Having collaborated on The Butcher Boy, Neil Jordan and Pat McCabe have teamed up again for Breakfast on Pluto, the picaresque tale of cross-dressing, border crossing, glam rocking, wombling free spirit Kitten Braden. Donald Clarke hears how it all came about
KNOWING Ireland to be a small country, we suspect that its cultural enclaves - literary, theatrical, cinematic - must be huddled little principalities whose citizens keep wary eyes on how many bottles of absinthe are being delivered to the garret next door.
Pat McCabe and Neil Jordan, born either side of Elvis's Sun sessions, are from the same generation. They have similar tastes. It is true that Jordan, the older by five years, established his reputation as a writer of fiction a decade before McCabe got out of the starting blocks, but they must surely have been rubbing up against one another for aeons. The Butcher Boy, Neil's film of Pat's novel, emerged in 1997, the last year it was possible to get any peace in the country. After then we embraced our hitherto obscure manifest destiny and set out to conquer the universe. Before that point artists - and everybody else - just sat around in brown bars scowling at one another. What did the two make of one another then? "The funny thing is we didn't really know one another at all," McCabe says.
"We first met in New York of all places. It was at a reading I was doing of The Butcher Boy and Neil was in New York working on something: The Crying Game I guess. It was at this club called Sin-é. We had somehow never come across one another before." Jordan, as always distributing his gaze between unlikely parts of the room, ponders this.
"But I had read the book, before then?" "Oh, yes, you'd read the book, but you hadn't met me," McCabe says. "This must have been 1993 or so. I don't know how long past that I wrote the script." They continue batting opaque recollections back and forth until I eventually bring them to order.
McCabe and Jordan make an effective double-act. Both display unfussy bohemian qualities. But McCabe, revealing perhaps traces of his years as a schoolmaster, is more inclined towards precision. He can also - though not today - make it discomfortingly plain with just how little gladness he suffers fools. Jordan is altogether more vague; even when expressing opinions he has held firmly for years, he still seems to be figuratively trying them on for size.
Eight years after the success of The Butcher Boy - identified by a poll in Film Ireland magazine as the best Irish movie of all time - the two men have come together again to bring us the picaresque, psychedelic adventure Breakfast on Pluto. McCabe's 1998 source novel, many aspects of which have been savagely tweaked in the script, follows the story of a young man from a border town whose adventures in gender land him in trouble with teachers, terrorists, sexual predators and, following a relocation to London, the Metropolitan Police. Set in the early 1970s, and featuring a bravura central performance from Cillian Murphy, the picture crackles with the static from fake fur and pounds with the rhythms of glam rock.
Interestingly, whereas Irish critics have been making comparisons with The Butcher Boy, in America Jordan has been asked more often to discuss thematic similarities to The Crying Game. Both films do certainly deal with gender ambivalence. In one interview Neil even suggested that McCabe might have had The Crying Game in his mind while writing Breakfast on Pluto. Rubbish? "No. Actually that's not necessarily bullshit," McCabe says. "It may well have been in there. But I think more than anything else it was influenced by listening to the album Shag Tobacco by Gavin Friday. It has that louche thing all the way through it. The influence is not obvious, perhaps. It is subliminal. I wrote the sleeve notes for the LP. So it is almost perfect that he ended up in the film." The erstwhile Virgin Prune turns out as the lead singer of the terrifying showband, Billy Hatchet and the Mohawks, who take on Kitten Braden, the films hero(ine), as a kind of Pocahontas.
Jordan, as is his wont, has been pondering. He goes back to the quote I produced from the American interviews.
"I think you said somewhere that Kitten represented Ireland," he says to the fireplace or the light-fitting. "Did you say that?" Pat goes on to explain that there were all kinds of odd ideas in his original notes for the book. He had notions about Bardic poetry in there.
Yes, he eventually admits, if he was asked what the book was about he might have said that it was "Ireland as a woman".
"Yeah. Americans are so literal minded," Jordan muses. "You make a remark like that in passing and suddenly: oh, yeah, he represents Ireland."
So what has the American public made of Breakfast on Pluto? The film has picked up reviews diverging from the rapturous to the angrily bewildered. Murphy has, however, received consistent praise and has been nominated for a Golden Globe.
"Well, strangely, they see it as a comedy over there," Jordan says. "I mean it is that too, but not only that. I have been to two big screenings and they were kind of ecstatic. It has been classed together with two other films - Capote and Brokeback Mountain - as the three big gay films. So there is a strange kind of interpreting it as a response to Bush's America. It is getting lumped in with all those films. I suppose that's good in a way." The film was, in fact, first conceived during the second Clinton administration. Various versions of the script have been floating around since the book's publication in 1998.
"I had this very comfortable deal with DreamWorks, whereby I could just buy the rights to this novel and that novel," Jordan says. "So when the book came out I heard about it and bought the rights. Pat wrote the first script.
"We began to change it considerably. But I was very loath to return to the issue of political violence, which, though it's not the theme, does occur in the film. Having done Michael Collins and The Crying Game and then receiving all that brouhaha, it was just too much. You know, I made Michael Collins and suddenly I had made 'a Fine Gael film' and all that stuff."
Jordan screen-tested Cillian Murphy for the part of Kitten Braden back in the late 1990s and came to the conclusion that, with his delicate, surprised features, the Corkman was the only actor for the job. Time passed. Jordan directed the odd, chaotic thriller The Good Thief and Murphy began to wonder what had happened to this great role. "Eventually he said: 'Do the bloody film before I am too old to do the part.' And I thought: fair point," Jordan explains.
As it happens, Breakfast in Pluto, arriving after a decade of quasi-peace in Northern Ireland, comes across very much as a post-Troubles film. It has, in that sense, a very different flavour to it than The Crying Game. Indeed, so much has changed in Ireland recently that Pluto, though set a full decade after The Butcher Boy, seems more of a period piece than that earlier film did. Is Jordan comfortable with the film being seen as a study of yesterday's conflict? "Oh yeah, that is totally fair," he says. "That is what it is. It couldn't have been made 10 years ago. There is maybe now a different perspective on those issues. Angel [ Jordan's first film from 1982] was objected to by politicised nationalists. Then, when I made The Crying Game, I was dealing with the grey area of the moral responsibility of someone who is prepared to kill somebody. But it was interesting to look at this character who is only interested in innocence and goodness."
Jordan enjoys comparing Kitten Braden to Candide. Like the hero of Voltaire's tale, the fragile Irish transvestite seems, despite the evidence of decay and decadence everywhere about, convinced that all life-stories have the potential for a happy ending. Murphy quite sensibly does not flounce or pout in the role. This is not a conventional drag queen. Then again, a young man coming of age around the Border in the early 1970s would not have had much access to camp role models. He would surely have felt himself an entirely original creation.
"Yeah. I think that's right," Neil says. "I didn't want it to be camp. I wanted him to be casual. This was before Freddie Mercury put on the white jumpsuit. It was before the gay movement. His models would have been Marc Bolan. He had to have a sort of inherent femininity."
Though his name has been changed from the racier Pussy Braden, the hero of McCabe's novel makes it into the film with all his attributes intact. Much of the story has, however, been altered. The hero now catches up with the glamorous mother he never knew. His father, revealed early to be the parish priest, is a more benign figure in the movie (and not just because he is played by lovely old Liam Neeson). It seems reasonable to leap to the conclusion that script meetings between Neil and Pat - the two pals share a writing credit - consisted of the director pleading with the novelist to allow changes. Not so, it seems.
"Do you know, I think, with the film, the project is now finished," McCabe says. "Neil said to me a few times: do you think Breakfast on Pluto is unfinished? And I thought, yes, it is open-ended to some extent - in story terms. There are sections in the book that don't appear in the film that were important to me. There are other things I could do here that I just couldn't do in the book." He gestures towards Jordan. "There were no serious differences between us at all. I felt that I got it all wrong and he got it all right."
The film retains and expands upon the book's interest in the way foreign popular culture juiced up life in drab 1970s Ireland. One of the highlights is Brendan Gleeson's turn as an aggressive Womble wrangler who hires Kitten to wear the furry suit. Elsewhere Brian Ferry, his perennially lank fringe waving towards remembered Tops of the Pops, turns up to play a homicidal kerbcrawler. "He was very upper class and very vain," Jordan says. "He said: 'You don't know what vanity is.' He knows what a tailor is."
We also get a real sense of the excitement that London offered the young Irish traveller in those times. The British capital is now viewed as just somewhere else to shop: if they don't have it in Dundrum, they'll probably have it on Bond Street. Back in the brown pub days, when Pat was teaching and Neil was forming The Irish Writers' Cooperative, the city offered any number of escapes.
"Oh, yeah, I have daughters of 19 and 20 and they have been going to New York since they were six years of age," McCabe agrees. "The notion of escape to London doesn't even enter their heads. I asked them recently if they wanted to go and they said no. They think it's boring. They think it's more fun here." That's good to hear.
"It is good to hear. And it's a huge turnaround. Certainly in my time London represented girls. It represented drugs. It represented rock and roll. You got the hell out of here as soon as you could. Mind you, you were being encouraged to get the hell out, because nobody wanted you here from what I could tell." Goodness, the olden days were ghastly.
Breakfast on Pluto is released next Friday
