To mark the publication of Neil Jordan’s autobiography Amnesia Aubrey Malone offers personal observations of the writer/director who, for a while, abandoned fiction for fame in film
I have a lot in common with Neil Jordan. We share a connection with the Roscommon town of Elphin (family relatives), with the school of Santa Sabina (marriage connection), with places like Vernon Avenue and Dollymount Beach, both of which are close to where I live.
He was born on the same day, and year, as one of my sisters, February 25, 1950. Coming into the world half way through the century seems appropriate. He’s looked forward as well as back with equal enthusiasm since he took his first breath in life.
He’s just written a fascinating memoir called Amnesiac. From author to film director to memoirist – what’s left for him to do?
It opens as he sits in a car in the grounds of my local hospital, Beaumont, listening to one of my favourite songs, Bob Dylan’s Not Dark Yet. He’s waiting for news of his mother, who’s having her heart checked out…
I used to send Neil short stories I wrote back in the 1970s when he was at the helm of the Irish Writers Co-Op. I hoped he might use some of them in the books the Co-Op was producing then. In my innocence I thought I could match the genius of people like Des Hogan and himself in my humble scribblings. I was having a few stories published in David Marcus’ New Irish Writing page in the Irish Press at the time and had started to get notions about myself.
The writing was a hobby. I was teaching by day, having just graduated from St. Pat’s Training College in Drumcondra. Neil’s father, Michael, had been one of my lecturers there. ‘I teach the teachers’, he liked to say. I met Neil one night at a party and told him I’d been lectured to by his father. ‘Not another teacher!’ he groaned (expletive deleted).
Noel Jordan’s first collection of short stories Night in Tunisia, drew praise from no less a luminary than Sean O’Faoláin
The next time I saw him was at the Listowel Writers Week in 1980. By now I’d got a collection of stories published by Uinsin O Donobháin of Cillenna Press. I was launching it down there. Neil was launching his debut novel The Past, riding high on the success of his recent story collection Night in Tunisia, which had drawn praise from no less a luminary than Sean O’Faoláin.
I imagined he’d go on to produce many more novels of equal brilliance. He would, of course, but not for many years. He now shocked the literary world by taking an amazing U-turn and becoming a film director.
A friend of mine was sitting near him in a restaurant one day at this time. Like me he had the image of Neil as the kind of person one might expect to see dressed in a woollen jumper (with perhaps a hole in the sleeve). Imagine his shock when he saw him in a snazzy suit talking to a Hollywood executive. Figures like ‘five’ and ‘seven’ were being tossed around in the conversation. After a while my friend copped on to the fact that they were talking about five and seven million – of something.
Neil’s odyssey to the big time was smoothed by John Boorman. He was chairman of the Irish Film Board at the time. Boorman was, and is, a perfect gentleman, something I can vouch for, having met him. He’s the kind of man one could always rely on to get a career off the ground. Though born in England, he’s become an adoptive Irishman over the past few decades.
He allowed Neil to make a documentary of a film he was shooting in Ireland at the time called Excalibur. This became Neil’s bargaining chip when he was trying to pony up the money to make his first feature, Angel. The Excalibur documentary meant he could tell the big shots that as well as being adept at the art of blackening pages he knew one end of a camera from the other.
John Boorman
Once he got the green light for Angel, which he also wrote, he was up and running. It was that rare thing, a poetical film about violence. He would go on to mix the two strands in much of his future work, and also to work frequently with the film’s star, Stephen Rea. Rea has done some of his best work with Neil, and vice versa.
He followed Angel with The Company of Wolves, a graphic re-imagining of the Little Red Riding Hood story. After that was Mona Lisa, a totally different kind of film from the previous two – more gritty, more grounded. That was the thing about the wunderkind: you never knew quite what to expect from him.
He hit a bump in the road with High Spirits, a ghost story with a tourist theme. Perhaps it was too eccentric. It became his first flop. Neither did his next feature, We’re No Angels, work. This was a remake of a 1955 film with Robert de Niro in the lead. Neither Neil nor De Niro were comfortable with comedy and it showed.
He was on surer footing with The Crying Game, one of his most highly-acclaimed works. He won an Oscar for writing the screenplay for it. It was the film with ‘that’ scene. You know what I mean, don’t you? Think Jaye Davidson not being entirely sure if he was going to be nominated for Best Actor or Best Actress.
Neil Jordan with the Oscar he won for best original screenplay for The Crying Game in 1992. He also directed the film
Harvey Weinstein produced it. He was one of the most powerful men in Hollywood at the time, having been behind some incredibly successful ‘indie’ films for Miramax Studios. He would, of course, subsequently be disgraced for gross sexual offences against a slew of women and now resides at the American government’s pleasure behind lock and key.
Neil couldn’t have predicted the degree of his sexual rapaciousness but he says in Amnesiac that he never liked him, writing ‘What I basically thought is that he should have been tried for theft long before [the sex charges].’ Weinstein ripped him off financially, as he did other people working on The Crying Game, denying them a profit share they were due.
His next film was Interview with the Vampire, a revisionist horror movie with Hollywood A-listers Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt. Stephen Woolley made the classic comment, ‘It’s like having Elvis and Frank Sinatra in the same movie.’
Julia Roberts, Liam Neeson and Aidan Quinn in Michael Collins
Neil went even bigger with Michael Collins in 1996. By now he had people like Julia Roberts running after him looking for parts. Could life get better?
I wrote a book about the making of that film soon afterwards for a Movies Made in Irelan series. I’d already done one on Ryan’s Daughter. They were little gift books that sold in novelty shops, often to returning Yanks.
I was on a restricted budget for them. Irish printers proved too expensive so we went to Budapest instead. The man we dealt with there was able to print the entire books for what the Irish printers were asking for the covers.
For permission to use stills from Ryan’s Daughter I wrote a begging letter to Ted Turner (who was then married to Jane Fonda) pleading poverty. I must have caught him on a good day because he let me illustrate the entire book for a nominal $100. Or Maybe Jane put a word in his ear.
In hopes of a similar courtesy with Michael Collins I faxed Neil (remember faxes?) to Ardmore Studios. Alas, he said his hands were tied by Warner Brothers. They were looking for £500 a pop.
In the end I got what I wanted from a photographer in The Star newspaper. He’d been snapping the stars on set. He got shots of Roberts, Liam Neeson, Aidan Quinn and Alan Rickman (who played Dev) in a series of ‘candids’. That meant they were his property rather than that of the studios. Onlookers in modern dress were in the background to emphasise the fact that they weren’t images from the actual film. All he asked for in payment from me was three packs of cigarettes from the newsagent across the road. It proved to be a bit cheaper than the ten grand Warners were looking for.
Jordan was now such an established figure he could do practically anything he wanted. He used that muscle to continue his versatile ways with the incredible CV he’s built up from then until now: The Butcher Boy (1997), In Dreams and The End of the Affair (both 1999), The Good Thief (2002), Breakfast on Pluto (2005), The Brave One (2007), Ondine (2009) Byzantium (2012), Greta (2018) and Marlowe (2022).
In between such heady assignments he went back to writing novels. 1994 saw the publication of Sunrise with Sea Monster. It was a work of rich lyricism. Obviously the camera hadn’t dented the literary gift he started out with. He waited a decade before penning his next novel, Shade. Mistaken appeared in 2011. Sinead O’Connor, who’d played Our Lady in The Butcher Boy, said this was her favourite novel of all time.
Since then he’s written The Drowned Detective (2016), Carnivalesque (2017), The Ballad of Lord Edward and Citizen Small (what he called his ‘Covid’ novel) and, most recently, The Well of Saint Nobody.
Bob Hoskins in Mona Lisa. This followed Angel and The Company of Wolves. Mona Lisa was a totally different kind of film from the previous two – more gritty, more grounded
Amnesiac represents a departure for him even by his chameleon standards. There are lots of stories in it of what went on behind the scenes of many of his most controversial films. For instance he tells us he wasn’t totally happy with Brad Pitt’s performance in Interview with the Vampire. He hummed and hawed about having Tom Cruise co-star opposite him. How many directors can hum and haw about Tom Cruise? Is that not a bit like telling God you’ll get back to him?
The book also contains beguiling stories about Neil’s youth, about his mother – an artist – and his father, with whom he had a fractious (and occasionally violent) relationship. Music bubbles under the surface. Neil fictionalised Michael in Night in Tunisia in this guise. Neil himself did a stint in a band too, back in the day.
We read about his life at school, about the first stirrings of his sexual urges. (‘Bird-watching’ begins with, er, bird-watching). We read about a distressing experience with a paedophile, about him working in theatre with Jim Sheridan in UCD, about being fired from a teaching job (‘I was torn to pieces by a group of bilingual nine year olds’), about his time on the dole, about being at the Oscar ceremonies when a copy of a novel in a bag he was carrying which was suspected of containing an IRA bomb.
There are also references to a terrible accident involving his daughter. And, in somewhat more frivolous vein, helping a nun on an airplane during turbulence. We even read about Stanley Kubrick ringing his house and him not getting the message properly because his daughter mis-hears the name as Stanley Cooper.
My favourite yarn in the book is one told to him by John McGahern (who taught him for a time when he was at school in Raheny) about Charlie Haughey walking down the street with Albert Reynolds one day and pointing across it to two young girls. ‘I’m going to marry one of them,’ he says. ‘Which one?’ asks Albert. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Charlie tells him, ‘They’re both the Taoiseach’s daughters!’
Towards the end of the book – hold on to your hat – we get a meeting between Neil and Marlon Brando. Brando summons him to his home in Mulholland Drive to discuss a possible collaboration with him. During the course of their meeting, Brando proceeds to do a trick for him using a silk handkerchief. This doesn’t impress Neil in the least. Brando gives him a gift of the handkerchief to give to his daughter. When he does so, she says she prefers her Daddy doing different kinds of tricks. Sorry, Marlon.
There’s a moment in their conversation where Brando tells Neil he has a great affinity with Ireland, saying there’s a bridge on the way from Dublin Airport that he went under when he was making a film here one year. As he did so, he says he felt more at home there than he’d ever been in America. I know this bridge. It’s in Drumcondra. I go under it quite a lot myself. Since reading the book I’ve been seeing it in a different light.
Such anecdotes resonate in the mind long after leaving Amnesiac down. It’s written in the atmospheric prose Neil uses in his best fiction. But why did he airbrush Beverly d’Angelo out of it? They had a turbulent relationship during the filming of The Miracle.
Maybe that’s why.
