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134 Neil Jordan in the New Millennium: 1999–2011 Carole Zucker / 2011 Interview conducted March/April 2011. Previously unpublished. Carole Zucker: Can you talk about how In Dreams came about? Neil Jordan: What happened was Steven Spielberg sent me that script, and they had just set up DreamWorks. I’d done a movie with David Geffen , and they were very anxious that I do a film for them, and they sent me a script by Bruce Robinson which was called Blue Vision, and it was about somebody sharing dreams with a killer. They asked me to consider making it and I said: “Well, why don’t I just have a go at the script and see what I come up with.” Because there were problems with the screenplay. Basically, I wrote a script, and they got very, very excited about it, and very rapidly put it into production. That’s the way it happened. CZ: Because I remember reading Robinson’s script when I was at your home doing research, and it seems to be quite different to what you wrote. NJ: Well not entirely different, not entirely. I mean it was one of those conventional scare thrillers in a way. When I got my hands on the script, I looked at things that were the background. I made it very phantasmagoric —the whole idea of them sharing the same dreams and the same experience, I brought to the forefront. And I got quite excited by the Grand Guignol possibilities of it all, let’s put it that way. It was one of those films where when we finished the movie, there were quite a few problems with it. Because I suppose the realistic aspect of the plot, the last third of it, didn’t turn out to be very convincing. And it was one of those issues where, I suppose, one does a rewrite and a rewrite and a carole zucker / 2011 135 rewrite but one doesn’t solve some of the problems with the basic concepts . But I mean I love . . . I really like the movie. CZ: It’s one of my favorite films. NJ: Well I mean it’s hard to love, it’s hard to love. CZ: I want to go into it more, because I think it’s one of your best films, because there are so many real tour-de-force scenes in it, and it’s incredibly beautiful as well. It deals with underlying things that I find in all of your work, like myth and ritual, and the structure and meaning of fairy tales, and the particular view that you have of the family, something that casts the viability of the family unit into doubt, violence and psychic and physical damage . . . NJ: Well now the real thing—if you want to know the truth—that attracted me to the whole thing was the image of that buried town at the very start of the script. I developed the story a bit more about the character that Robert Downey played . . . CZ: Vivian . . . NJ: Vivian, yeah, and I placed him in that drowned town and made the whole idea of a drowned town and 1950s America be center to the story. I suppose what I did when I began to do it, was to work on all the dreamlike levels. All the dream elements of the script, I brought to the forefront , and the realistic ones I pushed to the background, so it became phantasmagoric. CZ: It’s interesting that in most horror films what you have is a long section at the beginning that establishes the normality of the world, and In Dreams that lasts for about five minutes. NJ: Well yeah but that’s all you need really because the images of that town are so arresting. The awful thing about horror movies and about serial killer movies is, and this is what I find a little bit disappointing in the movie, in the whole concept of the script, Bruce’s and my work, is that you always end up with some explanation for the central character: dementia , and it’s always something to do with childhood and childhood abuse, and the kid who’s locked in a box or put in a coffin by a demented father, something like that. That becomes cheap Freudianism, and it’s always a little bit disappointing. I would love if a monster were just monstrous because say, somebody robbed their sweets when they were kids...

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