Neil Jordan: Interviews

Face to Face with Evil

31 Face to Face with Evil Michael Open / 1982 From Film Directions 5, no. 18 (December 1, 1982): 3–5, 16. Reprinted by permission of the author. In spite of the controversy it caused at the Festival of Film and Television in Celtic countries, held in Wexford, with its inane boycotts, walkouts, and similar childish protests by members of the Association of Independent Producers (who ought to have known better), Neil Jordan’s Angel has burst upon the Irish cinema screen as its major cinematic achievement of recent years. The film was given a screening in the film market at Cannes and was greeted with euphoria by all of those who saw it. I went into the film expecting to leave before it ended and catch up with its ending when I returned to Ireland, however, it was so impressive I stayed to the end. As soon as I returned I contacted Neil Jordan to record the interview which I had been asking for since he started production of the film and between one thing and another, had never materialized. After a smash-hit run of many weeks in Dublin, Angel was by that time something of a phenomenon. It tells the story of a young and talented saxophonist player (Danny, played by Stephen Rea). In the course of a dalliance with a deaf teenager after a dance at which he had been playing , he witnesses a terrorist bombing and the killing of both his band’s manager and the deaf girl. Using only his wits and the information he has observed during this traumatic event, Danny becomes both private eye and angel of death and pursues the perpetrators of this outrage to a shattering climax. The following interview was conducted in Neil Jordan’s Dublin flat. MO: You’ve written a number of things before you started into making films, and Angel is your first fiction film, had you actually been holding 32 neil jordan: inter views it back to make yourself for a considerable time, or was it just the next script that you’d written? NJ: It was just the next script that I’d written. MO: So there wasn’t anything that was particularly more personal in Angel than in any of the others? NJ: No, nothing—except I suppose the fact that the main character is a musician. MO: One of the things that struck me about the film when I saw it at Cannes was that it seemed to be very exterior, there’s a great deal of movement in the film. Was that a conscious thing that you put into it? NJ: I’ve written three or four films now and I think in all of them the character has gone on a journey, and part of the appeal of film for me as a writer, and someone who has been used to sitting in a room, is the fact that you can take your mind and your concerns and your obsessions and imagination on the same kind of journey. So I think that’s reflected in it really, it’s just a kind of a bedrock. It’s one of these tendencies that people who tell stories have. The journey, the actual physical journey in some sense echoes the metaphysical journey that’s going on inside the main character, and I suppose too there’s an element of the road movie type film in it. MO: What about the practical details of how it was financed? How did the finance come about? NJ: Really by persistence, and a kind of manic assault in all possible areas and finding out where there actually was money. I always outline the script first and write a thirty-page outline, in terms of what actually happens . It’s a help to show people what your intentions are. And I showed that around to several people, and myself and John Boorman showed it around to the major companies, none of whom were interested! I had worked with Walter Donohue (I’d had some contact with him at Channel 4), and I sent him the script and he liked it and they were interested in making films of that type and it was from Channel 4 that the finance of the film came. All you do is get your script and send it round where you can and if you find somebody who needs this type of film and wants to back it, you follow them. [3.138...