Neil Jordan has spent his career telling strange, twisting stories that have mesmerised, surprised and occasionally misfired. Mona Lisa, The Crying Game, The Company of Wolves, Breakfast on Pluto – these films all veer off in unexpected directions, ambushing the audience. But it turns out the director saved the biggest twist for himself. Watching some of his films at a festival some years ago, Jordan was startled to see his own private life up there on the screen. It seems he had unknowingly channelled his relationships with his father, his wife and his children into stories about gangsters, terrorists and hot vampires. “I was shocked at how much of myself I revealed,” he says. “It was like a physical shock.”
That Jordan burgled his own psyche injects fresh meaning into a highly idiosyncratic body of work that spans mainstream hits like Interview With a Vampire and Michael Collins, Hollywood duds such as High Spirits and We’re No Angels, and art-house darlings such as Angel and The Butcher Boy. The disclosure is one of many plums in his new book Amnesiac, a memoir of a life (and imagination) less ordinary. It hop-scotches from a childhood in 1950s Catholic Ireland to bohemian 1970s London, then on to a shimmering 90s Los Angeles, before reaching a peripatetic lion-in-winter stage, with Jordan, now 74, making forays from Dublin for TV and film work.
In photos, he often appears stern – the auteur as Grumpy Cat – but when we meet at a cafe in Dublin, near his Dalkey home, he seems affable and relaxed, with a hint of California in the excellent teeth and linen jacket and T-shirt. The memoir was the publisher’s idea, he says. “One doesn’t think of one’s life as having any particular story, or of being of interest to anybody really. I’m very suspicious of the idea of memoirs. But I just began to write and began enjoying it.”
The memoir mixes moviemaking tales – we encounter a triumphant Tom Cruise, a dispirited Brad Pitt, a grasping Harvey Weinstein – with reflections on transgenderism, Irish history, race and ghosts, all sprinkled with Wildean epigrams. “One should never introduce the idea of God to a child,” he writes. “Like leprechauns, they can only take it literally.”
Jordan is a gifted, garlanded writer, though he downplays the recognition. “Nobody reads my novels,” he says. “A lot of people see my movies but they’re surprised I write. That I write novels is almost like, I don’t know, somebody writing poetry. It’s almost a private activity.”
Amnesiac is a series of cinematic vignettes bookended by the illness and death of Jordan’s mother, Angela, an artist whose watercolours influenced her son’s visual aesthetic. His father Michael was a mathematician and educator who shuddered whenever Jordan sat down to write. “It used to disturb him tremendously, perhaps because he was afraid of exploring certain forbidden aspects of himself.”
Jordan mined his family’s life for stories such as Night in Tunisia, the title story in a collection that won the Guardian prize for fiction in 1979. But he says he did not consciously do so in his films. Mona Lisa, released in 1986, features an ex-convict played by Bob Hoskins who has grown distant from his daughter and falls for a sex worker, played by Cathy Tyson, whom he ferries around a seedy London. Only decades later did Jordan connect its central theme with the fact that, during filming, he was getting divorced and was separated from his daughters. “I made a film about a man who fundamentally misunderstands women. I was just amazed at how personal it was – and I was embarrassed.”
Other autobiographical touches hid in plain sight. A river estuary on the Dublin-to-Drogheda railway line that appears as a location in multiple Jordan films – it is the site of a carnival in the opening of The Crying Game – is where his father had a fatal heart attack while fishing. Jordan believes he saw his father’s ghost in, of all places, the first class cabin of a 747 while experiencing turbulence over the Atlantic. “You don’t know whether these events are in your imagination or not. There was an event, let me put it that way.”
For Jordan there is no mystery about the darkness that often slides into his work. “I grew up in a country that was fundamentally irrational. It seemed to exist above the world, in some weird fucking paranoid construct.” Growing up in Sligo and Dublin he suffered no abuse, no trauma, but he saw a nation in thrall to Catholic theology, where people prayed to release souls from purgatory. “They lived in this world where that was as real to them as the beach at Dollymount.”
Jordan does not lament its passing. “It was horrible. But it was actually an interesting context from which to come. Probably somebody who leaves North Korea for South Korea would have the same experience.”
London’s vast, multiracial, pulsing energy provided a great contrast. “The only time I discovered rationality was when I went to England.” It had murky recesses, though. On a break from University College Dublin, the young Jordan sought work in London, only to end up carrying a sandwich board around Oxford Street and becoming destitute. When a couple of Scottish hippies offered him a bed at a friend’s “crash-pad” he accepted and found himself delivered, like a pizza, to the suburban home of a large man who expected sex. “And thus,” says the memoir, “began your hatred of hippies.”
After sandwich-boarding, Jordan returned to Ireland and apprenticed John Boorman during the making of Excalibur, the 1981 Arthurian epic. A year later, he made his feature debut, Angel, about a saxophonist, played by Stephen Rea, who becomes a killer. The Company of Wolves, Mona Lisa, The Crying Game and critical acclaim followed.
One scene in The Crying Game, about an IRA man who is enchanted by the beautiful, feminine partner of a murdered British soldier, still stirs debate 32 years on. When the republican fugitive played by Rea discovers that Dil, played by the male actor Jaye Davidson, has a penis, he vomits. Some have cried transphobia.
“A lot of trans cinemagoers would say that represents a rejection of their entire community,” says Jordan. “But he thought she was a woman. There would have been no drama if he hadn’t had a response. And if he hadn’t rejected her, he wouldn’t have been able to come back to her and embrace her with a different understanding. So that’s my problem with these kind of conversations: they seem to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of drama and storytelling. They think that because you present something in the story, you’re authenticating a certain point of view – which you’re not.”
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The film predated the widespread use of the term “transgender”, and “somehow blundered” into contemporary debate, he says. “I support the trans community,” adds Jordan, “and their right to be identified the way they want to be identified.”
The Crying Game won the director an Oscar for best original screenplay and lit up the box office, but Jordan says Weinstein’s Miramax company did not share its proceeds with the crew members who had deferred fees on the basis of profit participation. Long before #MeToo, he believes, the producer should have been tried for theft.
Interview with the Vampire, his 1994 adaptation of Anne Rice’s gothic novel, left Jordan with enduring respect for Tom Cruise. “It must have been very difficult for him. The entire world said, ‘You are miscast.’” But the actor’s turn as the cruel, sensualist vampire Lestat eventually won over critics, and the performance was hailed anew upon a rerelease for the film’s 30th anniversary. “He’s a great actor,” says Jordan. “If he says he can do something, he will do it in a way that people will be shocked by. Tom has become the last remaining film star. It’s kind of strange.”
Brad Pitt, who played the sad, soulful vampire Louis, faced different hurdles. Arriving straight after finishing Legends of the Fall, he was exhausted and became more so because filming was at night. “It simply wore him out,” says Jordan. So did the nature of Louis. “Brad’s a very active guy, that was the direction he wanted to go in. The passivity of the character got him down.”
The 1996 biopic Michael Collins, in which Liam Neeson played the rebel leader, angered some in Ireland with its depiction of his rival Éamon de Valera – who went on to found Fianna Fáil and become taoiseach – as machiavellian. “I’ll never be forgiven for that. I don’t really care.” He would love to do a biopic of De Valera but doubts it would ever receive funding. “It would reveal a lot of the pathologies that Irish society had to live with.”
Jordan would be willing to direct another big studio picture but doubts he will be asked. “Would anybody want to see me doing a Marvel movie? When they have these huge, four-quadrant films, they choose younger people.” He has fond, wry memories of Hollywood. “It was a very welcoming place. They really wanted you. They just didn’t want to do what you wanted to do.”
Instead, he is preparing to turn his 2023 novel The Well of Saint Nobody into a film starring Jeremy Irons and Helena Bonham Carter. It will be the first time he has adapted one of his own books. Or, in a way, two books. The story features a pianist, incapacitated by psoriasis on his hands, who falls for his housekeeper. Jordan’s memoir also vividly describes his own struggles with psoriasis, as well as how he fell for his assistant, Brenda Rawn, now his wife. Another case of his life reaching the screen? Actually, Jordan thinks the story’s true appeal lies elsewhere. With a Mona Lisa smile, he says: “It deals with sex among older people.”