A girl in a red cloak listens to her grandmother's warnings about men whose eyebrows meet in the middle (1984)
The Company of Wolves — from Angela Carter's stories, with Angela Lansbury.
Film · British & Irish
Neil Jordan
born 1950 · Irish
Irish cinema — gothic fable and political thriller
Neil Jordan began as a short-story writer and novelist and has never stopped being one, moving between lush gothic fantasy, Irish political history and sly genre subversion with a fluency few directors manage. His 1992 thriller about an IRA volunteer and the lover of the soldier he guarded became a sensation partly through a secret the audience was asked to keep, and won him an Academy Award for its screenplay. He remains the most internationally successful Irish director of his generation, and still writes fiction between films.
How to spot them
- ▸Fairy tale and horror treated as adult forms — wolves, vampires, changelings
- ▸Irish history handled through one compromised individual rather than a movement
- ▸Identity, disguise and revealed secrets; characters who are not the gender or side you assumed
- ▸Composer Elliot Goldenthal, cinematographer Philippe Rousselot, and the actor Stephen Rea in ten films
- ▸He is a working novelist; several films are adapted from his own prose
Key films
A newly released London driver chauffeurs a call girl and falls for her while she searches for a lost friend (1986)
Mona Lisa — Bob Hoskins won Best Actor at Cannes.
A volunteer befriends the hostage he is guarding, then seeks out the soldier's lover in London — and learns something (1992)
The Crying Game — the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay; Stephen Rea and Jaye Davidson.
A two-hundred-year-old immortal tells his life story to a reporter with a tape recorder in San Francisco (1994)
Interview with the Vampire — from Anne Rice, with Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt.
The founder of a guerrilla intelligence network signs a treaty he knows will kill him, and is shot in a Cork lane (1996)
Michael Collins — the Golden Lion at Venice, with Liam Neeson.
A small-town Irish boy's mind comes apart after his mother's death, in a world of comics and nuclear dread (1997)
The Butcher Boy — from Patrick McCabe's novel; a Silver Bear at Berlin.
A transgender young woman leaves 1970s Ireland for London in search of the mother who abandoned her (2005)
Breakfast on Pluto — Cillian Murphy, again from Patrick McCabe.
A lonely New York waitress returns a handbag left on the subway and cannot get rid of its owner (2018)
Greta — Isabelle Huppert and Chloë Grace Moretz.
Key ideas
- The fairy tale as the honest form for sexual awakening and violence
- Nationalist history is best told through the person who compromises, not the martyr
- Genre as camouflage: a thriller, a vampire film or a horror picture used to smuggle in a study of identity
Quick-fire facts
- •Born in Sligo on 25 February 1950 and raised in Dublin; he read Irish history and English at University College Dublin
- •His first book, the story collection Night in Tunisia (1976), won the Guardian Fiction Prize
- •He co-founded the Irish Writers' Co-operative before entering film, and worked as a script consultant for John Boorman on Excalibur
- •The Crying Game (1992) won him the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay; its distributor's campaign asked audiences not to reveal the twist
- •Michael Collins (1996) won the Golden Lion at Venice and Best Actor there for Liam Neeson
- •Stephen Rea has appeared in around ten of his films, from Angel (1982) onwards
- •He created the television series The Borgias (2011–2013) for Showtime
- •He has continued to publish novels, including The Well of Saint Nobody (2023), which he is now adapting himself with Jeremy Irons and Helena Bonham Carter attached
- •In 2026 he oversaw the 4K restoration of Interview with the Vampire and published a new novel, The Library of Traumatic Memory
Drill it — 8 cards
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Sources
- Festival de Cannes — Neil Jordan at the Festival de Cannes
- Variety — Neil Jordan on Restoring 'Interview With the Vampire' for 4K