Neil Jordan pads on stockinged feet across the plush suite of a Dublin hotel and settles himself down in a large armchair for the umpteenth interview of the day, looking relaxed but slightly tired. It's now late afternoon, and he's been doing the media circus thing for several hours.
A poster propped rather incongruously against a cabinet reminds us that he's here to publicise his new film, The End of the Affair, which opens in two weeks.In a couple of days, he'll be heading off to Los Angeles for the Golden Globe awards, for which the film received four nominations. As it turns out, the film will walk away empty-handed from the Golden Globes, although Jordan has been through these hoops often enough to know that the odds were always against him. But there's a good shot at a couple of Oscar nominations for what he himself describes as his "austere" adaptation of Graham Greene's novel.
Jordan will be 50 next month, but he still has those slightly unsettling verbal tics (or tricks) that turn the question back on the interviewer - every answer ends with "you know?" or "Don't you think?" - and which must come in useful in getting the most out of a film crew.
He is taking a break from movie-making at the moment. "This is the first time in years that I've finished one film and not had another that's been implanted in my brain," he says. "It makes me feel very uneasy not to have something to go straight into, but maybe that's a good thing, maybe I should just wait a little bit."
He is directing a version of Not I, which he describes as a "little tiny Beckett movie, about an enormous mouth", in a few weeks' time, as part of the Gate Theatre's current project of filming the entire Beckett canon. He plans to cast Julianne Moore, his female lead from The End of the Affair, in the role. "She's one of the best actresses around. She's so good it's scary. She manages that move from the carnal to the mystical without a blip."
The End of the Affair sees Jordan returning to London, a setting which he has evoked memorably before, as the seedy, violent but glamorous backdrop to Mona Lisa and the multi-cultural, sexually ambivalent refuge of The Crying Game. This time, it's the London of the Blitz, but there's still a sense of a city of opportunities, of transgression and potential liberation. I wonder whether that depiction reflects his own experience and that of his generation who came of age in the 1970s.
"I've spent a lot of my life in London," he says. "I went there when I was about 20, and started writing stories. The first story I wrote, Last Rites, was written and set there. I suppose it's another culture that you have some familiarity with, but you're a foreigner there as well."
Writing and directing The End of the Affair, he says, was "kind of like making a film in a foreign language, because the most intimidating aspect was the Englishness of it. The possibility of getting it wrong is staring you in the face. You get that kind of arch, middle-class thing, particularly in regard to the expression of emotion. It's so deeply un-Irish. Our relationship to expressing our emotions is either in a torrent of words or a black silence. We've got a far more combative approach to expression in general. In Greene it's a smouldering and corrosive way in which he allows his characters to express themselves, which is very interesting to me. The way he writes dialogue is very cinematic."
The austerity of The End of the Affair is certainly a change in style from the visually arresting but somewhat overblown symbolism of his last film, In Dreams, he agrees. "The basic story is almost Pinteresque," he says. "It's a lover, a husband, a wife and a detective. It's almost rapier-like, like a dissection of tiny little relationships. For me, the visual key to it was those Japanese erotic prints from the turn of the century. I felt it should have that same haunted quality, because in a way the characters are haunted. When we meet them at the start of the story, they're almost dead in a way. Their lives had stopped two years before that, so they're almost like ghosts retracing their lives."
Ghosts and the shadows of the dead hang over Jordan's work, from his early fiction, through the sectarian victims of Angel, the missing mothers of The Miracle and The Butcher Boy, the dead British squaddie of The Crying Game and the murdered children of In Dreams. Not to mention the whimsical poltergeists of High Spirits and decadent undead of Interview with the Vampire. It's not surprising, then, that talking about the novel he is now writing he says that he doesn't know what it's about "except that it's about a woman who died".
The intertwining of eroticism, death and an equivocal sense of the sacred in The End of the Affair marks the film with Jordan's signature. In that sense, fans of Greene's novel may be disappointed by its Jordanisation; this is no faithful, Brit-lit adaptation, although the director did find himself returning to a closer version of the original.
"At one point I thought of removing it from that wartime context entirely, and making it a contemporary story. Then I decided that was a really silly idea, because it depends so much on its actual context. When I began to write it, the story became very tiny. The confinement of it seemed the best way to express the emotions."
The evocation of the cold, empty streets of wartime London is the latest in a series of memorable urban landscapes he has created, but London is a very difficult city to photograph, he says. "It doesn't express itself, like Dublin. I actually haven't made a Dublin movie, about the city." What about Michael Collins? "Yeah, but it wasn't really about Dublin, was it? It was about the War of Independence." When I disagree, pointing out that Michael Collins is the most fully realised portrait on film of the city in the early years of this century. "Well, maybe, but it's not about Dublin in the way that Ulysses is about Dublin".
Three years on, how does he view that whole Michael Collins experience, and the controversies which the film engendered? "There was an enormous amount of ill-informed comment," he says. "People said `this is a republican perspective'. How on earth can it be, when it's about someone like Collins, who of all those figures is the great betrayer of that tradition. There was the whole revisionist/anti-revisionist thing, the whole question of who owns the history. I was kind of glad about that, because that was the function of the movie, to throw something in there that would give rise to all that argument.
`Some historians would say the War of Independence was an irrelevant skirmish with a series of outcomes which would have happened anyway. But I think the strength of the reaction on both sides showed that was not the truth - they were deeply pivotal events. The odd thing is that most of the argument was actually not about how I presented the history itself; it was about how the presentation relates to what was happening then in the North of Ireland, which to me was not the point. To me, it was a story of tragic ironies. A lot of the reaction to the movie didn't read those ironies. But I was very glad I made it."
Looking at the ebb and flow of Jordan's 18 years of film-making, a pattern emerges, particularly in America, where his smaller, more intimate, non-American films are warmly received, but his bigger, genre movies have critics holding their noses. He must be used to it by now - his first forays into big-budget Hollywood productions, with High Spirits and We're No Angels, were commercial and critical failures, hampered by studio interference and lack of control.
When he returned to Ireland to make The Miracle in 1990, he seemed to have decided to return to his roots (literally, since much of the film was shot on his own doorstep and next door to his then home in Bray). But The Miracle received a lukewarm reception, and he couldn't even raise the £3 million to complete his next film, a low-budget romantic thriller called The Soldier's Wife, relying on crew and cast who deferred their wages to finish it.
The Soldier's Wife was retitled The Crying Game, was picked up and aggressively marketed in the US by the independent distribution company, Miramax, and the rest is history. Tellingly, he turned around immediately and directed Interview with the Vampire with Tom Cruise, provoking critical groans but finally showing he could direct a commercially successful blockbuster movie. More recently, the relatively small-scale The Butcher Boy was enthusiastically received, while the lavish In Dreams was universally (and somewhat unfairly) panned. Now the relatively small-scale The End of the Affair has been well-received.
Does he feel that there's a consensus in favour of his smaller, more personal films? "Yeah, basically I would say so, although it is actually often true that the best work comes out of the local and the specific. In Dreams came out just after The Butcher Boy, and every American critic had loved that movie to death. It was on all the Ten Best lists and all that, so they see me making In Dreams and say, `How can he do this? He's just shown us the world of Francie Brady, with all that integrity and authenticity.' But you can never predict how people will react, really. Sometimes, you get movies that people really don't like, and they really hated In Dreams!" He laughs ruefully.
"It was one of those intractable stories that wasn't really my own. I found the premise fascinating and the roots of it, but the development of it went into this black hole. In a way, as a director, I sort of relished sending it there, but I had to agree with the critics."
Since Interview with the Vampire in 1995, he has made Michael Collins, The Butcher Boy, In Dreams and now The End of the Affair, all of them financed by Hollywood studios. Given the received wisdom that it takes a minimum of 18 months to develop, produce and complete a feature film these days, that's a pretty impressive work rate, especially since he wrote or cowrote the screenplays to all those films, and in 1996 published a novel, Sunrise with Sea Monster. He seems startled, though, at the suggestion that he might be a workaholic.
"Oh no, not at all. I like writing and I like working. I particularly like imagining a film, and I'll work anywhere. You can write a movie anywhere. You can write it on a plane." Writing a novel, he says, is harder. "You can't write a novel anywhere, you can only write it in your home, I think. I haven't done it in a long time. Prose is really hard, particularly if you're not in practice. I think writing is a habit as much as anything else."
He acted as executive producer and mentor on the Elizabeth Bowen adaptation, The Last September, which opens here in March, and Company of Wolves, the new company he has set up with his producer and longstanding collaborator Stephen Woolley, is due to go into production in the spring with its first film, written and directed by Conor McPherson. "It's from a story that I had years ago. Conor has written this wonderful script. It's a story about a good actor and a bad actor, set in the world of Dublin theatre. But he should tell you about it, not me."
He spent four years on the Film Board, reading scripts and making recommendations, before pressure of work caused him to step down in 1998. "It was really fascinating," he says. "What struck me is that the persistent energy in Ireland is still in the writing, although there's some good directors coming up now.
"I don't know how successful it's been, this establishment of an Irish movie industry," he reflects. "There's been a lot of movies made that haven't been seen or released. There've been some very good ones, but I don't think as yet there's a thing that you could call new Irish cinema. It's not for lack of effort - the input from the powers-that-be has been enormous. I just think we've still got a lot to learn. No particular culture or experience is interesting in and of itself. It's made interesting by the perspective of an author or a film-maker. There's myself and Jim Sheridan and Pat O'Connor. We should be getting booted out by younger and more aggressive talents, but we don't seem to be as yet, which to me is a pity."
The End of the Affair opens on February 11th
