One of those rare souls-a novelist turned motion picture director-Neil Jordan says he suffers no guilt feelings for having largely set aside his fiction writing for the last few years while he turns out his cinematic creations.
”You mean that I knew I wasn`t going to be James Joyce?” he is asking from his home in Dublin. ”Or that I wasn`t going to suffer and be poor? They say Irish writers have to suffer, but actually I think they do pretty well. No, I think you suffer far more making movies. Compared to that, writing is a pleasant little game.”
Best known to knowledgeable audiences here for ”Mona Lisa” (1986)-which starred Bob Hoskins as an ex-con/gangland chauffeur who falls in love with a stylish prostitute-Jordan is currently checking in with ”The Crying Game”
(opening here Friday). A film that unashamedly defies categorization, it centers on a reluctant IRA member (Stephen Rea of ”Life Is Sweet”) who messes up the hostage-taking of a black British soldier (Forest Whitaker of
”Bird”) and eventually hooks up in London with his captive`s striking girlfriend (newcomer Jaye Davidson). Much more than that, it is a work about loyalty and misconceptions, and shatters the viewer`s own preconceptions with a jolting storyline relevation halfway through.
The critics generally have been good about not giving it away, Jordan says. ”They`ve been extraordinary, really. I think because the critical reaction has been so good. Although in London, the critic in the Financial Times said basically, `OK, it`s impossible to write about this movie without saying certain things, and if you don`t want to find out about it, don`t read on.` But that critic didn`t like the film, you know what I mean?
”I call `The Crying Game` a political/racial/sexual fairy tale,” says Jordan, who admits he loves to experiment with genre-switching within the same movie. ”In this case, I was making very bold moves with the narrative. I suppose I was playing a game, seeing how far I could drag the audience along with me. It starts off with a political identity, then it goes into issues of racial identity and sexual identity and it ends up with questions of moral responsibility, doesn`t it?
”What interests me in my films is the surface presentation of people and the world that leads up to something else. Beneath the rational surface there`s always something else, isn`t there? There`s always something that`s often irrational or deeper or more fascinating.
”The heart of this film is the love story, because it`s the heart of the issue: Can people not only love one another, but accommodate one another?
That`s where Fergus, the central character, finds the central dilemma. He isn`t the stereotype of the IRA terrorist; he`s like a bruised angel-a good man who has done bad things, who`s perched between a world of violence and a world of possibility. And the black man isn`t the stereotype of the British soldier; he`s a wonderfully warm human being. The point of the movie is about people breaking through these attitudes and definitions. Everybody is pretending to be somebody else. The IRA member played by Miranda Richardson is the black heart of the film. It`s interesting, all the men kind of redeem themselves by making feminine choices, and here this woman actually becomes more and more masculine with all this demonic energy.”
It was much more of a struggle financially than artistically to get the low-budget ($5 million) film made. ”It`s almost as if I`d written a script that was unfinancable, really, because of all the different issues like terrorism and a central character who`s basically a killer. Plus the racial issue and the sexual implications. I mean, people were just terrified of it. You know, `I love your script, but I don`t want to give you any money to make it.` ”
Money eventually came from England`s Palace Pictures, which proceeded to go bankrupt halfway through the filming. ”We got money from sources in Europe, and the cast and crew deferred portions of their fees. Our producer, Stephen Woolley, has a small repertory cinema in London, and we`d send people around to collect the box-office receipts for the day to pay the wages. But it`s the kind of picture that has to be done with absolute freedom, and absolute freedom means absolute poverty.”
Now 42, Jordan was born in Sligo in northwest Ireland and grew up in Dublin, where, he remembers, ”I saw as many films as I was allowed to see. Ireland in the `50s, you know, was a bit like Iran. It was a very prescribed kind of society with heavy censorship and all that sort of stuff. I mean, I got to see an awful lot of religious movies. We were trooped out to see every religious movie that was ever made. I`m an expert on them.”
He still is based in Dublin, where he is working on a novel set in Ireland during World War II, but is comfortable making films wherever the
”appropriate” place. ”I mean, I suppose if I could sit in my house in Dublin and make films here all my life the way Stanley Kubrick makes films in England, I`d be very happy. But I`m not as clever as Stanley Kubrick, you know?”
Starting out as a writer, he founded the Irish Writers Cooperative in 1974, and five years later his collection of stories, ”Night in Tunisia,”
won the Guardian fiction prize. He has also published two novels, ”The Past” and ”The Dream of the Beast.”
”I don`t know, really, how I made the transition to film. It happened. I just began writing screenplays for television and became more and more interested. It became an extension of my writing, but it was never a conscious thing.”
He began his film career as a creative consultant on John Boorman`s
”Excalibur” (1981), then made his writing-directing debut a year later with ”Angel” (known in the U.S. as ”Danny Boy”), which dealt with political violence in Northern Ireland. His next film was ”The Company of Wolves,” which gives a sexual spin to Little Red Riding Hood (Angela Lansbury stars as wise, old, acerbic Granny) and which won critical and commercial acclaim in Britain but disappeared quickly in the States. (”It was released as a horror movie, but, basically, it`s a fantasy.”)
Following ”Mona Lisa” came two movies made under the aegis of Hollywood studios, ”High Spirits” and ”We`re No Angels.” For Jordan, apparently, those were not happy times.
”They were all right,” he says with a shrug in his voice. ”I mean, is anybody happy in Hollywood? Show me one director who`s happy being a Hollywood director. . . . Maybe Ivan Reitman (`Ghostbusters`).”
With ”High Spirits”-Peter O`Toole, Daryl Hannah and Steve Guttenberg in a haunted Irish castle-the main problem seemed to be that the studio took away the final cut, but Jordan says, ”The whole movie was a problem. The producers had one thing they wanted, and I had one thing I wanted, and the film got mangled in between.”
”We`re No Angels”-Robert De Niro and Sean Penn as a pair of Depression Era escaped cons who hide out as priests-received a critical and box-office dousing. Jordan recently was quoted as saying that it was marketed as a comedy but that the two actors, scriptwriter David Mamet and the director himself were not ”exactly known as fun people.” (”What I meant was that Mamet`s best work is very, very dark, and De Niro`s and Penn`s work is very dark and so is mine. Perhaps audiences came to the film with different expectations. I mean, just because it didn`t make $100 million doesn`t mean it was a bad movie.”)
His last film was the unhappily neglected and lovely ”The Miracle”
(1991), which focuses on two teenagers (Niall Byrne and Lorraine Pilkington) in a Dublin suburb who make up romantic stories, and a mysterious American musical-comedy star (Beverly D`Angelo) who comes to town. ”It was good doing it, because it was getting back to what I should have been doing myself-which is writing my own scripts and making up things.”
Among his upcoming projects is an adaptation of Henry Fielding`s 1743 novel, ”Jonathan Wild.” As for now, there is that novel to complete, which should be no problem for an Irishman, right?
”I do think there must be something in the Irish people`s love of words. I mean, language is the only thing the Irish have ever possessed. And even their own language was taken away from them. Irish culture is a history of dispossession, really. Jewish culture is like that, isn`t it? All of Woody Allen`s movies are full of language, aren`t they? You know, the Jewish people say they can take away everything but they can`t take away your mind. Well, the Irish people say they can take away everything but they can`t take away your mouth.”
