Neil Jordan

Speaker 20:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

Speaker 20:08

The programme was originally broadcast in the year two thousand, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:30

My Castaway this week is a writer and film director. He comes from an academic family in Ireland, but he always preferred fiction and the cinema to study. At the age of twenty-five, he published a book of short stories, which won two literary awards. He went on to write plays for television and radio, and then made his first film for Channel Four. Since then, it's filmmaking which has dominated his career. Mona Lisa, The Crying Game, Michael Collins, and about to be released, The End of the Affair, are just some of the titles that have won him equal acclaim in the commercial world of Hollywood and in the more, well, restrained environment of British and, of course, Irish cinema. Of making his films, he says, It's the same as writing a sentence. They should have both a logic and a truth. He is Neil Jordan. How surprised are you, Neil, that you've become a filmmaker? Because if I understand you are right, you intended all along to be a writer.

Neil Jordan1:24

Yeah, I did, yeah. It's it's what Irish people did. You either joined the civil service or you, you know, jump became a teacher or you became one of the great unemployed and unwashed or you rogue

Presenter1:28

Mm.

Presenter1:34

Because of your heritage.

Neil Jordan1:35

It's it's because, I mean, traditionally I suppose it was a very it was not a very wealthy culture, not a very wealthy place. When I grew up in the fifties it was very, very downbeat, very the opportunities were utterly totally scarce, nonexistent probably. And the uh the thought of me in the f when I was growing up of an Irish person directing a movie was like a contradiction in terms of

Presenter1:58

Other people did that. It wasn't.

Neil Jordan2:00

Yeah, Americans and Italians, I thought, at the time, you know.

Presenter2:03

So that if you were had literary pretensions at all, I mean, that's that's what you did. You wrote. You wrote your stories. You would not make films of that.

Neil Jordan2:08

Yeah, you're right. And it was uh I mean, writing was a great uh I suppose it was a great escape, you know. It was it was quite a uniform society. I mean, it wasn't a bad place. I mean, it was but it was you know, it was very

Neil Jordan2:21

Very monolithic. I mean, I grew up in the north side of Dublin, Catholic, kind of middle class. Everybody seemed to do exactly the same things. They all went to church, they all got beaten at school, they all like uh tried to play football, they all did it you know, it was kind of a quite conformist place and I suppose writing was reading and writing was the great escape for me.

Presenter2:42

But you said that when you finally did come to make a film, and we'll talk about how you came to do that.

Neil Jordan2:46

Okay.

Presenter2:47

It was a kind of incredible liberation.

Neil Jordan2:49

Yeah, it was extraordinary because, I mean, there's two things. As an Irish writer of the period, you're so it's it seemed to me that Dublin that I grew up in, every street and every brick had more words per cubic centimetre than any other city in the world, it seemed. You know, I mean, you've got Ulysses, you've got Finnegan's Wake, you've got Flanner Bryan, you've got George Bernard Shaw, you've got an endless procession of people who had walked those streets and come from them and written about them and, you know, kind of mythologised them. You know, so for me to get a camera and make a movie or even think of writing a movie, it was a tremendous freedom because nobody had ever done this before.

Presenter3:24

It's a breaking of the mould of the Irish traditional movement.

Neil Jordan3:26

Well, just for your own imagination too. You don't feel every kind of step has been done. You know, you you don't always feel you're walking you don't feel you're walking in anybody's footsteps.

Presenter3:34

Tell me about your first record.

Neil Jordan3:36

One of the best known staple kind of tunes in jazz is Around Midnight. You know, it's been recorded so many times by all sorts of different artists, probably almost done to death, but the original.

Neil Jordan3:46

It was written by Theolonius Monk, you know, who was yeah, you know, one of the giants of kind of musical giants, I think, of the twentieth century. And uh, he's got this spiky little style of playing the piano that is absolutely magnificent.

Presenter4:57

TELONIOUS MONK PLAYING ROUND MIDNIGHT. The End of the Affair stars Rafe Fiennes. It's the film, of course, of Graham Greene's novel about a a sterile marriage, moral dilemma, Roman Catholicism. What attracted you to it?

Neil Jordan5:11

I'd read Alder Green when I was a kid and I'd always felt that he was never well served by his directors, you know, except for Carl Reed, who made two marvellous movies on, you know, The Third Man and The Fallen Idol, because the films never had the atmosphere that you feel in the books, never had the imagery and the kind of dense moral kind of ambiguity. And I I read the book again about four or five years ago, and what it struck me there was something very cinematic right in the middle of the novel, which is the fact that there's a a love affair scene from two different points of view. Now it's not the centre of the book, really that. I mean the centre of the book actually is the novelist's kind of obsessional dialogue with himself and with God, isn't it really? And with

Speaker 25:54

And with Scott, isn't it really?

Neil Jordan5:57

The idea of love and jealousy. But if you actually extract that little but central thing.

Neil Jordan6:03

I could make it the center of a movie. I thought it could become a cinematic very cinematic thing.

Presenter6:06

But it's interesting, it's about two men being obsessed by the same woman, um which seems to me to be something of a theme of yours. I mean, in Mona Lisa you've got uh the the the prostitute and Bob Hoskins and the other man fascinated by her. Also in one of your novels, Sunrise and Sea Monster, you've got the father and son in love with the same woman. Why why does that theme crop up so often?

Neil Jordan6:11

And which

Neil Jordan6:14

Naviza

Neil Jordan6:22

Yeah.

Neil Jordan6:26

It's probably happened to me a lot in my life, you know, it's probably

Presenter6:28

Well, you've been in competition for the same reason.

Neil Jordan6:29

Meaning cookies.

Neil Jordan6:30

Probably, yeah. But no, it's it's not that. It's it's uh

Neil Jordan6:34

Yeah. I don't really know, really. It's it's um'cause I suppose

Neil Jordan6:39

The examination of erotic desire or of um the idea of what we call love, you know, people think it's simple, you know, I never think it's simple, ever, you know. And I often think that people don't even know what they desire, you know, they often desire

Neil Jordan6:54

Uh they often think they desire a certain person or a certain thing and the minute they get it they uh realize this wasn't it at all, you know that kind of thing. And it it it's the whole mechanism of need and longing fasc has always fascinated me, because I think in in many ways what people long for is oblivion or eternity in a way. And that's is at the center of Green's novel.

Presenter7:13

It is, and you can hear as you talk about it the way in which you've done it, is is very theatrical in a way. And perhaps the same could be said of the crying game. Again, there are long scenes where you've got character development and dialogue.

Speaker 47:27

Yeah.

Presenter7:28

Which contradicted, I mean, you think back to when you made the crying game, when when all those lethal weapons and diehards were kind of king of the cinema.

Speaker 47:33

And

Neil Jordan7:34

Uh

Neil Jordan7:35

Yeah.

Presenter7:35

You obviously took a view that you weren't going to go that way. You were going to do it in a rather more literary way.

Neil Jordan7:35

You won't

Neil Jordan7:39

Yeah.

Neil Jordan7:40

It was I think it was the worst period in cinema since the history of since the invention of the motion picture camera, you know, where if you hadn't got seventy five explosions per second and a major star, you know, you couldn't get your movie made. And I wrote that film thinking if they don't if I don't get this film made, actually I probably retire gracefully from the scene, you know, because it uh I mean it was about d it was about serious confrontational issues, it was about politics and sexuality and race and

Neil Jordan8:08

And Northern Ireland.

Presenter8:08

And Northern Ireland.

Presenter8:12

Which is not an easy thing to sell.

Neil Jordan8:14

A horribly difficult thing to sell. Yeah, but you know, I th and so I thought if if I can't get this made, I'll stop. But actually we did get it made and it turned out to be an enormous success, so.

Presenter8:22

I won't won an Oscar for this group.

Neil Jordan8:23

It did, yeah, yeah.

Presenter8:25

Tell me about record number two.

Neil Jordan8:26

Record number two. Oh, it's No One Knows from uh Dion and the Belmonts. I mean, it was a strange thing when I was a kid. You always heard the best versions of kind of soul and American music in carnival environments and I remember this from my youth and I put it in a movie called The Butcher Boy.

Speaker 48:43

No, oh no.

Speaker 48:48

What I go through

Speaker 48:53

And the tears

Speaker 48:56

I cried for you.

Speaker 49:00

And when I smile, it's just a pose.

Speaker 49:09

My heart is breaking

Presenter9:12

No one knows from Dion and the Belmonts, which you used, as you say, uh Neil Jordan in the Butcher Boy, you know, the Irish lad who literally butchers his next door neighbor, um wonderful mixture of kind of innocence and savagery.

Neil Jordan9:23

Savage

Presenter9:24

Resonances for you there in your childhood? Did you know that feeling? I don't mean you butchered your neighbour, but you know that feeling.

Neil Jordan9:29

I I knew that yeah, I knew that kid. I think doesn't everybody know a kid like that? I think. You know a kid that is so attractive, so uh so utterly compelling, you know, that there's no barriers to their emotional expression and yet, you know, it's so dangerous. So you're kind of scared and fascinated at the same time, you know?

Speaker 29:44

Yeah.

Presenter9:44

So yeah.

Presenter9:47

Francie, his name was, and he of course um heard voices. He talks to the Virgin Mary, Shine O'Connor, you yeah. But I mean, she particularly appears in this great, great light. Did you have visions as a kid? Did you hear voices?

Neil Jordan9:52

Yeah.

Neil Jordan9:59

Oh yeah, absolutely, yeah, all the time, yeah, yeah, yeah. What did they say? Well, I mean, when I was grow growing up, you were constantly told that you were being watched by

Presenter10:02

What did they say?

Neil Jordan10:08

not only, uh, you know, uh God and the Virgin Mary, but by about thirty seven variety of saints at the same time, you know what I mean? So uh anything you do is observed by unseen eyes everywhere in the sky kind of thing, you know. I mean, kids are very impressionable, aren't they? They believe everything you tell'em.

Presenter10:23

Yeah.

Speaker 210:23

Uh

Neil Jordan10:23

We we the one one of the worst things we were taught when we were kids was uh

Neil Jordan10:27

That if you were given if you got a vocation to be a priest, yeah, you would hear a voice in your head and there was no escaping it, that was it, you would be chosen. So I think I literally used to grab my hands over my ears when I was a certain age in case I heard this bloody voice, you know. But it's uh I mean that that that's one of the attractions of making a a movie like The Butcher Boy actually is to portray that rather wonderful paranoid and totally insane world, you know.

Presenter10:51

The irony in all of this is, of course, that you weren't allowed a lot of cinema as a child, were you? You were rationed heavily.

Neil Jordan10:55

You were Russian.

Neil Jordan10:56

Yeah, I had to go to the next one.

Presenter10:57

What were you allowed to see and not?

Neil Jordan10:59

Er for some reason I mean, it I think it was because my father was a teacher.

Neil Jordan11:03

I was allowed to see one movie every two weeks. And grew up in a house without a television, yeah? And uh if I wanted to see T V had to either go round to the neighbour's house or stare in their window, you know, that kind of thing. And uh which is a scene that's also in The Butcher Boy actually.

Speaker 211:06

Yeah.

Presenter11:06

Thank you.

Speaker 211:06

Uh

Neil Jordan11:17

And um

Neil Jordan11:19

I think it was because being a teacher and being very concerned with ideas of literacy and reading and all that sort of stuff, he thought movies were kind of detrimental, you know, to the psyche, somehow kind of a corrosive force.

Presenter11:32

But did he tell you stories?

Neil Jordan11:34

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Tommy Stories, yeah.

Presenter11:37

Like what?

Neil Jordan11:37

Ghost stories, you know, stories of uh generally stories to do with the uh unknown. I think that's what adults do, isn't it, to kids? Or that's what the adult world does to kids. As in The Company of Wolves, that movie I made with Angela Carter, you know.

Neil Jordan11:52

Fairy tales are cautionary tales, and designed to scare the daylights out of kids really, you know?

Presenter11:56

But

Neil Jordan11:56

Twitter

Presenter11:56

Red Riding Hood

Neil Jordan11:57

Mm.

Presenter11:58

and sexual fantasy.

Neil Jordan11:59

All that sort of stuff.

Presenter11:59

In a fairly potent mix. But did your father's stories frighten you?

Neil Jordan12:04

Well, they were always about ghosts. They were always about people coming back from the dead. Somebody, for example, somebody a loved one dies and they

Neil Jordan12:12

long for them to come back. They have a dream that night, they come back and touch their arm, they wake up in the morning knowing that they've been visited by the dead person but they find their arm is withered. You know that kind of thing? Stories like that, yeah.

Presenter12:21

Story

Presenter12:22

Chilling.

Neil Jordan12:22

Chilling, quite chilling, yeah, yeah.

Presenter12:24

But the father-son relationship again is one of your themes, it seems to me. It it pops up very frequently, most particularly in your novel Sunrise with Sea Monster, and there it's about a father and son who don't communicate. There's a kind of silence between them.

Neil Jordan12:28

Do you think that's a good one?

Neil Jordan12:32

Yeah.

Neil Jordan12:35

It's a kind of

Neil Jordan12:36

Total silence. Well, that was that was actually written as a response to my father's death, actually, because I was in um

Neil Jordan12:44

It was quite sudden and quite shocking. I was in Los Angeles and we were o opening the company of wolves and I got this message saying that he had died. So I came back and I'm standing at this graveyard and um

Neil Jordan12:56

saying to myself, well

Neil Jordan12:58

Come on and haunt me, you know, tell me all those stories you actually told me were true, huh? And of course there was no haunting, there was no apparition from beyond the grave, you know, I mean, there was no, um there was no kind of Hamlet's ghost wandering through my life, there was just silence, you know. And I think it's out of that that I wrote that novel, really. It was kind of an exploration of uh

Neil Jordan13:18

That kind of silence in a way.

Presenter13:20

Tell me about your third piece of music.

Neil Jordan13:22

Well, you know, like if one loves music, as I did as a kid, that was one of the things we shared, my f myself my father, because he was a fiddle player, you know. And uh but when I first experienced when I first heard uh Beep Up jazz, when I first heard specifically heard Charlie Parker, you know, I heard a kind of a world of tonality and a world of kind of uh discovery that was terribly fresh. You know, I wrote about it. I mean the first collection of stories was called Night and Shunisia, so so this uh it's written by Dizzy Gillespie, but it's probably again one of the great jazz tunes.

Presenter14:55

Charlie Parker and A Night in Tunisia, which was the title of your first published work, a collection of short stories.

Presenter15:01

Many of them about sort of adolescents in shabby seaside resorts. You were twenty-five, mid-twenties. Why had you left it so long?

Neil Jordan15:09

To ride? I didn't have that long at all, no.

Presenter15:09

Hmm.

Neil Jordan15:12

It just took a long time to be published, I think.

Presenter15:15

You'd been writing them all that time, had you?

Neil Jordan15:15

You've been by sharing.

Neil Jordan15:16

I've been writing. Yeah, I've been writing stuff. I was working in the I had worked in theater groups before that. I think that's the thing.

Presenter15:22

Yeah, but you've been working you've worked on building sites in London, you tried to get jobs, you know, you know, you're always trying to find a

Neil Jordan15:27

Yeah, you don't

Presenter15:31

A proper job in inverted comments while you were writing. But there was obviously a point at which you sat down and said, look.

Neil Jordan15:32

Yes, while you were writing.

Presenter15:37

For God's sake, I must stop doing I must just sit down and do what I've got to do.

Neil Jordan15:40

There was, there was a point, yeah, yeah, there was, yeah. I suppose because, um

Neil Jordan15:44

It's uh well, I suppose I realized I was unemployable, you know. I mean I was I had a a degree in university, so I could have been a

Neil Jordan15:51

the jo one job I could have got was teaching, you know, and uh

Neil Jordan15:55

I found it appalling. I found it so difficult, you know, managing kids. I tried it, yeah, but it would just it would just exhaust me. I would walk into a class, I swear to God, and my very presence there would drive them insane, you know. So you see thirty-five kids suddenly would just go nuts. I don't know, I had no sense of discipline whatsoever. So I I I couldn't get a job as a teacher, so I began I did what most Irish people do, I suppose I went to England, you know, and worked at whatever you could get. Bars, I worked in building sites, I worked in

Presenter15:58

Mm.

Speaker 215:58

The management is

Speaker 416:10

Oh I don't know

Speaker 416:13

Mm.

Neil Jordan16:24

Tried to work as a teacher again, not very successfully.

Presenter16:28

He stood in dull cues.

Neil Jordan16:29

What was that like?

Presenter16:30

What was that like?

Neil Jordan16:30

After a while I just got sick of it. I said, I'm not doing this, I'll just do what I

Neil Jordan16:34

want to do which is right, you know. And s you know, when I did that, suddenly I was able to earn a living.

Presenter16:38

And the stories won the Guardian Fiction Prize and the Somerset Maum. People said you'd broken the mould, you'd you'd set a new style in Irish Ghost Wars.

Neil Jordan16:47

Yeah, well it was I mean because Irish fiction hadn't I suppose discussed those issues. You know they didn't talk about rock and roll, they didn't talk about

Presenter16:53

Jazz.

Neil Jordan16:54

The yeah, our influence of movies, the T V, it's it's at the time, I think, um th it was rooted in quite quite rural realities.

Presenter17:02

But interestingly, and you can see it rereading them now, they were very, very visual. Were you aware of that at the time?

Neil Jordan17:09

Well, I was aware that I loved the cinema at the time, you know. I mean, that was the great uh that was the great secret kind of uh mistress of everybody that I knew, you know. And uh I was aware after when I came to write my first novel that actually most of the pleasure I took from the act of even writing pro prose was in the act of visual description, you know. And at the center of that novel I wrote was called The Past, there was a photographer and so the whole thing was was uh talking about photography, you know, and every dramatic scene began with the photograph, so it it it struck me this is ludicrous. I I thought to myself, I should just s you know, try and make films just even to see what it's like, you know, because the m this prose was trying to be a movie.

Speaker 217:42

Mm.

Presenter17:55

Next piece of music.

Neil Jordan17:56

If you were on a desert island, yeah, and you wanted to remind yourself of the entire history of popular music and soul music and the essence of it, uh

Neil Jordan18:04

Uh all I'd want is Sam Cooke, you know, because uh he began singing in a Baptist choir. He's one of the best voices of uh all time, I think. And this song, you know, would be a great substitute for me of every popular song I've ever heard, you know.

Speaker 418:21

I'm by the river.

Speaker 418:25

In a little tent.

Speaker 418:28

Oh, and just like the river I've been running.

Neil Jordan18:31

But I've been running

Speaker 418:34

Every sense has been a long

Speaker 418:40

A long time coming, but I know

Speaker 418:45

A change gon' come

Presenter18:48

Sam Cooke and a change is gonna come. So you made the break into films, Neil. It seems to me you've got a lot of stick about it. I mean, on the one hand, from jealous film makers who thought what's this novelist doing making films but uh more interestingly from the literary community in Dublin who who seem to me to be

Presenter19:04

upset that you were doing something quite so vulgar.

Neil Jordan19:07

That's true on all counts, yeah. But no, it's the um

Neil Jordan19:12

At the time, people novelists didn't make films anywhere in the world, I think, you know? I mean, now.

Neil Jordan19:19

Uh William Boyd has just made a movie, I think his first movie. David Mammoth, who's a playwright, is making films and um

Neil Jordan19:25

It seems to be a common thing now that writers are making films, you know?

Presenter19:29

But again, it's what you were talking about, aren't you? That rather conservative

Presenter19:32

Orthodox Irish thing that serious writers do not struggle with the majority of the people.

Neil Jordan19:35

Yeah, no, I wouldn't call it conservative and or orthodox. I would say actually that the the kind of um the importance of writing in the culture, in Irish culture, is huge. It's a it's always been the subversive for force in the culture itself, you know what I mean? But it was what people did, it was what one did, you know, as if if you were and once you

Presenter19:53

Yes, but conservative in the sense that you're not allowed to do anything else if that's what you're capable of doing.

Neil Jordan19:57

Yeah, yeah, yeah, but it could be

Presenter19:58

You've got to use your talent properly.

Neil Jordan19:59

Yes, absolutely. You know, I mean it was then it's it's kind of a seen as a vocation in a way. You know, if you're a playwright or if you're a novelist or if you're a poet, I mean that is your primary duty and your primary duty is to words and the world of literature.

Presenter20:04

Yeah.

Presenter20:10

Duty, exactly. And again, I've seen them quoted since this, these literary beings who say, you know, we thought we'd lost him, but he's come back.

Neil Jordan20:11

Yeah.

Presenter20:19

One of them said at one point, because you wrote a another novel having made a few films

Neil Jordan20:19

Woman

Neil Jordan20:21

I was an answer.

Presenter20:23

Uh

Neil Jordan20:23

Yeah.

Presenter20:23

Um I mean, they're very proprietorial about you.

Neil Jordan20:26

Maybe they like my work. I was not aware that a lot of people read my books, you know what I mean? But maybe they did. But I think it was also that the idea of liter the literary culture being fractured, you know? And it has been fractured. And I'm not sure it's a great thing myself either. Even in Britain and the United States, the world of what you would call literary cultures, I mean, when you got Naomi Campbell writing novels, I mean, where does one go? You know?

Presenter20:48

You sound to me though as if you have a certain sense of guilt about the

Neil Jordan20:51

I do, yeah. Well, I was very conflicted myself.

Neil Jordan20:54

For one thing, the world of making films involves an enormous amount of travel. You're constantly abandoning your home and ending up somewhere different and remaking your life and all this sort of stuff, you know? And you say.

Presenter21:03

But you're betraying your talent. That's what you're really saying you feel guilty about.

Neil Jordan21:07

No, it's not that. No, it's not that. I feel what it's it's the b the silence and the uh not quite peace, but that enormous battle with oneself, you know, which is an entirely private battle that goes on when you're writing a piece of prose. Is uh

Neil Jordan21:22

Something, it's probably not good for you, you know, maybe once you've done it, you feel, oh, this is probably really important. Why am I doing more? You know what I mean? But it's

Presenter21:31

It's it's less silent writing screenplays then?

Neil Jordan21:33

Oh, much less, yeah, yeah. I clatter away much faster. You can hear those keys going, you know, ten to the dozen.

Presenter21:41

Echo number five.

Neil Jordan21:42

Record number five. It's uh a beautiful arrangement of the most hackneyed tune of all time, yeah, which is actually still a beautiful tune. And people connected with Irel Ireland, in fact it's a Scottish tune, it's Danny Boy, and it's

Neil Jordan21:55

Percy Granger's arrangement of the same tune, which I would I tried to fit into a movie I made called Michael Collins, but uh just couldn't quite get it in there.

Presenter23:05

The Academy of Saint Martin in the Fields chamber ensemble performing Percy Granger's arrangement of Danny Boy, the tune you didn't use in your film of of about Michael Collins, the the bio pic of the founding father of

Neil Jordan23:15

The b

Presenter23:18

Urban guerrilla warfare. You got a lot of flack for that one, didn't you?

Neil Jordan23:21

I did, yeah, enormous amount, yeah, yeah.

Presenter23:23

Do you regret making it?

Neil Jordan23:25

No, not at all. I mean it's it's um I think somebody should have made it. If it wasn't me, I think s I would have demanded somebody else made it.

Neil Jordan23:33

Perhaps, you know, people would have said perhaps it shouldn't have been me that made it, maybe it should have been Richard Attenborough or somebody like that, but I I felt it was an important film to be made and I felt it was um an instructive film for anybody who's interested in, you know, relationships between these islands. And the thing that attracted me to Collins is he was a figure of such contradictions. I mean he he to me he contradicted every kind of

Neil Jordan23:58

every kind of cliched uh kind of image you could have of that conflict. You know, I mean, he was the in a way the kind of, as you say, the founder of urban guerrilla warfare. He was the kind of godfather of the IRA. He was the most effective uh physical force kind of

Neil Jordan24:13

Thug you could ever think of, you know, and yet he is regarded as the great betrayer of the Republican cause. And he's actually regarded as the founding father of the most conservative Irish party, which is the Phoenix Gael Party, you know, the Irish version of the Tory Party, you know.

Presenter24:25

Mm.

Presenter24:28

Which is, as you say, very, very instructive, I think, for an English audience.

Neil Jordan24:31

Yeah. And an Irish audience, you know, that and and I I think actually that he is full of such contradictions because actually the history is full of such contradictions, you know. And the reason I wanted to make the film was kind of just to put those contradictions on screen.

Presenter24:40

Yeah.

Presenter24:44

The other theme in your work is of course completely different. It's the dream, the fantasy, the myth, the gothic, whether it's interview with the vampire or we mentioned earlier the Red Riding Hood allegory and the company of wolves. Why are you so attracted by horror?

Neil Jordan24:56

But

Neil Jordan24:59

I love what uh

Neil Jordan25:01

kind of fantasy implies, you know? I mean it's if if you say for example you take a book like Anne Rice's book, Interview the Vampire, what's interesting it's it's set it's set in a total kind of fantastic version of reality, but what's interesting is it's actually about guilt, you know? It's about it's about a hu a hu really profound sense of guilt, you know, it's about if you did live in an absolutely amoral world, you know what I mean, where

Neil Jordan25:25

You could do what you want and you never actually died, how would you f what would you feel like? You'd feel rotten, you know, constantly rotten. You've got a vampire with a conscience. Kind of, yeah. But that's I mean, that's what sometimes these kind of fantasies do.

Presenter25:31

You got a vampire with a conscience.

Presenter25:36

It harks back, though, doesn't it, to the sorts of tales you said your father told you, these kind of dreams on the cusp of a nightmare.

Neil Jordan25:42

Yeah, absolutely, yeah. And I mean, I I used to cycle if I cycled to uh s school, we could cycle past Bram Stoker's house, yeah. And Bram Stoker lived in a place called the Crescent in uh Marino, you know, it's kind of a it was then a decaying kind of Regency Crescent, it looked incredibly creepy, you know, but the idea that the guy who wrote Dracula kind of lived just down the corner from where I grew up was kind of fascinating.

Presenter26:09

Record number six.

Neil Jordan26:10

I suppose I love voices really, you know, and uh um I love Astrid Gilberto's voice because she doesn't seem to put any effort into it whatsoever. And uh I think this is one of the most beautiful voices of a country that I've never visited.

Speaker 226:19

Ever

Speaker 426:25

Make you stay Because love is the saddest thing when it goes away Because love is the saddest thing when it goes away

Presenter26:53

Astrid Gilberto singing Once I Loved. You write all your own screenplays, Neil Jordan, even when you're adapting living writers like Patrick McCabe. You would never do anybody else's screenplay, would you?

Neil Jordan27:00

Just like my

Neil Jordan27:03

Well I have done, it is screenplay by David Mammet.

Presenter27:05

Did you?

Neil Jordan27:06

I did a movie called We're No Angels.

Presenter27:07

But you don't like doing it, do you?

Neil Jordan27:09

No, I don't, no. No, because um I mean uh as a director for hire you may as well just be a traffic cop, you know what I mean? Because um it's just not a very elevated place to be. You know, you're moving the furniture around, placing the camera in the right place, but everybody else's opinion on the centre matter, which is the text or the script, is as good as yours, you know, and it's um

Presenter27:30

Makes it a lot of short, but cuts out all the arguments of course, because if you've written it and you're directing it, you can change your own stuff.

Neil Jordan27:33

And directly you can

Neil Jordan27:35

You only argue it yourself. I mean, I've collaborated with writers, of course. David Leland wrote the script of Mona Lisa with me and

Neil Jordan27:42

Pat McKay brought the screenplay of The Butcher Boy with me and

Neil Jordan27:45

At the moment, I'm working with writers, you know, for films that may or might not be made in the future. But I think that's not a

Presenter27:50

Yeah.

Neil Jordan27:53

No, not entirely, no. It's it's about how the images come to you and it's about how the film suggests itself to you, you know. And uh if it suggests if it comes to you through the writing, it generally stays with you and it's generally a more integral piece of work in every way.

Presenter28:07

Do you think there'll ever be another novel?

Neil Jordan28:09

For me, yeah, they're I'm trying to write a novel at the moment, actually.

Presenter28:12

That?

Neil Jordan28:12

Yeah.

Neil Jordan28:13

It's about a woman. I don't know. I have no idea who she is. I think she's becoming sh she's becoming an actress, which is alarming. It's set in this house in Ireland, this kind of house near the Boyne River. And uh but it's I I've I'm only like making disparate sketches at the moment.

Presenter28:29

How does it come to you? Does it sort of come into your head and ask to be written or

Neil Jordan28:32

It is really weird. It is really strange. They kind of choose you, really, in a way. And it's a kind of a private dialogue I have with myself in a way. And I began writing this stuff and suddenly this character emerged and this voice emerged and I have no idea where it came from, you know. It's familiar, but it's totally strange, you know. I mean it deals with familiar issues, familiar places and stuff like that, but it's totally utterly strange to me.

Presenter29:02

From it

Presenter29:06

Mechod number seven.

Neil Jordan29:08

Record number seven is uh John McCormack singing uh a Moore's melody, one of the great Moore's melodies, uh and it's a parlour song, you know, it's kind of it's these melodies always remind me of um you know, my uncles and aunts and the kind of generation that just I suppose that came out of the War of Independence, you know what I mean, and the kind of weird sense of uh kind of Irishness that they came up with, half Victorian, you know, half invented, but quite beautiful.

Speaker 429:43

Is far from the land where a holy young hero sleeps.

Speaker 429:52

A Lord.

Speaker 429:59

But coldly she talks from their gates and we.

Presenter30:11

John McCormack's singing She Is Far From the Land echoes of your childhood, Neil Jordan, the sort of song your parents used to play.

Presenter30:20

It would therefore be a comfort on your desert island for you?

Neil Jordan30:23

Uh yeah, yeah. I mean the f the song is full of this uh appalling melancholy, isn't it, you know? It's all about graves and bury her and

Presenter30:30

Is that how it's going to be on your desert island? Is it going to be quite melancholy?

Neil Jordan30:30

That's how it's going to be on the desert.

Neil Jordan30:33

Melancholy. Yeah, I'm very bad at being on my own, you know. Very. It's a weird thing. I should talk to somebody about it, you know. So, uh I suppose uh if there were parrots there I'd be happy, yeah. I had a parrot about um a year ago and I g we were very attached to this animal. I had no idea it could get so attached to a animal that just mimics your speech, you know, and they live to about a hundred and eight, do that, don't they? So I think the first thing I do is try and bef befriend every parrot on the island.

Presenter30:36

Very

Presenter30:57

Mm-hmm.

Presenter31:00

And if there weren't and there really is no other human life there, it sounds as if you might

Presenter31:06

Go under or go mad, huh?

Presenter31:08

Yeah. Uh

Neil Jordan31:08

Go on at me, prob probably. Well, I've still do plenty of things to do, like fish, I suppose, you know, build it at the boat, like Robinson Crusoe and

Presenter31:10

Well I've got to plan

Presenter31:15

You don't really believe that then, do you? You uh you sound to me as if you believe that you You might have a job hanging on to your sanity.

Neil Jordan31:20

The idea of being on a desert island on my own, believe me, would be pure hell. To say hell as other people, don't they? But I suppose. For me, hell is myself, yeah.

Presenter31:30

Or perhaps hell is your own dreams, your own fantasies.

Neil Jordan31:32

Fantasy.

Presenter31:34

Your own imagination.

Neil Jordan31:35

Maybe, maybe.

Neil Jordan31:37

I should need a rescue service, I think, to get me off that little stretch of sand.

Presenter31:42

Last piece of music.

Neil Jordan31:44

Well the last piece of music I'll choose is a piece by Maurice Ravel, who is a very interesting composer and uh he's written some terribly, I suppose, conventional stuff, but also some extraordinarily imaginative stuff. This is a piece I thought of at one stage of putting on the end of the affair and somewhere when I was toying with the temp music, but I was saved from that necessity by the great Michael Nyman and uh it's called a bavan, but in fact I think it is a very slow waltz.

Presenter33:09

The opening of Revelle's Pavan for a Dead Infanta played by the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Andre Previn.

Presenter33:15

Now, if you could only take one of those eight records, Neil, which one would you take?

Neil Jordan33:20

I'd take the tear on this monk.

Presenter33:22

Round midnight.

Neil Jordan33:23

Yeah, I well, just his playing is so extraordinary.

Presenter33:26

Then we give you the Bible, and we give you the complete works of Shakespeare. So which other piece of writing would you like to take?

Neil Jordan33:30

Child peace

Neil Jordan33:32

I would take uh Marcel Proust's Alle Recherche de Tompes Perdue, and I would try to take two versions of it, one in English and one in French, and I'd try and learn the French by the end of my sojourn on this little island.

Presenter33:45

And what about your luxury?

Neil Jordan33:46

I'll take a typewriter, I think, yeah, because uh um with with the advent of computers, you know, that kind of whole relationship to print and to that little ribbon and the sound and all that, that uh is gone, you know, and uh the fact that the words you put in a page, there's some finality about them if they're actually printed onto a page that you have to tear up if it's wrong and if you know, shrivel in your hand and throw away. So, I probably enjoy reestablishing that relationship again.

Presenter34:13

Neil Jordan, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your Desert Island discs.

Neil Jordan34:17

Thank you.

Speaker 234:25

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For more podcasts please visit bbc.co. uk slash radio four.