Neil Jordan: Interviews

Beauty and the Beasts

40 Beauty and the Beasts Neil Jordan / 1984 From Time Out (September 13–19, 1984): 18–21. Reprinted by permission of Neil Jordan. Novelist turned film director Neil Jordan describes the metamorphosis of Angela Carter’s eleven-page short story “The Company of Wolves” into a full-length English Gothic horror movie. “At night, the eyes of wolves shine like candle flames, yellowish, reddish, but that is because the pupils of their eyes fatten on darkness and catch the light from your lantern and flash it back to you—red for danger; if a wolf’s eyes reflect only moonlight, then they gleam a cold and unnatural green, a mineral, a piercing color.” On the set we place a light box in front of the camera lens, with a peabulb encased in a two-way mirror, which throws the beam from the bulb towards the wolf’s eyes, which indeed fatten on the darkness, catch the light, and flash it back to us. So the wolf’s eyes gleam, sometimes red, sometimes yellow. All of which shows me that imaginative fiction can sometimes have the precision of science. It was this precision that first drew me to the story. Angela Carter had been commissioned by Channel 4 to write a short script based on her short story “The Company of Wolves.” We had met, quite by accident, during a week of festivities in Dublin to celebrate the centenary of James Joyce. Jorge Luis Borges read a speech to a thousand or so of Dublin’s finest in a plush hotel. No one seemed to know who he was. Halfway through, a Ceilidh band struck up next door, drowning him out completely . No one seemed to notice. I asked the head of the Irish Tourist Board to get the band turned off, and found myself thrown out on the street. Angela had wandered through this baroque extravaganza in a neil jordan / 1984 41 state of bemused wonder. I remember a night’s drinking with an Irish lecturer in mediaeval philosophy and a gay priest, the conversation of which consisted mainly of a discourse on farting and the problems of erections on buses. And Angela proved herself to be a model of tact in the face of these, and other, manifestations of the national temperament. A week after that, her script arrived. It was quite short, but all the splendor of her story rippled off it. A series of tales told to a small girl by a wonderfully wicked granny, all culminating in her own encounter with the legend of Red Riding Hood; sensual and brutal, like the fairy tale you dreamed of as a child, but were never told. I brought the script to Steve Woolley of Palace, who rapidly put together a development deal which allowed for a fuller script to be written , and some preparatory production work. I came to London and cycled out to Angela’s house in Clapham every morning, where we would spend the day on the script. We would drink large quantities of tea, and proceed through the script in quite a businesslike manner. I was reminded of the surrealist painter Magritte who would dress impeccably each morning, pack his briefcase, kiss his wife goodbye, then walk round the block, return home and begin to work. Angela maintains a similar sense of order, a certain Scots puritan rigor which belies the wicked nature of her work. The script began to sizzle after a while, like an old stew. The whole world of fairy tale proved to be of infinite suggestiveness. Little Red Riding Hood led us towards intimations of Tom Thumb, which led via Beauty and the Beast back to Little Red Riding Hood. “A witch from up the valley once turned an entire wedding party into wolves because the groom had settled on another girl.” It was fascinating to me how an allusion like that, just part of the texture of the story, could become a whole sequence in the script. One tries to picture the valley, muses on the look of that wedding-party, expand on the tale of the groom, spoilt scion of the landed classes and the peasant girl he wronged, her bewitching pleasures and the pale, hemophiliac visage of the bride he chose. Writing is normally an isolated process, quite painful most of the time, and it is only when you work with another mind that you realize how exhilarating it actually is, stretching the imagination like a set of...