With his 1992 Oscar-winning film, The Crying Game, Irish director-screenwriter Neil Jordan staked a claim as a major force in the international film industry. In 1994, Jordan’s spectacular film version of Anne Rice’s cult novel, Interview with the Vampire, consolidated that claim.
Starring box-office heavyweights Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, and Christian Slater the movie is attracting critical and popular acclaim on a scale typically denied highly-charged, blood-filled horror movies. Back in Ireland planning his next film, to be based on the life of Michael Collins, Jordan talked to Colin Lacey about vampires, the Irish film industry, his forthcoming novel, and why Ireland in the 1950s was like Rumania under Ceausescu.
Interview with the Vampire has been a huge critical and commercial success, in terms of your Hollywood career, how significant is that?
Neil Jordan: It’s hard to say. Vampire is actually the first time I had full control over a film in Hollywood. High Spirits, for example, was recut totally before release, but I was able to make the rules myself on this one, and for me that’s very significant. I wouldn’t say I didn’t enjoy the experience [of making the earlier films] but I was working as director-for-hire. Making Interview with the Vampire was a rather wonderful experience. I was making it like it was an independent film, really — the way I made The Crying Game, but with a budget of $50 or $60 million. There was no interference from the studio and nobody trying to second guess me. They kind of left me alone to do what I wanted.
IA: How did you feel about the film before it was released?
Neil Jordan: I was very proud of it and very happy with it. It took off like a rocket, but I knew that even if it hadn’t worked commercially it was still a very good film. It’s a very special movie.
IA: Anne Rice was very public in her initial opposition to the involvement of yourself and Tom Cruise with the film. How did her objections affect you?
Neil Jordan: Well, I didn’t appreciate it that much. Vampire became a very high profile, very public movie from the minute I took it on. For some reason everyone got the impression that I was going to distort the book, that myself and [film producer] David Geffen were going to sanitize the whole thing — which we had no intention of doing, and which we didn’t do at all. I just felt Cruise was right for the role, Rice was wrong about what we were going to do, and I went ahead and made the film.
IA: Later, however, she turned around to praise the work you did.
Neil Jordan: Right. After she saw the movie, she liked it. Actually she loved it. She thought it captured her book very well, which was great.
IA: As a straight ahead horror film, Vampire is quite unlike any of your other films…
Neil Jordan: [interrupts]…No, there was The Company of Wolves, which is similar in some ways.
IA: What was it that attracted you to the project?
Neil Jordan: I’ve always liked Gothic horror. I grew up close to [Dracula creator] Bram Stoker’s house in Dublin and I remember cycling past it on my way into town and thinking it was the scariest house ever — I’d never seen a creepier place. I also loved horror movies, because they give you the opportunity to go to these dark places you’ll never see — the nightworld of the dead. Anne Rice’s vampires are magnificent creatures. They make you want to be like them, and what she has done — and this made it more interesting for me — is to bring sexuality to the forefront. This sexuality has always been there; even in the old Christopher Lee movies, the vampire was like a horny priest, but in a much more subdued way than in Rice’s books.
IA: Interview with the Vampire has been criticized for its high levels of graphic violence. What’s your reaction to that?
Neil Jordan: Interview with the Vampire is a vampire film. If anyone says there’s too much blood or whatever in it, I just tell them ‘It’s about vampires, and when you go to see it, you know that vampires don’t exist, that they’re imaginary creatures. So [the violence] is definitely removed from the real world.’ A lot of the people who complain about it don’t actually go to horror movies. I go to a lot of them and I can tell you that the amount of blood in Interview with the Vampire is mild compared to something like A Nightmare on Elm Street. Actually, movies are not as bloody now as they were in the 1970s. [Sam Peckinpah’s] The Wild Bunch, which was made in 1969 and received a PG rating, was re-released recently and the only thing it could get was NC17.
IA: Oliver Stone’s latest film, Natural Born Killers, was banned in Ireland. Does it concern you that one of your films could possibly receive the same treatment?
Neil Jordan: Yes, of course. We ban films here in Ireland. I don’t agree with censorship. A studio doesn’t make a film just because it’s violent, and people don’t go to see it just because it’s violent, and anyway I think the violence in movies is nothing compared to the extremes you get on daily television. Interview with the Vampire is a Gothic fantasy. They’re vampires, and they live on blood. How can you make a vampire movie without blood?
IA: Rice’s novel is one of a series, and the film appears to leave an opening for a sequel. Will there be one?
Neil Jordan: Yes, if I can get the script right. No plans yet, though.
IA: Although you’re more noted as a film maker, you ‘began’ as a fiction writer. If you had to define yourself as an artist, would it be as writer or director?
Neil Jordan: It would have to be both. Even though I enjoyed writing short stories and novels, I was always writing scripts too. But they weren’t being produced very well. I wrote a series on the life of Sean O’Casey for RTE and an independent film called Travellers, and I wasn’t very happy with the results. I loved writing films but I hated seeing what happened to them, so I decided I’d make them myself.
IA: Your new novel, Sunrise with Sea Monster, is due to be published in 1995. What can you tell me about it?
Neil Jordan: I haven’t published a book since 1984, and I wanted to find out if I could still write a novel. I’ve been writing it for the past few years, in between movies. The book is set in Ireland during the Second World War and Spain during the Civil War, which sounds intimidating and historical, but it’s not really. It’s a love story set in Dublin during the Emergency about a triangular relationship between a son, a father, and a stepmother.
IA: When you conceive of an idea for a narrative, how do you decide if it should take form as a book or a film?
Neil Jordan: It doesn’t work like that. Sunrise with Sea Monster is a novel, and it’ll never be filmed, by me or anyone. If that happened I’d probably react like Anne Rice. I either think of an idea for a film, or an idea for a book. I mainly make films now, but if the Guardians of Morality ever forbid me or prevent me from doing it, I can always go back to writing.
IA: Is that likely to happen?
Neil Jordan: [Laughs] Well, it’s getting pretty religious over there in the United States, isn’t it?
IA: In the film industry, interest in Ireland has certainly grown in recent years. But is Ireland the Australia of the 1990s, or can the Irish film industry be of long-term international significance?
Neil Jordan: It depends on how it’s handled. It depends on whether people take advantage or misuse the financial incentives like Section 35 that have been set up in Ireland for the film industry. I’m on the National Film Board in Ireland, and I think people are very, very conscious of what happened in Australia in the 1980s. What killed the industry in Australia was that everyone just left and went to Hollywood. Irish film makers are doing that too, and they should, but they have to come back. Jim Sheridan does that, and I do it too — I go to Hollywood and make a film there and then I come back and make an Irish film. I think you can only get stronger from doing that. So I hope the industry can survive, because we have one now, and there never really has been one before.
IA: Your next film is about Michael Collins with Liam Neeson starring. How did the project evolve?
Neil Jordan: It’s something I’ve been wanting to do for years. David Puttnam commissioned a script from me for Warner Bros. A few years ago and I got very into the subject. But then David left Warner and the script stayed there, so I thought I’d never get to make it. Nothing has been written in stone yet, but now Warner Bros. want it to go ahead. It’ll be a low-to medium-sized budget and shooting starts in spring in Ireland.
IA: Why make a film about Collins?
Neil Jordan: Collins has become almost a mythic figure in Irish history, and you’re able, through a single character, to tell the whole story of the contradictions of the Irish relationship to England and the paradoxes of the uses of violence. It’s kind of the whole Irish story told through one character. I grew up in Ireland in the 1950s, and I’m just beginning to realize it was like growing up in Ceausescu’s Rumania. DeValera and the Catholic Church froze the South and we grew up almost in a Catholic/Nationalist model state that was dominated, like Rumania or Yugoslavia, by a single ethos. Collins is such an important figure in Irish history because his death allowed that to happen. Had Collins lived, deValera wouldn’t have dominated the country for 50 or 60 years. That’s something that’s only supposed to happen in Communist countries.
IA: The film is almost certain to attract controversy in Ireland, possibly in the way Oliver Stone’s JFK did in the U.S. What do you expect the reactions to be?
Neil Jordan: I’ve no idea. Depending on the approach, it’s the kind of story that could be a bit of a hot potato, so there’ll probably be every possible kind of reaction. I’m not trying to cover my tracks or make a bad film — I’ll just try and tell the truth about Collins from 1916 to 1922.
IA: Thank you Neil Jordan.
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in the January/February 1995 issue of Irish America. ⬥
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