Did you have a regular work routine during the two years it took to write?
To write a novel like that you’ve got to say, “I’m gonna do this until it’s finished.” You’ve gotta stop all other activity. I have to anyway. I just stopped all prospects of doing anything else until the thing is finished. But I think you can only write that kind of prose for about two or three hours a day really. You can’t do any more – or at least I can’t.
Do you ever suffer from writer’s block?
No, I don’t think so. But the kind of surge that I go into when I’m writing scripts never really happens with a piece of fiction. Well, except maybe for short stories – but I haven’t written a short story in a long time.
Do you see yourself primarily as a writer or a filmmaker?
I see myself as a storyteller, really. I see myself as somebody who writes and directs movies, and as somebody who writes prose. The truth of the matter is if you’re . . . [pauses]. Anybody who wants to make movies and live a creative life in movies . . . at this present point in time it’s probably impossible, because most film directors that I know end up doing about one film every five years. Now, I’ve been lucky and I’ve made generally about a movie a year. But even at that, if I didn’t write, if I didn’t have the option of writing fiction – you know, when movies kind of fail you, or the industry doesn’t let you make them anymore – I don’t know what I’d do. If I just made movies, I wouldn’t consider myself fully occupied really.
Do you have any other artistic outlets? I know that you have a big collection of guitars. . .
Guitars? Yeah, yeah, I do. But I wouldn’t consider myself a musician. I play music but it’s not the same thing [laughs].
You used to play in a band with Niall Stokes, didn’t you?
Yeah, I did. I used to play the mandolin, the guitar and the saxophone. I started playing the saxophone, just doing these rock’n’roll riffs behind Niall and Dermot [Stokes]. And then I got into the saxophone seriously, for a while. But I took it up too late. What I really played was the classical guitar.
Do you socialise with other writers much?
Yeah, yeah – I meet lots. I meet John Banville, Pat McCabe, Dermot Healy. . . I meet a lot of them because I work with a lot of them. I mean, about six months ago I bought the rights to Hugo Hamilton’s book [The Speckled People]. The best thing that Ireland has, really, are its writers, you know. There is a community there.
You founded a Dublin writers’ co-op in the early 70’s, didn’t you?
I did yeah. I started that and we published a few books, until it collapsed into argument.
Is it true that the reason you returned to Ireland from London in 1974 was because a relative of yours was killed in the Dublin-Monaghan bombings?
Em . . . yeah. I lived in England and came back in 1974. Basically my wife’s aunt was killed in the bombings. It was a strange experience because it was the old mailboat then – and every single person on the boat was returning because of the bombings. There was about 28 people killed, wasn’t there? So you can imagine how many relatives they would have had. All of them would have had family living in England. So it was a shocking experience, really. And it’s kind of shocking that it’s been brushed under the carpet.
Are you following the inquiry now?
I am, yeah. Well, it was a Fianna Gael- Labour government at the time, with Conor Cruise O’Brien and Desmond O’Malley, wasn’t it? And Cosgrave and stuff, wasn’t it?
Actually, I was three years old at the time so I can’t say for sure.
You were three, were you? [laughs]. But it’s quite shocking . . . that’s what I find disturbing about this country, because you’ve got two different parties – you know, really – but none of them have clean hands.
You’re quite political in your writing. . .
Not really, no.
Well, historically political . . . films like Michael Collins . . .
Maybe, yeah. But I’ve never written about politics really. You know, I’m not a communist or anything like that. I’m not a neo-liberal or a neo-conservative. I’m not even whatever Bob Geldof is, you know what I mean? But . . . it’s odd living here and seeing all the corruption and things going on, and realising that it’s all spectrums of the political landscape – not only Fianna Fail. Which is probably why they’ve persisted so long.
Why are you still living here?
Well, I lived in Los Angeles for a while and I suppose when I made all those films in London, I really lived in London – Company of Wolves and Mona Lisa, stuff like that. I suppose I’m really here because my kids have grown up here.
How many kids do you have?
I’ve five kids. The eldest is 28 and the youngest is nine. I mean, my two daughters have grown up, but I’ve three young kids so that might keep me here [laughs]. But I never intended to live so long here. It just ended up that way.
Do you travel much?
I do, yeah. I travel a lot. But when I was writing the book, I was rooted here. I’ve been here for the last four or five years. For the last few years I’ve been here for a greater length of time than I ever have before.
Can you speak another language?
No. I can speak Latin [laughs]. I intersperse it with bits of French and Italian. I’d love to learn another language. When I was researching the Borgia movie, I had to research Machiavelli and I began to teach myself Italian. It was brilliant – I was learning the grammar and all of that. And then the movie fell through so . . . [shrugs]
I was talking to Galway-based filmmaker Justin McCarthy the other day and he told me that some jealous Irish directors actually held protests outside the Angel premiere in 1982. Is that true?
There was, yeah. It just seemed obligatory. The Angel thing was a function of the fact that so many people had been wanting to make films and not been able to get to the point where they could make a feature movie. So when I did it with what seemed repellent ease, everybody got outraged because they thought I was a writer. But actually the only reason I got to do it was because I was a writer.
You insisted on directing it, didn’t you?
I did, yeah. I showed to Channel 4 and they loved the script and they said they wanted to make it. And I’d had one or two experiences of seeing my scripts turned into movies – or rather short TV films – and I hadn’t enjoyed it that much. And I just thought, if I ever do this again, I’m gonna direct it myself. So I said to Channel 4, “I’m glad you want to make it, but I want to direct it.” They were a bit taken aback. And I’d asked John Boorman would he produce it. . .
You worked with him on Excalibur, didn’t you?
I did, yeah. I was kind of a script consultant. I went through the last draft of the script with John. Anyway, I’d shown him the script and asked him to produce it and he said he would. So when I told the Channel 4 people, “I know you think I’m inexperienced but Boorman’s gonna produce it for me”, they kind of went “OK”. Then when I went back to John and told him, “We’ve got the money for the movie,” I think he was really surprised [laughs]. But that’s the way it happened. And then when we made it, it caused a stir of complaint and outrage and protests. I should be honoured, I suppose. Bit like O’Casey, except for different reasons. But it’s probably an honour as an Irish writer, or an Irish artist, to be pilloried in public with their first few works.
Well, you probably showed a lot of them up by having the cheek to actually do something, rather than just talking about it . . .
Probably, yeah. But I didn’t mean to show anybody up really. Back then, there was a movement of independent filmmakers and the presumption was that you came from the craft. You know, that was your entry into making films. Even within the unions. I mean, somebody in the union tried to stop me making it, saying that I wasn’t a member of the Director’s Guild. And there was a director’s guild but there were very few directors practising. A lot of them just made commercials and stuff like that.
And I think they didn’t realise that actually the key to getting a feature film made is the writing of it really. But it was odd, that. It was almost like the film–making community were kind of obeying the . . . what’s the word? . . . It was like they had the mindset of an earlier generation, from the ‘40s and ‘50s. You know that kind of embittered, unachieved writer who used sit in McDaid’s? It was almost like that. You don’t find that in writers, you don’t find that in the theatrical community. It’s an odd thing really.
But there are really good people here now, really good filmmakers. People like Damien O’Donnell. And people like John Crowley, who’s just produced Intermission. He’s very positive. Maybe if you stay too long here, it comes with the water – or maybe the Guinness!
Are you temperamental?
Not really. I don’t find it a very rewarding function, really.
Skipping ahead to your most recent movie, although critically acclaimed, The Good Thief wasn’t a huge box office hit. Do you think it was affected by the anti-French sentiment in America at the time?
Well, it suffered a bit [laughs]. I’d go on Fox News and they’d be like [adopts haughty American tone] – “So France, huh? Drugs, huh? This guy seems to have hygiene problems!” You know. And then Nick [Nolte] got himself arrested. But the movie was very well received. It did OK at the box office but it could’ve done a lot better.
I love the soundtrack to that film.
Yeah. I chose that myself actually. A lot of that French-Arabic hip-hop stuff is brilliant, isn’t it? But the funny thing was, with a lot of these tracks, when I went to get clearance for them nobody knew where the artists were. They seemed to have made a few things, made a bit of a splash, and then vanished. But it was lovely putting that together.
What kind of music do you listen to?
Well, everything really. But at the moment the only interesting thing musically is Dr. Dre. I’m not interested in anything else, just the stuff he does and the people he works with. When I hear those strange little sounds beneath this hip-hop shit, and haven’t got a clue what’s going on, I think there’s a musical intelligence there. I suppose I like Radiohead a bit. And I listen to classical music. And a bit of jazz.
Do you enjoy your celebrity?
Well, as a film director and a writer you’re not really a celebrity. I think in the future people will pay not to be famous. It’s getting kinda silly. The culture has gone a bit weird that way. It’s an odd one, isn’t it? Popular culture has kind of taken over the world in a way. But do I enjoy celebrity? I enjoy the community of filmmakers and the community of writers, I enjoy being part of that. But I wouldn’t say I’m a celebrity really.
Have you ever been tempted to do a cameo in one of your own films?
No, never been tempted. Actually, maybe I’d like to try it once – just to have the experience of inhabiting a different person.
The last time we spoke, you were talking about doing a film about Roger Casement. . .
I was thinking of it, yeah. And I began to look into it and, after having made Michael Collins, I realised that actually the way to do it would be to do a ten or twelve hour TV series – to do a twelve hour movie, essentially. Sometimes with those kind of historical subjects that might be the way to do it – the way Bergman did Scenes From A Marriage and then reduced it into a movie. But Casement kind of led an essentially undramatic life – except in private, you know, except at the very end. It’d be a fascinating thing to do. But the time at the moment, the zeitgeist in Hollywood is not for putting large amounts of money into complex historical subjects.
What about the new Alexander The Great movie?
Well, that probably won’t be very complex. Or historical! [laughs]
Anne Rice famously had a problem with your casting of Tom Cruise in Interview With A Vampire, didn’t she?
She liked it in the end. The thing is that Anne Rice is a very famous woman. At the time that I made that movie, I think an Anne Rice novel was being sold once every 28 seconds somewhere around the world. And she regarded her characters as real life people. When she met me she said, “Lestat wants you to make this movie.” But I loved the book, I thought it was wonderful. And she didn’t agree with my casting of Tom. And I discussed it with Tom and we agreed that there was something really interesting you could do there.
Cruise is actually a far better actor than people give him credit for, isn’t he?
There’s depths to that man. He’s one of those actors who carries the entire meaning of the movie. He’s such a big star. But he was great to work with. And Brad Pitt was amazing as well.
Withnail & I director Bruce Robinson wasn’t particularly happy with the changes you made to his script of In Dreams. Were you happy with the way the film finished up?
Yeah, I was, actually – kind of. It was a story that Steven Spielberg came up with and I think he asked Bruce to write it. Then they sent it to me and I rang up Bruce and said, “Look , if you wanna do this then just tell me and I’ll get out of the way really quickly.” DreamWorks really wanted me to work with them, you know? And he said [adopts English accent], “No man, it’s cool – it’s fine!” And actually he was lying because he was really pissed off in the end.
Did you read his account of it in Smoking In Bed?
I didn’t read it but I heard he was annoyed. But he didn’t say it to me. The problem was that the story didn’t make a lot of sense. Steven’s idea was really about the psychic connection between a serial killer and a woman. I think really what he was thinking about was these psychics who’re used to work out crimes. And Bruce came up with this quite compelling and sick thing, which I made as compelling and as sick as I could make it. But the critics in America didn’t like it at all. It was kind of unpleasant subject matter – child murder and stuff like that. But I thought the movie was good. I liked the movie in a strange way.
You made a short Beckett film recently, didn’t you?
I made Not I, yeah. With Julianne [Moore]. It was an interesting project. It was [Michael] Colgan’s idea – a very good idea. In a strange way I think it exposed the limitations of Beckett’s work. I know Beckett’s like a secular saint, but having directed that Not I thing, I thought it was too long. The text was too long – there was too much repetition in it. I mean, I love Beckett and admire him so much but to direct his words for all those different cameras, it was interesting seeing how it just barely sustained it.
Who would be your biggest influence as a filmmaker?
Em . . . it’s very hard to say. I mean the one that was probably closest to my sensibilities when I started making movies was Nicholas Ray – you know, They Live By Night and Rebel Without A Cause. But when I was 18, 19, 20 in Dublin I used to watch all the [Akira] Kurosawa movies, the [Ingmar] Bergman movies. I used to go and see all these brilliant Japanese films.
Have you seen Kill Bill Vol 2?
Yeah. I think it’s a good movie, but it’s oddly adolescent. You know, is the world full of teams of female assassins that we don’t know about, jetting off to Tokyo and Paris with swords, killing people? I don’t think so. It’s like it gives young males the pleasure of watching basically chop-socky movies with a bit of French post-modernism in the dialogue. It’s a winning combination obviously. But Pulp Fiction was a great movie, I think – it was one of those defining films really. It’s not particularly well composed visually or anything like that, but the dynamic of the characters and the dialogue and the wraparound story was brilliant. But, at the moment, movies aren’t the place to look for certain kinds of illumination.
Are novels?
Some novels are.
Have you read Houellebecq?
Michel Houellebecq? He’s got a house down beside me in Cork – on Beara Island. He’s very, very good, I think. I don’t know him but I have read his three books. He does let the logic of the narrative go exactly where it wants – and with him it goes to very strange places – but he’s very interesting. But there’s nothing as interesting as that in contemporary movies really, I don’t think.
Did you like The Lord Of The Rings?
I did, yeah. The whole epic of it I thought was great. But the thing about films is – something that Bergman said – there’s always something happening in cinema. And there actually still is – even though your average Hollywood movie costs a $100 million dollars now.
Are you competitive in terms of film – or does that competition exist?
Oh yeah, it’s the most competitive thing in the world. It really is – it’s totally competitive. It’s all driven on ego. But I kind of exist in a twilight zone – it’s not Hollywood and it’s not European cinema. So I don’t know who I compete with really [laughs].
Have you seen the Simpsons, where Mayor Quimby announces that, “The chick in The Crying Game is really a man”?
No, I didn’t. That was a long time ago. People told me but I didn’t see it.
Do you get to see many movies?
When I was in London I used to watch 12-15 movies every weekend. But what you get in Ireland is kind of disgraceful. We’ve a huge movie-going population, but the actual movies that are available to see through the distribution system are actually what you’d get in any mid-western city in the United States. It’s not good here, really. The IFI is doing its best, but it’s not like living in a major cosmopolitan city. Kinda sad really.
What do you think of the changes in Ireland over the last decade?
They’ve created something that’s almost culture-less really. I know in terms of movies that Ireland’s lost its glow for international production companies.
Surely it was only ever really about money and tax breaks?
No. It was also about the fact that it was an interesting place to go to and stuff. You know, if you said to a bunch of Hollywood guys that you were gonna make a movie in Ireland, they’d go, ‘Great, I always wanted to go there’. Ireland had a happening thing for a while, didn’t it? Dublin was a bit the way people look at Iceland now. But now people want to go to New Zealand or Italy.
Which of your works are you happiest with?
It’s always the current piece of work, so at the moment it’s that [indicates copy of Shade on table]. And the two scripts that I’m about to do, I think they’re lovely. You know, but I’m really glad to have written that book. I like it – and I’d love to do more of it.
Is there anything you’ve done that you now dislike?
That I’ve done? Well, it’s hard . . . The only movie that was a total mess from my point of view was High Spirits. That was kind of . . . mangled from the word go really. I never saw the finished film, you know what I mean? By the time the interference at an executive level was finished, I never sat back and watched the whole movie the way it got cut. So I don’t know what that movie was or could’ve been. I just know that it was a very noisy piece of work that a lot of kids seem to like [laughs].
Do you revisit your stuff much?
No, I don’t. Oh, with DVD you have to now. So I’ve had a look at Mona Lisa and The Crying Game again because I’m doing a commentary on them. Same with The Butcher Boy. I’d love to do a commentary on Company of Wolves actually – I’d love to do a DVD on that. They’re great – DVD’s last forever!
What’s next in the pipeline for you?
I’m doing a movie with Sony. They want me to do a big movie, it’s kind of a fairy–tale thing and it needs an enormous amount of preparation. It’s slightly like Company of Wolves but more eccentric. But before I do that, they’ve given me permission to do an Irish movie so I might do a kind of medium budget Irish movie in the Autumn. It’s based on a novel by Pat McCabe called Breakfast On Pluto. It’s quite outrageous. Kinda wild – an alternative history of the ‘80s. It could be great actually. I’m having conversations with producers about it.
Would you consider making a movie out of Shade?
No. I’d consider making movies out of the numerous scripts I’ve written [laughs]. But it’d be impossible to do Shade. Having lived with it as a book for two years, it’d be impossible. I dunno how I could make it into a movie.

[photography: Liam Sweeney]