Originally printed in Issue 74 - February/March 2000
Interview by Ted Sheehy

It's a peculiar set up to begin with. Over the course of a long day a snake of reviewers, interviewers, critics, columnists, and photographers uncoils itself from the lobby of the Merrion Hotel in Dublin. It eventually passes, in bite sizes, through a suite on an anonymous corridor upstairs where Neil Jordan gets on with what may be one of the more arduous aspects of being a film director. I have my own crammed page of questions and I hope some of them are new. We start with a question each about Michael Collins, The Butcher Boy and In Dreams.

Ted Sheehy: Firstly a question (or critical hypothesis) about Michael Collins. The film is to some extent a reading of history and character but it also, it seems to me, could only have been made by someone who lived at a formative age through the 1916/1966 commemorations in Ireland, and then through the beginnings of conflict in NI, and who asked themselves serious questions about political violence at that time. Is that a valid point?

Neil Jordan: It is a valid point, yeah, absolutely. It was basically because of there being a persistence of political violence in the culture of the whole island... the appeal to me of the story was when you examined that story everything that is still an issue was so perfectly expressed in that period.

TS: The one niggling and perhaps only criticism of The Butcher Boy as a film is the ending, and the casting of Stephen Rea as the grown Francie - it presents a credibility issue to the viewer at the end?

NJ: That was Pat's conception when he wrote the original screenplay, in a way. That in the end Francie, in the mental hospital, had become the image of the father. I discussed it with Stephen, because I suppose they weren't that physically like each other. And he said, well, the only alternative is that you play him , because you look like him. I didn't want to do that because I always: thought it's a bit embarrassing, doing the Hitchcock bit. But the point was that Stephen was the voice, so it had to be him that played the older Francie at the end.

TS: To what do you ascribe the negative reaction to In Dreams, in the US especially?

NJ: They didn't like the movie, it's very simple!

TS: I know they didn't like it! Do you think there are things about the film that justify their not liking it?

NJ: I don't think the story made a lot of sense to them. The story justifies everything in a way. The story had been developed by Steven Spielberg himself, at Amblin, and he'd commissioned Bruce Robinson to write a screenplay. I read the screenplay and the images were fascinating, the premise of the entire story was absolutely fascinating. It went into this strange territory. I did a version of the screenplay myself, you know, in an attempt to solve that [story] problem. But lo and behold when I finished the movie that problem was still there. It's impossible to end that story... dealing with the death of a child in the middle of a film like that creates this huge narrative hole, you don't know where to put your emotions... There are certain rules in the genre, in a way, you start with a female character, you know, being pursued by irrational forces... you expect them to survive or triumph in some way. It was a film which destroyed all the rules of the genre. But I think it's more complicated than that, I think American critics objected to me making a movie like that because they loved The Butcher Boy so much. They said this guy shouldn't be doing this, really. I was not unhappy with the film at all but there are holes in it. The problem is it wasn't my story.

TS: To come on to The End of the Affair - I'm not a great reader of Greene but (as a Catholic convert) he's said to be preoccupied with 'redemption through degradation' - which is simplistic, perhaps, and doesn't address his strengths as a stylist, but there's some truth in it and he's 'out of fashion' as a result? And I wondered if it were thematic, character (writer as narrator/protagonist) or stylistic (time play) concerns which drew you to the book?

NJ: What drew me to the book was quite simply the fact that the same relationship was seen from different points of view. There are multiple interpretations of a series of central events. And at the end of all those interpretations there was something inexplicable to all the characters. Greene had come up with a beautiful story - I don't know if you've read Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. It's collected essays and in one of them he talks about the power of the story - somebody has taken over Rome and the Emperor has to stand there and watch his entire entourage being humiliated. He sees his wife come through in chains, he doesn't move a muscle. He sees all the dignitaries, all the loved ones in his life, children, being dragged through. He doesn't move a muscle. Until the end, he sees this old, broken-backed guy, this servant who used bring his breakfast, something like that, and he breaks down and weeps. Benjamin examines that story and says the reason it's powerful is because - and he examines different interpretations of it: someone says it was because he loved that servant best of all, someone else says it was because this was just the tiny drop that made his grief overflow. And Benjamin says the power of the story is that it's not explained by any of those explanations and yet it's amenable to all of them. I think Greene came up with such a story in this.

TS: My own feeling about it, as a novel, was that at times it's little more than a thesis...

NJ: Well that's the fault with it...

TS: And the protagonist narrator is a very unlikeable, very prickly, unpleasant character in many ways. Did you feel that you had to moderate that?

NJ: No, no I tried to make him as unlikeable as he was!

TS: Ralph Fiennes [as Maurice Bendrix] has given the audience more to empathise with in the film than there is in the book.

NJ: Yeah, perhaps there is more. The basic dynamic of the character, Bendrix, is that the more he says he hates, the more you know he has loved. The thing that I changed was exactly that kind of theoretical argument, that sense of philosophical argument towards the end of the novel which I think just overwhelmed the characters and the story itself. I think if there is a fault in the book it is that.

TS: The film I was reminded of by The End of the Affair is Breaking the Waves, would you agree there are affinities...

NJ: To both movies, yes there are except Emily Watson is in this portrait of this tiny little community in Scotland which was deeply Presbyterian, the entire logic of all their lives was to do with religion.

TS: It was, yes, but you could say that she gave her life for Stellan Skarsgaard's character in the way, perhaps, that Sarah Miles does for Bendrix...

NJ: Equally irrational in a way, wasn't it?

TS: ...and one of the consequences of adapting the novel was the issue of the possibility of his being dead on the stairs becomes more of a probability in the film.

NJ: Well the novel is entirely subjective, you know, until he encounters her diary, so he's speaking as himself. But he does say, when he's hit by that door that falls on top of him, he felt free of all pain and all jealousy and I used that voiceover. But in the movie you can present different perspectives, you can almost have present a God-like perspective. I wanted it to be a decided possibility that he actually could have died in that event. In a way he did die because his emotional life was over after that moment. He walks upstairs and she leaves him and he doesn't see her again. His life is stopped there and then, you know? And when we meet him at the start of the movie he's like a dead man, a ghost of what he was, in a way, and he's haunted by the meaning of that event. That's why he takes Henry's suggestion. And all the characters are emotionally haunted.

TS: There's something going on which allows for the possibility that there's something happening on a metaphysical plane and it's something you've intentionally enhanced in the film and I wonder where...

NJ: Where that comes from?

TS: Yeah... cause it's there in other female characters in a few of your other films.

NJ: Like in what?

TS: Well, it's there in In Dreams, there's the girl in Angel...

NJ: Yeah, yeah, I suppose so, you're right. Well it's like... she says something happened in that room, yeah, you know?, If you're filming an event from different perspectives - his perspective, her perspective - there's another perspective too, you know? Which is the perspective of absence, in a way. I think the reason certain filmmakers have been quite mystical, or expressed oddly mystical things - I'm not sure that Kieslowski did it well in Three Colours Red but he definitely did it in his Decalogue. He expressed this mysterious perspective where something is happening between the logic of ordinary events and the logic of mathematics, like when the kid is playing chess with his father, and the computer sends this message, and then the kid dies. There's something about filming thngs that makes you think of those things. Light in itself is mysterious.

TS: As a filmmaker you create that on celluloid...

NJ: Well it's not that. For example, me as a director, I've got to present his [Bendrix's] point of view - bitter, jealous, priapic, obsessive, needs to possess all the time and wants to reclaim, basically that's one thing. Then you present her perspective, whatever that should be - you have to make the camera more gentle yet you can't in a way. But to be making a film with the idea that there is another perspective, there's another way of looking at things which is beyond all the characters, in a way that's what the camera does in a strange way.

TS: There's a kind of ambivalence to Sarah's character in the notion of redemptive action on her part, in withdrawing from him, denying herself and then her death. Is she going from being a morally bad person to becoming a good person?

NJ: No, I don't think so. That's why the combination of sexual rapture and mystical rapture is... you feel they're one and the same thng, don't you? The only pictorial or physical way of presenting mystical rapture is in sexual terms, that's what Renaissance painting always did. There seems to be a rightness, really; emotionally it seems to be terribly appropriate that she is so carnal and from that she can actually be so... you know, so...

TS: Are you saying there's a purity in carnality which transfers...

NJ: I think there's somethng we deny nowadays about the whole idea of sexuality, the whole idea of any kind of rapture, you know what I mean. That's why it seems to me to be absolutely true and obvious. But people say, ok this is a very old- fashioned idea, a religious idea, but I don't agree. If there was, for example, (I'm talking about painting and portraiture) a tradition of the nude like there was when Rubens was painting and a tradition of religious portraiture, then the same elements would come into play. But all those things don't exist in our culture anymore. We've become terribly grey in our understanding of thngs. To me it makes absolute sense.

TS: So it's not a morally guilt-ridden thing...

NJ: No, not at all. I think that's the simplicity with which Julianne played it. It's hard to explain it to anybody, particularly to an actress. If I was to say, look, the emotional intensity that's put into the sexual scenes leads directly to your abandonment of this man. They're both an expression of love really, they both are exactly about the same emotion. To me it makes absolute sense.