Breakfast on Pluto is the extraordinary new film from Neil Jordan, starring Cillian Murphy as the falmboyant Patrick 'Kitten' Braden. Lir Mac Cárthaigh talks to Jordan and Murphy.

Lir: Breakfast On Pluto, from the novel to the cast to the financing is very much an Irish project.

Neil: Totally an Irish project, almost totally. In terms of financing it's Pathé, and it's what Alan Moloney could put together.

Was it deliberate; to make a very Irish film?

No, not at all. I had a deal with DreamWorks; I kept buying books that they didn't want to do, and one of them was Breakfast on Pluto. They gave me a very comfortable deal, and I managed to pay Pat McCabe for a first draft of the script. But it's not their kind of material, so we ended up doing it independently – that's what you have to do with most things.

If you want to do them the way you want to do them?

If you want to do them at all, actually. I mean you'd say 'of course I'll compromise if you'll do it', but they don't even want to do it! Basically, Pat had written a draft, then I began to write different drafts. Both myself and Pat wanted to depart from the novel, to use the novel as a springboard, really. Because to a certain extent he thought he hadn't finished the book – seriously! And the movie's quite different from the book; we were both anxious to finish it in some way. The first thing he did was bring the father back in – the priest – he had a meeting towards the end, and that was quite a departure. And then I began to take over the script myself, and re-write and re-write. It was a long process because I was doing different things.

I'd tested Cillian when we had arrived at a script that was interesting – I really wanted to see could anyone play the part!

(Lir chuckles)

No, seriously, because it is a big deal. I mean if somebody had played that part with the kind of camp you get in La Cage aux folles, or even in Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, it wouldn't have worked at all. Cillian gave this amazing performance, so I then knew that somebody could do the role. But I was doing other things, I was finishing a novel, Shade, and I think I was making a movie, The Good Thief, and I kind of put it off for a bit. Cillian kept coming back saying 'you have to do it, you have to do it'. The script was quite wild and quite provocative. So I sent it round to various studios, and various independent studios in America, and we didn't get a great response. I kept revising the script, and eventually we reached a point where I was really happy with it. I had a meeting with Cillian and Alan where all three of us talked about it, and Alan said 'well, how much is it going to cost?' and I said 'probably about twelve million dollars', and he said, 'look, give me three weeks or four weeks to put it together', and he did. Then we just went into making it, really. So it was one of those fortuitous things, you know?

The full article is printed in Film Ireland 108.