FROM THE ARCHIVES:Film director Neil Jordan was profiled by Joe Jackson to mark the release in 1992 of his latest film The Crying Game which won him an Oscar. – JOE JACKSON
IT MAY come as a shock to some people, but on at least one occasion during the pre-premiere party for his new movie, The Crying Game, Neil Jordan was seen to be laughing. Not just tittering but trembling from the type of life-asserting laughter that smashed open wide his previous public persona as a man seemingly condemned to live in a state of perpetual angst.
This image goes back at least 20 years, with one fellow student at University College, Dublin, where Jordan read history and literature, remembering him as “a dark brooding presence, who very much kept to himself” and another suggesting that the Byronic-man pose was cultivated “to keep people at bay”.
Born in Sligo in 1950 into an artistic environment in which his mother was a painter and his father a teacher, Jordan formed an Irish Writers’ Co-Op soon after leaving UCD. In 1976, he published his first book Night in Tunisia and Other Stories and six years later directed his first movie, Angel.
But then, Jordan has every reason to be cheerful.
Less than two years ago, he was all but written off as a director, with influential tomes such as The International Dictionary of Films and Film-makers speaking for many when it dismissed his movies High Spirits and We’re No Angels, claiming that both demonstrated “rather painfully that Jordan does not have a feel for comedy”.
There was also the growing belief that the path Jordan had chosen as a film-maker had blocked any road back to his original role as one of Ireland’s most promising writers, as was evident in works such as The Past. Last year he admitted that, although he had a contract to write a book, he was finding the process “incredibly difficult”.
This month, Jordan disclosed that he had just “30 pages of the book to go” and although his script for The Crying Game creaks under the weight of dialogue that seems to have wandered in from the pages of that unfinished novel, overall the movie finds the director at the peak of his creative powers, proving that the return to form with last year’s The Miracle was no fluke.
Despite Jordan’s recent claim that, having proved himself again in two relatively low-budget movies he’d now “like another shot at a larger landscape”, it is possible he will never create the kind of commercially successful movies that would make him the darling of Hollywood.
Last year, he admitted “my temperament, and my brain is not suited to speaking to a wide popular audience”.
Indeed his detractors might suggest that as a self-proclaimed post-modernist whose style of writing was originally influenced by experimental novelists like Marguerite Duras and Robbe-Grillet, and whose style of film-making was similarly influenced by “surrealists” like Bunuel, Jordan’s brain is best suited to speaking to itself.
http://url.ie/dgts