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Hollywood Spin
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Jordan's Shadow
Long before he started making films, Neil Jordan was a novelist. His latest, Shade, boasts a central twist as memorable as that of The Crying Game.
Wednesday, November 17, 2004
By Richard Horgan
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Steve Grayson/Wireimage.com
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A soft-spoken storyteller
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Sitting on a patio earlier this week with Irish filmmaker and novelist Neil Jordan, it was hard not to feel caught up in something of a performing arts maelstrom.
Thanks to the previous evening’s American Music Awards, the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills was rife with pop stars who, as Jordan put it, all had enormous cigars, imposing bodyguards and were omnipresent in the elevator ever since his arrival in Los Angeles the previous day. Meanwhile, Jordan himself has recently completed a new movie, Breakfast on Pluto, a new novel, Shade, and is currently working with U2’s Bono and the Edge to fashion the contents of a Broadway musical adaptation of Spider-Man.
“Bono and The Edge are next-door neighbors of mine, so we meet for breakfast and talk about it,” Jordan reveals. “They want to do the musical. They’re very anxious to get into that world that Andrew Llloyd Weber has claimed as his own.”
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Bloomsbury USA
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Complicated ideas
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Although it’s certainly a departure for Jordan, the idea of a Broadway musical is ultimately just one more feather in the cap of an artist who ebbs and flows much like the Boyne River that is central to his latest novel. Throughout his career, the 54-year-old native of Sligo, Ireland has veered between making Hollywood films and independent movies, as well as stayed true to his beginnings as a novelist at various points along the way.
Shortly after 1994’s Interview with the Vampire, Jordan took a break to write the novel Sunrise with a Sea Monster and, a decade later, has done the same after The Good Thief with Nick Nolte with two years spent on Shade. When the novel was released in Ireland in May of this year, reviews were generally glowing and it has already greatly exceeded the popularity of Jordan’s previous efforts. Nonetheless, one of the filmmaker’s conditions for choosing a publisher was that they agree to re-issue his earlier works, which were all out of print.
“Several years ago, one of these Irish culture pundits, kind of like talk show guy, he asked me to be on a committee to judge which of the contemporary Irish writers were most likely to be read in 100 years time,” Jordan recalls. “And I said, ‘Why are you asking me, I’m a writer?’”
“‘Oh, I forgot,’ he says,” adds Jordan. “And it really struck me that people didn’t think of me as a writer, a novelist anymore in any real way. So I just took time out to write a novel. It’s a long, very intense process.”
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Warner Brothers
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Rea in The Butcher Boy
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Jordan’s film adaptations of both Anne Rice’s Interview with a Vampire and Pat McCabe’s The Butcher Boy saw him work extensively with voiceover components. That is also true of the very cinematic Shade, which begins with the murder of Nina Hardy on a bright afternoon in 1950 and then features her voice front and center throughout the rest of the narrative. As the drama is revealed, an exquisite twist comes to the surface and amplifies the story’s haunting heartbeat.
“In the case of this book, I heard the voice very clearly,” Jordan explains. “It was more the way she spoke, more the way the words expressed themselves. It’s very obvious that she had been in the theater, been an actress in some way, because there was an archaic rather florid way of speaking.”
Although Jordan originally chose to set his novel in the second half of the twentieth century and in fact wrote large chunks of the beginning and ending against that backdrop, he eventually decided to move the time frame back fifty years. In a sense, the filmmaker’s works of fiction make up a kind of historical tableau of his native country, with a first book of contemporary short stories followed by the 1920s setting of Past, the 1940s timeframe of Sunrise with Sea Monster and the futuristic elements of The Dream of a Beast.
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Kevin Mazur/Wireimage.com
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Friend, neighbor, colleague
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"The thing I always found easiest to do whenever I was writing novels was to describe things visually," Jordan explains. "That’s one of the reasons I started making movies. The Past, which is about a photographer, was entirely composed of visual descriptions. It was almost like I was elaborately describing motion pictures in words. I just thought it was silly and I may as well start making films."
“I decided to put Shade in my mother’s half century because the landscape just didn’t make sense," he adds. "There were all these industrial buildings and it didn’t fit right somehow. So in a way, I guess, the book was me imagining that landscape the way it was when I wasn’t around.”
As someone who both writes novels and adapts those written by others, Jordan says the worst thing to do in the latter case is treat them as some sort of reverential, untouchable material. His latest film, Breakfast on Pluto, reunites him on screen with The Butcher Boy’s Irish author Pat McCabe.
Nevertheless, although Jordan was once offered the opportunity to adapt arguably the most popular Irish novel of recent times – Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes - he never seriously considered it. In his opinion, it was too much of an episodic work of fiction to begin with, and that structure he feels is largely responsible for a less than satisfying translation to the big screen.
“The problem with a novel is you don’t know where it’s going to go,” he continues. “With a screenplay, at least you can work out the problems. You may not know what the ending is going to be, but you know there is an ending. You know the vague territory that the ending is going to have. But with a novel, sometimes when you start, you don’t even know what it’s about. The process of writing it is finding out what it’s about.”
“In the movie that I just finished, I had Liam Neeson, Brendan Gleeson, Stephen Rea, and they all just tackled these characters and they gave them the kind of light that I never expected,” he adds. “It was quite extraordinary. That kind of thing doesn’t happen in books; the voice, the characters tell you who they want to be.”
Several years ago, Jordan bought the rights to Peter Carey’s book The True Story of Kelly’s Gang, a project that eventually became the Australian film Ned Kelly, directed by Gregor Jordan and starring Heath Ledger. But the filmmaker laughs when told of an item on his IMDB page news section that reports he wanted Brad Pitt and Nicole Kidman for the project. “Ha ha, that’s a good idea,” he chuckles. “But I never discussed it with either one of them.”
| Truth, or the perception thereof, is also a topic of note when the conversation turns to DVD audio commentary tracks. Although Jordan admits to being an avid DVD watcher of Akira Kurosawa, Luis Bunuel, his early mentor John Boorman and others, he says that when it comes to directors and producers and writers talking about their own work on DVD, few if any tell it like it is. However, Jordan recently sought to change that with his commentary for an upcoming January DVD re-release of The Crying Game.
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“I’d love to hear one of those commentaries where they actually told the truth,” he muses. "For The Crying Game, I told the truth. We couldn’t get the backing to it, so I rewrote the ending; it was appallingly sentimental and ridiculous. And they said, ‘Oh, we love this ending, we’re going to make the movie.’”
“So I started shooting the film and about two thirds of the way through, I said to the producer, there’s absolutely no point in shooting this. But they said, 'No, we have to shoot the ending.’ Later, of course, they loved the movie and hated the ending; they then allowed me to shoot my original ending. But I managed to get a copy of the fake ending I wrote, which will be on the DVD.”
Jordan is determined not to let another ten years go by before his next novel. Having spent a large portion of his adult life in Los Angeles, he says he has begun to toy with the idea of a piece of fiction set here.
| But for the moment, as he stays in town to take some meetings and gets ready to decide whether or not he will remain attached to the Jake Gyllenhaal comedy vehicle Me and My Monster, Jordan can’t help but comment on the current state of the Hollywood union.
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“It’s changing so much here,” he marvels. “The films are so expensive and boring and dull and empty. Every time I do a Hollywood movie, the critics say go back to making your independent movies. In general, critics much prefer Europeans when they’re Europeans, not when they impinge on the American industry and stuff like that.”
“But I do like to work on a large visual scale, so sometimes I end up doing large Hollywood movies if they offer them to me,” observes Jordan, who admits to reading his own reviews and being a former fan of The New Yorker's Pauline Kael and the New York Times' Elvis Mitchell. “I don’t think movies are adventurous enough.”
Still, even Jordan isn’t sure he can recapture the boldness of either the novels he wrote at age 24 or the films he made at around age 30. “Sometimes, I look at them and think, I wouldn’t have the balls to do that now.”
| [Every Wednesday, Richard Horgan’s FilmStew.com opinion column “Hollywood Spin” takes a look at a notable entertainment industry personality, PR trend or salient industry topic. To reach the author, please click here. To comment on this week’s topic, please go to our Hollywood Spin Discussion Board.] | |
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