Neil Jordan: Interviews

A Look Over Jordan

99 A Look Over Jordan Ted Sheehy / 2000 From Film Ireland 74 (February/March 2000): 16–18. Reprinted by permission of the author. It’s a peculiar setup to begin with. Over the course of a long day a snake of reviewers, interviewers, critics, columnists, and photographers uncoils itself from the lobby of the Merrion Hotel in Dublin. It eventually passes, in bite sizes, through a suite on an anonymous corridor upstairs where Neil Jordan gets on with what may be one of the more arduous aspects of being a film director. I have my own crammed page of questions and I hope some of them are new. We start with a question each about Michael Collins, The Butcher Boy, and In Dreams. Ted Sheehy: Firstly a question (or critical hypothesis) about Michael Collins. The film is to some extent a reading of history and character but it also, it seems to me, could only have been made by someone who lived at a formative age through the 1916/1966 commemorations in Ireland, and then through the beginnings of conflict in NI, and who asked themselves serious questions about political violence at that time. Is that a valid point? Neil Jordan: It is a valid point, yeah, absolutely. It was basically because of there being a persistence of political violence in the culture of the whole island . . . the appeal to me of the story was when you examined that story everything that is still an issue was so perfectly expressed in that period. TS: The one niggling and perhaps only criticism of The Butcher Boy as a film is the ending, and the casting of Stephen Rea as the grown Francie— it presents a credibility issue to the viewer at the end. NJ: That was Pat’s conception when he wrote the original screenplay, 100 neil jordan: inter views in a way. That in the end Francie, in the mental hospital, had become the image of the father. I discussed it with Stephen, because I suppose they weren’t that physically like each other. And he said, well, the only alternative is that you play him because you look like him. I didn’t want to do that because I always thought it’s a bit embarrassing, doing the Hitchcock bit. But the point was that Stephen was the voice, so it had to be him that played the older Francie at the end. TS: To what do you ascribe the negative reaction to In Dreams, in the US especially? NJ: They didn’t like the movie, it’s very simple! TS: I know they didn’t like it! Do you think there are things about the film that justify their not liking it? NJ: I don’t think the story made a lot of sense to them. The story justifies everything in a way. The story had been developed by Steven Spielberg himself, at Amblin, and he’d commissioned Bruce Robinson to write a screenplay. I read the screenplay and the images were fascinating, the premise of the entire story was absolutely fascinating. It went into this strange territory. I did a version of the screenplay myself, you know, in an attempt to solve that [story] problem. But lo and behold when I finished the movie that problem was still there. It’s impossible to end that story . . . dealing with the death of a child in the middle of a film like that creates this huge narrative hole, you don’t know where to put your emotions . . . . There are certain rules in the genre, in a way, you start with a female character, you know, being pursued by irrational forces . . . you expect them to survive or triumph in some way. It was a film which destroyed all the rules of the genre. But I think it’s more complicated than that, I think American critics objected to me making a movie like that because they loved The Butcher Boy so much. They said this guy shouldn’t be doing this, really. I was not unhappy with the film at all but there are holes in it. The problem is it wasn’t my story. TS: To come on to The End of the Affair—I’m not a great reader of Greene but (as a Catholic convert) he’s said to be preoccupied with “redemption through degradation”—which is simplistic, perhaps, and doesn’t address his strengths as a stylist, but there’s some truth in it and he...