Neil Jordan Quotes
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It is extremely difficult to get movies that cost more than $40 million to be made these days.
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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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It's the opposite journey from what I've usually done with films. I find it very easy to go from, say, a lit, pleasurable environment, like what you see outside there, to a very dark place. But the opposite journey, which is what this movie takes, is much more complicated.
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I don't know why anybody would come to Ireland chasing a dream or even employment - that's an extraordinary thing for a place where traditionally one was unemployed. For 10 years, people were coming from all over the world looking for employment here, kind of an extraordinary phenomenon. That's stopped now.
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You've got to play what people think you are, rather than what you are. You have to have a sense of what you are as you're playing what people think you are.
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I'm less comfortable making American movies because I don't know them so well.
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It's hard to know whether certain characters come to life or not, they either come to have their own life or they don't. I've written many things in which the characters just remain inert.
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I took two years away from making films to write a novel.
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I don't think we have enough imaginary creatures in cinema. It seems like we're stuck with zombies, vampires, and werewolves. We should have everything. We should have minotaurs. We should have elves. We should have mermen in popular culture. But instead we've stuck with vampires.
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I can't do a film if I don't start with the writing.
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I do enjoy working with writers.
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If you're brought up Catholic, you're convinced of magic at a very early age. You're convinced the world isn't entirely real, which is a kind of conviction that never leaves you, for some strange reason.
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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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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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For example, the character of Claire in In Dreams wasn't imagined enough by me. Annette Bening is a great actress, and she gave a great performance, but because I hadn't fully written it essentially the character wasn't finished.
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If movies have to satisfy every possible quadrant before they're even made, they're dull. You only get great things when people overreach themselves.
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Ireland is becoming like everywhere else, but that's the one I grew up in: the one that's hugely illogical. Rather wonderful, in a way. I never found this oppression of religion and that, but I did enjoy growing up in a culture that didn't need to be rational all of the time.
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It's nice to work with Hollywood because there is never any question of resources put at your disposal to make a film as long as it is the right thing to do.
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I hoped that grief was similar to the other emotions. That it would end, the way happiness did. Or laughter.
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Hollywood always chooses young and beautiful men and throws them into enormous, highly expensive toy-like movies, and I think sometimes it's hard for the maturity of the craft to emerge in that kind of glare.
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Well, Company of Wolves was about that literally, about fairy tales.
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Never make a promise - you may have to keep it.
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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 truth is that seals look more like dogs. And I'm surrounded by seals because I live by the sea. They're odd bloody creatures. Not fish, they don't have gills, they should have legs, but they don't. They're the weirdest things, you know?
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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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I just got back from New York, and I realized in New York, it's very difficult to hear a New York accent. It's almost impossible, actually - everybody seems to speak like they're from the Valley or something. When I grew up, you could tell what street in Dublin someone's from by the way they talked.
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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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My conception of it was that in a normal film you have a story with different movements that program, develop, go a little bit off the trunk, come back, and end.
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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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Is it fair to have given us the memory of what was and the desire of what could be when we must suffer what is?
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