Neil Jordan Quotes
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For me now, it's about what you would write and what you wouldn't write, and that's how I select what I am going to do. It can be quite nice being brought a concept by a studio for me to work on.
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No, I just thought of a story and wrote down what I saw. It was about two kids in Ireland who went around killing people. It was called Travelers, and it was made as an independent film.
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Never make a promise - you may have to keep it.
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Films have gotten leaner and leaner, cutting out all variations from the story line.
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I took two years away from making films to write a novel.
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There's no point in making a film out of a great book. The book's already great. What's the point?
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But everyone gets burnt, don't they? Certain things are outside of your control. I suppose the only thing you can learn as a director is to not put yourself into situations where it can get outside of your control. And that's what happened.
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I've also worked hard portraying an Ireland which is fast disappearing. Ireland was a very depressed and difficult place in the 1980s, and I've tried to include that in the script. I worked really hard to find the heart of the book.
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When you've written a movie, you then get together with a whole lot of people and make it. In many ways, I think it is far nicer to be with people rather than being completely solitary.
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The most difficult thing is the organization of people and the expression of your intentions. It's very easy to have a picture in your head and to imagine that you've told everybody about what you need.
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For me, the filmmaking has to be about the dramaturgy.
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The Company of Wolves is about how society teaches young women to look at themselves, and what to be afraid of. It's about a girl learning that the world of sensuality and the unknown is not to be feared, that it's worth getting your teeth into.
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I'm less comfortable making American movies because I don't know them so well.
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The End of the Affair is almost like a play.
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I do enjoy working with writers.
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I mean I grew up in Ireland, so one would have to be consciously blinkered not to have reflected on the issue of political violence because that was the story since I was 19 years old or 20.
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Well, Company of Wolves was about that literally, about fairy tales.
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Initially with The Butcher Boy, there was this kid growing up in this strange, weird environment that I remember from when I was a kid. And Patrick's vision was so complete there.
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It's the same thing in a way, although writing a book is a very solitary thing.
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The Company of Wolves doesn't belong in any category, so it's difficult to prepare an audience for it. It's not a horror film, it's not a fantasy film, it's not a children's film - so what is it?
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Well, I suppose I'm interested in ways of storytelling and in stories that are about storytelling.
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And I think I often choose to do something because it's quite different from what I've done before.
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Well, if you're talking about the current climate, there's a lack of content in American film because I think people are deeply confused about their emotions, and they don't regret certain aspects of their own foreign policy.
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In Dreams... well, I was slightly overcompensating with that. I was a bit like a director for hire, so maybe I was putting too much imagery that was familiar to me into it.