Neil Jordan, Director of Byzantium
Interview material release
Neil Jordan’s body of
work is an odd, fascinating beast. On one level, the Irish director’s fablelike
films — with their often mystical elements, their vivid photography, and their
tormented, passionate characters — are remarkably consistent in tone, style,
and themes. On another level, though, the films are a diverse lot, ranging from
moody dramas like Mona Lisa and The End of the Affair,
to thrillers like The Crying Game and The Good Thief,
to big-budget, star-studded epics like Interview With a Vampire and Michael
Collins, to fairy tales like The Company of Wolves. He’s even
made a couple of exuberant comedies along the way (including High
Spirits, which is better than you remember). Now, with his latest, Byzantium,
a tale of mother-and-daughter vampires (played by Gemma Arterton and Saoirse
Ronan) hiding out in a British seaside town, Jordan has returned to the vampire
genre, and the result is one of his strongest, most ambitious and romantic
works in years. Jordan talked to us about his new movie, fairy tales, and
vampires.
Were you wary of returning to a story
of vampires so many years after Interview
With a Vampire?
It was
really the script that Moira Buffini had written. I hadn’t seen the play, and I
was not involved in the development of the script, or the writing of it. But it
was strange, because when it was sent to me, I saw that there were so many
elements in it that felt familiar to me from other movies that I’d made: It was
set in an abandoned seaside town, it was about a mother and daughter, it was
about storytelling, and, yes, it was about vampires. Actually, the least attractive
thing was that it was about vampires. It’s quite difficult to put a vampire
movie out there nowadays.
But they seem like very different
vampires this time around.
I did try
to reinvent the rules a little bit. I got rid of the teeth, so now they use
their nails. Ultimately, I think vampires — we call them “sucreants” in the
film — are really like people who have entered a spell: They endure eternity in
some way because of a choice, or something that’s happened to them. That’s why
they’re so popular; they come out of the repository of fairy tales. I really
did think of these creatures in Byzantium as dark shadows out
of some fairy tale.
If I hadn’t seen the writing credit,
I could have sworn that you’d written this film as well.
That’s
interesting. I felt the dialogue was very specific. Some of it could even be
called “clunky,” but I deliberately didn’t want to put my fingers on it. I felt
it was important to preserve Moira’s voice, as a woman and as a writer: She had
ways of approaching things that I wouldn’t have taken. What I liked about the
script was its multifaceted quality — it turns into different things. It’s like
a lantern that lets you see different aspects of the story.
There have been so many films in
recent years that have attempted to “update” fairy tales: the Snow White films,
the Hansel & Gretel film. But in a way, you were already doing that sort of
thing 30 years ago, and doing it a lot more artfully, long before it became a
fad among filmmakers.
Yeah. I
guess I’ve always been obsessed with fairy tales. But it’s easy to see their
appeal: They’re so simple and so efficient. As a storyteller and writer, that
just appeals to me. There are a lot of archetypes and symbols there, and these
are stories that have very deep roots. I think that’s something I always find
myself drawn to.
There’s something else I’ve noticed
about your films: They’re all about devotion, on some level. That’s very much
true of Byzantium as well.
And it’s a kind of devotion that can be romantic, or maternal, or
spiritual. End of the Affair,
it seems to me, matches one character’s romantic devotion with another’s
devotion to God. And Byzantium, too, twins one character’s maternal
devotion with another’s romantic devotion.
It’s all
because I grew up as an Irish Catholic. [Laughs.] It’s a very specific
kind of mind-set. It’s like you’re in this strange movie theater showing the
same thing all the time. That was the reason I wanted to do Interview
With a Vampire: It seemed to me to be about guilt. It was the most
wonderful parable about wallowing in guilt that I’d ever come across. But these
things are unconscious: I don’t have an agenda. I’m neither a bad Irish
Catholic nor a good one. What is weird, though, is to watch a movie I made
years ago and see how revealing it is about me. Films are essentially attempts
to disguise one’s intentions, or state of mind. It’s amazing, because there
have been films I made that felt like they were opportunities to not be
personal. But then, years later, it shocks me how revealing it is.
Can you give me an example of such a
film?
Mona Lisa. It
turned out to be a film about how men are misunderstood. It shocked me how
emotionally revealing it was. Of course, that is what they
should be. They should just be full of emotion. Stanley Kubrick once said, “The
problem isn’t having a message. The problem is disguising the
message.”
Over and over, your films are replete
with career-high performances from actors — be they accomplished, established
ones like Bob Hoskins in Mona
Lisa or Julianne Moore in End of the Affair, or people we don’t ordinarily expect to give
standout performances, like Gemma Arterton in Byzantium. Do you work closely with actors? Are you hands-on?
I just
like actors. It’s really as simple as that. I like the fact that they don’t have
to be themselves. They can live in a world of fantasy. I don’t know how it
works. As for how I work with them, I try to make sure the actors understand
what the part is. I look for people who have emotional reality to them. Beyond
that, I don’t know what I do. To be fair, if you cast a film correctly, you’ve
almost nothing to do. If you cast the film slightly off kilter, then you have
to work your butt off.
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