The screen writer

Lacking any serious competition as Ireland’s pre-eminent director, Neil Jordan returns to action after a three-year hiatus with the deceptively simple heist-movie The Good Thief. A clever reworking of Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1955 crime caper Bob Le Flambeur, Jordan’s film boasts a winning turn from Hollywood wildman Nick Nolte as Bob, a recovering addict with a masterplan to rob a Monte Carlo casino. Having fashioned a fiendishly clever fake robbery in order to throw the police off the scent of his real plans, Bob assembles an impressive array of Eurotrash to help realise his crooked ambitions.

It’s an unusually generic film for Jordan, a gifted visual stylist given to flights of fantastical, imaginative fancy, as illustrated by the dreamscapes of The Company Of Wolves, The End Of The Affair, and probably the best Irish movie ever made, The Butcher Boy.

Indeed, Jordan has never seemed overly bound by reality as a filmmaker. Even his works which directly reference history or politics, like his Northern Ireland based debut Angel, or Michael Collins, are prone to drift towards contemplation, engaging with emotional and metaphysical realities, as opposed to earthbound, mundane concerns.

Even an early disastrous stint in Hollywood – replete with nightmarish interference from producers – which resulted in the misfires that were High Spirits and We’re No Angels, did little to dull the director’s dreamy, idiosyncratic impulses. He soon returned to form with the Oscar-winning The Crying Game, and hit an arguable career high in 1999 with the release of his supremely moving adaptation of Graham Greene’s The End Of The Affair.

In contrast to the prevailing dynamic of much of his work, Jordan in person is down-to-earth and linguistically precise. He’s also as resolutely un-Hollywood as his Good Thief leading man, the greatly talented Nick Nolte, as he outlines during the course of our meeting.

TB: Going by Angel, which slyly references Le Samourai, you seem to be a big Jean Pierre Melville fan. Didn’t that make it difficult remaking Bob Le Flambeur?

NJ: Yeah, I do like Melville. Definitely. It wasn’t as daunting as you’d think though, because the original film was so tiny. Really small. There’s almost nothing there. So I was asked to do this, and I agreed, or at least I agreed to try, and then suddenly they bought the rights and that was expensive. So then I just had to get on with it and I had to basically think of a way I could make something without trashing the Melville movie, and I came up with the idea of a double plot.

TB: Doubles and duplicates seem to be everywhere in your movie...

NJ: Yeah, the whole thing is in doubles. Basically, I decided that I was kind of making a fake, and the movie was about pictures that were fake, and a robbery that was fake, so everything just got doubled up, and then twins were thrown in there as well. It became a kind of game with the original film, so everything Melville did, I did twice.

TB: It’s probably your most generic film to date – did you find that quite confining?

NJ: Yeah, I’ve never done anything like it before. It’s very difficult to do that kind of stuff. It’s very easy to be dark – you just follow the dark path. It’s easy for me anyway. So the best thing about this movie for me is that it starts as a film noir, but it has a happy ending. Someone has said that it’s probably the only film noir that has a happy ending, so that needed a kind of adroitness, a sleight of hand. So that was quite difficult to do.

TB: Nick Nolte puts in a virtuoso performance. How did you find working with him?

NJ: He was great. I had written this character, a recovering addict, using the programme and language of twelve steps, but in an immoral way. Like when he walks into the Narcotics Anonymous meeting and then straight out the back door because it’s just a ruse to fool the police. So, it was a very complicated character, and it’s the kind of film where you could cast Bruce Willis or Harrison Ford, or any of these people, but I thought that if I could find the right actor, I would direct myself. So I met Nick in San Francisco. I saw him in a Sam Shepard play and I met him afterwards and thought – this is as close as you can get to the character. He has a history of addiction himself, and you’ll never meet anyone less at home with the prevailing culture of Hollywood.

TB: He’s always seemed to have a persona more like that of an ageing rock-star than a Hollywood leading man...

NJ: Yeah, Nick’s had a life, hasn’t he? But he’s definitely one of the best actors in America, but because he doesn’t do the Hollywood thing that much, he doesn’t get nearly enough opportunities to strut his stuff really.

TB: And the rest of the cast is a real Euro-pudding mix. How did you assemble them all together?

NJ: Well, when you want a mix like that, you just go to Paris. Basically, they were all in Paris, except for the two Polish twins. I met Gerard Darmon (Betty Blue), Tcheky Karyo (Nikita, GoldenEye), Said Taghmaoui (Three Kings, Hideous Kinky) – and they all really wanted to be in a movie like this. And then Emir Kusturica (the Sarajevo born director of Black Cat, White Cat and Arizona Dream), of course.

TB: Was he easier to work with as an actor, because he has a near-legendary bark as a director?

NJ: Has he, really? That’s funny, I never knew that. He’s a lovely guy, normally. He’s a big huge Serbian bear, and he was appalled that I was doing reams of dialogue in single takes. The prospect of learning all those lines – he was not happy having to learn the whole lot. But he liked his character, because it’s the kind of figure that shows up a lot in American movies – the tech-head – nerdy, wimpy guys with big glasses. So this was the big, huge Eastern European equivilent.

TB: And how did you discover newcomer Nutsa Kukhianidze?

NJ: Well, I was looking for a young kid, and around the Mediterranean, there are just thousands of kids from Albania or Georgia milling around. She had done one other movie before which I hadn’t seen, called Stolen Kisses. She just had extraordinary poise. I was looking for that kind of gamene youthfulness, and you either have it or you don’t. It can’t be faked, and it’s quite a devastating quality.

TB: Though he’s not in this movie, the most established relationship you have with an actor is with Stephen Rea. What is it about him that enables you to work so well together?

NJ: Well, I have written several parts specifically for him, like with Angel and The Crying Game. It’s a relationship where we both started out together, and I have certain instincts that suit the actor very well. Of course, it helps that Steve is one of the best actors around, so it’s been a very fruitful relationship for me. He has an intelligence, and a conscience as an actor, but there was nothing for him in this film . I didn’t want him turning up as an East European gangster or to have to make him put on a French accent!

TB: He managed terribly well though with the English accent for The End Of The Affair?

NJ: Yeah, that’s true. That was a great experience. It was hard to get him into that role – a pompous Englishman – but once he did, it was brilliant. I was happy all round with that one. I was happy with the way the script turned out, and it was great working with Ralph Fiennes and Julianne Moore.

TB: You did seem to capture certain Graham Greene sensibilities perfectly with the screenplay – that very arch humour for example...

NJ: Yeah, there’s a bitter, black laughter there. There’s a savage humour attached to the way that the main character looks at stuff, but that wasn’t that hard to do, because it was all in the book. The hardest aspect of doing that script was changing the ending, because I always felt that the ending of the book was a bit theological, and a lot of the critics – especially in Britain – didn’t like what I did with the ending. But I realised that the problem there was that the book is so bloody short, they could all manage to read it before seeing the film! I wouldn’t have had nearly so much criticism had it been a longer book.

TB: Even your films which are overly political – like Michael Collins or The Crying Game – focus on the personal. Are you conciously apolitical when it comes to your art?

NJ: Well, I just like things to be complicated. I’ve never made a political movie like Z or Hidden Agenda, just because I think that the realities are more complicated than that. I suppose the movies that I’ve made about Ireland – like Angel or the ones you’ve mentioned – are about people who are stuck in the greys of morality. I just think that’s more interesting, and I’ve never really seen things in black and white when it comes to Irish politics, which is why I prefer to examine things from the personal.

TB: Your next two films – based on the Borgia papacy and The Odyssey – seem a lot bigger than the personal though?

NJ: Well, you’d be surprised. The Odyssey movie I’m making is small. It’s called The Return and it’s literally just that – the last part of the journey. Borgia is a kind of Godfather thing. Now that is a big, huge production, but as yet I can’t get enough money to do it. So, we’ll see.

TB: Has that part of the job gotten easier over the years, or can financing still be a nightmare depending on the project?

NJ: Exactly. It very much depends on the project. I mean, when you’re looking for sixty million dollars – then they want a sure thing. They want a movie with big stars and that kind of thing. It’s very difficult at the moment. Unbelievably so. There’s a huge economic downturn everywhere, so Hollywood responds with endless sequels – Terminator 3 and so on. So, it’s a very bad time to be coming up with unusual projects that need serious investment. Then, of course, in England there’s been the collapse of Film Four and here things are quiet too, though I’ve read great things about A Song For A Raggy Boy – so it’s not all bad news.

TB: When you look back on your first foray into the world of Hollywood, do you feel you could’ve kept control of High Spirits and We’re No Angels better?

NJ: No. I think that the first time a director goes to Hollywood, it’s very hard especially if, like me, you’ve made two or three European movies. I mean, I had made Angel, The Company Of Wolves and Mona Lisa, and there was never any question about who was the author of those films. No matter what – you work things out for yourself and you go with what’s interesting for you. That’s all part of becoming a filmmaker. Then you go to Hollywood, and it’s shocking. It was certainly shocking for me, People were actually trying to stop me from making the movie. It was really bizarre.

TB: It makes you wonder why they bother hiring directors in the first place...

NJ: Exactly. I remember on High Spirits,, I walked on set one day and everything was blindingly bright. And it was like – oh, it won’t be so bright when we film it – and then I saw the rushes. It was just too fucking bright, but everyone else is reasoning – oh, it’s a comedy, it has to be bright. It was unbelievable. What a stupid practice – producers trying to direct. It makes no sense.

TB: Was it easier when you returned there to make Interview With A Vampire?

NJ: Yeah, it was. Well, I suppose I was older, so when I was asked to do it, I was able to say – I don’t want this to happen. But I think a big problem – especially with big special effects pictures – is that maybe only forty percent of them end up being directed by a director. Everything else is added in post-production. So they choose young directors, from advertising and so on. The movies are made by committee, basically.

I mean, recently, I was being shown bits of the Harry Potter movie, in the special effects house, and it was a shot of Harry on top of a huge sculpture waving a sword, and there was all this stuff going on, but all the director did was stand the kid in front of a screen and filmed him waving a sword and then said ‘Now do it again’. That was it. That’s a director’s job now apparently.

TB: The only really special effects-based movie like that which you’ve done is The Company Of Wolves. Is it a genre you’ve ever wanted to return to?

NJ: Well, in a way, you’re always involved in special effects. You use them all the time. But in terms of fantasy-based movies – I would quite like to get back there sometime. I loved Lord Of The Rings. It’s the first time that you can really see the gamut of possibilities, of what can be achieved using digital effects. It’s the same story. When you put a director with a vision in control of this stuff, they can come up with marvels. I mean, there are good and bad things about Hollywood, and one of the good things is that every now and then they can make a decision like that and have the resources to back it up. It keeps you going, you know?

TB: Yeah, because I’ve read that you considered returning to writing novels prior to the success of The Crying Game...

NJ: Yeah, but I probably wouldn’t have written more novels than I have. I’m just so used to working in film. It’s easier. It’s more immediate. I work better in that context. When you’ve been working on screenplays for ages, like I have, then writing prose becomes torturous.

TB: Is that because of your background in visuals, with most of your family being painters?

NJ: No. I think it’s just because film is what I started out doing, and it’s too late to go back now!