Neil Jordan: Interviews

Wolf at the Door

46 Wolf at the Door Steve Jenkins and Paul Taylor / 1984 From Monthly Film Bulletin, September 1984, 264–65, published by the British Film Institute. Reprinted by permission. Down in the Woods Neil Jordan: I met Steve Woolley when he was keen to distribute Angel after seeing it in Cannes. He told me that Palace wanted to get into production and that he would like to see anything I was thinking of doing. Then Walter Donohue of Channel 4 commissioned a series of short films, about fifty minutes or so, one of which was an adaptation by Angela Carter of her story “The Company of Wolves.” I had met Angela briefly when I won the Guardian prize in 1979 and she was on the jury, and then again in Dublin during a centenary week for the birth of James Joyce. So I showed her script to Steve Woolley and spoke to Angela, whom I’d already talked to about films, and we thought of ways of making it into a larger feature film. Steve then got the development money and we sat down and wrote the script quite quickly, in about two or three weeks. The single most important factor that drew me to Angela’s work— which to me is like nothing else—is that it’s both so dramatic and so graphic. She has this iconoclastic, very steely intelligence, which I don’t often find now in writers. She’s an intellectual in the old sense, from the twenties and thirties. But she also has this incredibly fertile imagination and thinks very strongly in terms of imagery. The first script was full of things like “a man turns into a wolf in front of his family, he gets his head chopped off and it falls into a bucket and comes up as his own head.” You just don’t find that sort of thing very often in British movies . That script was quite a direct transposition of the story. If you take a short story and put the narrative down as a screenplay, you get one steve jenkins and paul taylor / 1984 47 thing. But if you look at all the little bits in between the sentences, the atmospheres and the tiny bits of description and the references, you get other things. I was really trying to pull out these little things that Angela just hinted at, saying, “Well, couldn’t this be a big sequence?” It was very instructive with regard to the way that people adapt things, which is usually scaling down rather than up, because the story is only a few pages. She says things like “It was rumored once that a witch walked into a wedding party and turned the entire village into wolves.” In the film that became an entire sequence. We found the shape—of stories within stories, and the portmanteau device of the girl dreaming—and then we built the script up by association . Instead of the forest meaning danger, the wolf meaning sexuality, and the granny authority, we tried to let images and types of stories come to us in an associative way, and follow them for the pleasure of it. I think that the meaning emerges from the pleasure, rather than in any straightforward interpretative way. I particularly wanted to avoid that rather obvious , pedestrian approach. When I was a kid, the pleasure I got from Disney films, or from Night of the Hunter or The Wizard of Oz, was more to do with recognition than interpretation. We tried to build each set so that it reminded you of something you had seen but weren’t quite sure what it was. You feel that you’re visiting somewhere that you’ve been before, like Hansel and Gretel’s cottage. In that sense, I wanted the culmination of the film to be the recognition that this is the story of Little Red Riding Hood. Angela had built her original story around that, and she had alluded to werewolf lore at the beginning and end of it. We also took a bit from a story of hers called “Wolf Alice,” and I drew a lot of images from my novel Dream of a Beast, which I’d just finished; things like the little babies coming out of the eggs, some of the stranger imagery. I also wanted to play a game with the perceptions of the audience, in the sense that you are led through one sequence, and think you are...