Neil Jordan: Interviews

The Butcher Boy

91 The Butcher Boy Ted Sheehy / 1998 From Film Ireland 63 (February/March 1998): 14–15. Reprinted by permission of the author. Interview conducted at the Cannes Film Festival. Ted Sheehy: Are you sad they couldn’t show The Butcher Boy here? Neil Jordan: Well, yeah, but you know these festivals have their rules so that’s the way it works . . . TS: That’s Berlin’s rules, is it? NJ: Yeah, well it’s them. TS: Can I compliment you on it, I think it’s the best thing you’ve done. NJ: Thank you. TS: I noticed you seemed to be very nervous in Galway at the premiere last July, and I wondered was it particularly . . . am I wrong in thinking you were nervous? NJ: No, no, it was a bit of a . . . you normally don’t show a film like that at such a small festival, but I was very glad I did actually because I didn’t know when the release would be and it was a very good way to show it. Normally when you show a film at a festival for the first time you show it at an international one in Europe, like Venice, you know. They were all people that knew me, that’s probably why I was a bit nervous. TS: It’s probably the closest I’ve seen to the Irish imagination captured on screen, in all its wildness . . . NJ: Well that’s what’s marvelous about the book, actually. TS: And was it that in the book that grabbed you or the strength of the narrative . . .? 92 neil jordan: inter views NJ: It was the whole quality of the book, the challenge of putting the book on screen into a movie. The book is very much about cinema in a way, it’s about these influences in the kid’s head, he saw the world in a cinematic way. So I felt it could be made into a movie, I just didn’t know how. It was a matter of two things really, the script and the principal actor . So when we finally got the script right I said, okay now, the movie can be made if we can find a child to play the part. So I didn’t put it into production until we found the kid. TS: And for Warner Bros. to hack it, because it’s a fairly small picture for them, did they give you carte blanche, effectively? NJ: The way it went was this, they said to me, “What are you doing next?”—and I had it set up independently, I’d bought the rights to the book myself and paid for the script myself—so (after doing Interview with a Vampire and Michael Collins with them) I said, “I’m doing a small Irish movie and it really is not for you,” and I meant it. But the more I said that the more they were interested in it, you know that kind of thing. I said, “Look, it’s not the kind of film you release. Sure I could make it with you, but you wouldn’t know what to do with it when we finish it.” And they said, “No, no, no, we want to do this film. We can make small films as well as big films,” and so, eventually, I said, “Yes.” So it was the odd position of probably the biggest studio in the world doing this very idiosyncratic , very . . . I can’t think of a more non-mainstream film than this film, you know. When I showed it to them they kind of said, “What the fuck is this?” as I’d predicted. I said, “I told you you’d say that.” They’ve been quite good about it, they don’t understand it so they’re asking what to do with it . . . TS: Are they following your lead on it? NJ: They are, at the moment. We’re releasing it first in Europe as they don’t know what to do in America. They love the movie, they really genuinely like it—I’ve been shooting another film, In Dreams, in America— we were going to release it in November and I hoped the actors would be able to do all the press but they said no, they needed me to do press, but I couldn’t because I was shooting a film so we put it off. So then I decided to open it here...