Neil Jordan: Interviews

Happy Days

111 Happy Days Ted Sheehy / 2001 From Film Ireland 79 (February/March, 2001): 14–15. Reprinted by permission of the author. At the launch of the Beckett on Film season in Dublin, Anthony Minghella , Damien O’Donnell, and Neil Jordan spoke with Ted Sheehy about filming Samuel Beckett’s plays. Ted Sheehy: Is it just that it’s Beckett’s work or can you conceive of yourselves otherwise wanting to make short films that are formally experimental? Anthony Minghella: I think you’d get a different answer from every director but in my case it was entirely connected with a long-held admiration for Beckett. I studied Beckett, I tried to do a doctorate on Beckett’s work, Play was the first play I ever directed—it was a very particular reason to go into the world of short films and I’m not sure that anyone else would have got me into that arena. Having said that I suspect that Michael Colgan and Alan Moloney can persuade anyone to do anything so the likelihood is that we’ll all be back here next year doing some project they have up their sleeves. Damien O’Donnell: It depends on who initiates it really, if you’re talking about inspiring established filmmakers to work in the short medium FilmFour have a website and they did something in association with Dazed and Confused where they got a load of artists, including people like Harmony Korine, to make one-minute films on digital for broadcast on the web. I think, if someone has any sort of drive, filmmakers are open to experimenting and the thing about short films is you don’t make a huge 112 neil jordan: inter views investment of time and if someone else is looking after production of it, it’s fun really. AM: Well you’re doing a thing with Mike Figgis, aren’t you? DO: Yeah, I’m working on a website for Mike Figgis’s film, Hotel, because I’m interested in all that kind of thing and he’s invited me along to work on it, to develop material. It’s five weeks work and what I like about it is I don’t have to think, is this a year of my life? It’s only a couple of months and I think people should always make room for that kind of work. Neil Jordan: Any opportunity you can get to do something that makes you think of the form, that’s what it made me think about. You’ve got this strange wonderful piece of work and you’ve got to think of a way in which to make cinema, cameras, and all the cumbersome stuff, express this lovely thing. It was great. AM: The play that I did was called Play, his one excursion into film was called Film, and it tells you that he was a formalist long before he was obsessed with content. It’s interesting that Neil’s done this installation at the Museum of Modern Art [IMMA] with seven versions . . . NJ: He does force you to rethink the medium because Julianne [Moore] had to do this—it only made sense if it was done on one long take so every angle we did had to encompass the entire performance. Mostly in a film, if you look at the bits you’ve got, the tiny bits, the entire film is a composite of those bits. In this case the bits I had were all of the same length, of the entire piece. It was interesting just to say let’s put all these bits together and let people look at them at the same time. Beckett makes you think that way. TS: Is that a paradoxical aspect of the project, that the concerns of the Beckett estate and the precision of Beckett’s dialogue and stage directions gives you the opportunity to draw back right into the camera? NJ: You stick yourself in a tiny confine and you have to work out not only how to photograph it but what the act of photographing it means. For me it was an opportunity to do something you’d never get the opportunity to do, to engage with ideas you’d never get the chance to engage with in commercial cinema, at all. ted sheehy / 2001 113 For me, and I’m obviously a fan of short films, I...