Neil Jordan: Interviews

The Screen Writer

119 The Screen Writer Tara Brady / 2003 From Hot Press, March 12, 2003. 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. 120 neil jordan: inter views 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 program 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...