The Company of Wolves was one of the darkest, most daring, and deeply layered cinematic fairy tales ever created. Pavel Barter talks to director Neil Jordan about the making of his 1984 cult classic.

Clapham, London, 1983. Director Neil Jordan and writer Angela Carter are seated beside one another, pens and paper at the ready, dreaming out loud. And their dream is this: monster toadstools and swaying redwoods, giant teddy bears and life-sized dollhouses; a childhood Neverland narrated by a kindly grandma – a storybook snapshot brought to life. But if you go down to the woods today be sure of a big surprise, for behind the playful toys and pastoral shanties lurks something quite terrible – the beast. Suddenly the dollhouse collapses beneath the weight of a rustic nightmare, and with a single howl all your worst fears are realised. You are a child trapped in a storybook. You are the prey and your grandma has become worryingly hairy. And Jordan and Carter keep dreaming.

'Every morning we would meet in Angela's house to imagine these extraordinary scenes. We would think about them every night, then meet the next day and create more,' recalls Neil Jordan today, fresh from the final edit of Breakfast on Pluto. 'We had total freedom playing with different genres, multiple meanings, and ideas of reality and fantasy. We had a ball with it.' The fact that the pair sang from the same literary hymn sheet helped matters hugely. In 1967 Angela Carter was awarded the Somerset Maugham prize for her second novel, and through the rest of that decade and the 1970s she cemented a reputation as a formidable feminist critic and novelist. Neil Jordan, 33 years old at the time, also began his career as an award-winning novelist, and was fresh from his directorial debut Angel (1982).

Angel was shot on real landscapes, no studio work involved at all. After that I wanted to go the opposite direction and create a story in an entirely imaginary environment. I met Angela Carter at a writers conference in Dublin, and she showed me a small radio play she had written based on a collection of her stories called The Bloody Chamber. She suggested that it might make a small movie, so I read it. Angela's message in The Bloody Chamber was that behind these saccharine kids' bedtime stories was real blood, flesh, hair, and a seething torrent of sexuality. I had a fascination with fairy tales and understood where she was coming from immediately.'

The full article is printed in Film Ireland 105.