In the lush surroundings of Jimmy's night club, the party to mark the LA premiere of Neil Jordan's new movie The End Of The Affair is getting under way. By the lamentably low standards of such movie industry junkets, it's a fairly lively affair.
The small but vocal Irish contingent seems to have injected into the frantic jocularity of the liggers and the mid-level execs an air of genuine good cheer. Even the celebrities, who normally evaporate after 25 minutes, are still nattering away contentedly: a radiant Julianne Moore is talking babies with Jordan's partner Brenda, Ralph Fiennes is expounding on a horseback trek he plans to take across Mongolia, and Brad Pitt, who worked with Jordan on Interview With The Vampire and is here with his burly minder out of solidarity, chats up the director's daughter Anna, 20, who looks uncannily like her father, but with kohl and piercings.
Only Jordan himself remains resolutely detached, flitting morosely around the room or sitting uneasily in some corner, drumming with his fingertips on the table, staring passionately into the middle distance. Occasionally, he's playful and endearing, such as when he captures Brad Pitt with an awkward bear-hug and yells an abrupt: "How are ya, Brad?" But equally, his manner is quite unnerving when he collides with a journalist by the bar, and the conversation instantly breaks down into stunted exclamations, laced with Jordan's characteristic "hmmmms" and "you knows".
In contrast, the company of his loquacious pony-tailed producer, Stephen Woolley, is easeful: "I just don't think that Neil has quite mastered the art of polite conversation," he says. "He finds it really difficult to talk about the weather, and all that usual stuff. Most things are completely peripheral to his vision."
Of all the characteristics and influences that come together in Neil Jordan, it is this enigmatic reserve that is perhaps the most dominant and intriguing. "He knows very well how to work that to his benefit," says Hugh Linehan, a film critic for the Irish Times who has worked on Jordan films. "He will give you that blank look intentionally, to try to make you feel awkward. I have seen him do that on the set. He uses it to force people to come up with things." It seems particularly effective with actors, who find in Jordan's careful reticence a delicate and unimposing guiding hand: "He hasn't got a fixed idea of what he wants," says Ralph Fiennes, who plays Bendrix in The End Of The Affair, "he's open to the journey of performance, and his manner is very easy. He's never in the least imposing. I just think that he's very collaborative, very open."
Even more vital for a filmmaker in search of funding, producers view Jordan's lack of frills as unalloyed dedication: "He is a person of talent and passion," says David Geffen, producer of Interview With The Vampire and Michael Collins. "He understands how to solve problems. He is not temperamental or difficult to work with."
It might even be said that in Jordan's work, in the career choices he has made and the dogged determination he has shown, and even the material he has produced, there is also the mark of his restive persona and its attendant curiosity. Though a pioneer of Irish film, he has maintained a distance from the nascent Irish Film Industry that has now sprung up around him. He has opted to make films with a visual daring unknown among his fellow Irish directors and of an almost startling diversity, from big Hollywood blockbusters - such as Interview With The Vampire, to highly intimate pieces - The Miracle, to his current adaptation of The End Of The Affair, by the quintessentially English novelist Graham Greene.
"I wouldn't demean Neil even by saying that he is the first international Irish filmmaker," says the critic Alexander Walker. "He is simply an international filmmaker who has his preferred subjects and areas of interest dealing with the Irish character."
Practically all of Jordan's films, even some of the more conventional genre pictures, have a brooding, off-kilter, unclassifiable quality, or as his friend, the novelist John Banville, puts it: "the great thing about Neil's movies is that they are all slightly sick." As is probably fitting for a director whose first ever sex scene - in Angel - involved a saxophonist and an underage deaf mute, Jordan's films make constant forays into lonely sexual byways. In The Miracle, he gave us jittery Oedipal yearning; in Mona Lisa, it was Soho sleaze; and, most famously, in The Crying Game, it was the love affair between a transvestite and an IRA man.
There is even something vaguely eerie in the constant repetition of Jordan 's favourite decorative motifs: the jangling tunes of the beach-front marquee and the gaudy ambience of the seaside town. "I can never end a story until I get it to the sea," Jordan claims.
Though he identifies himself as "not particularly political", and though he feels that there is nothing wrong with the idea of republicanism, his capacity to whip up political controversy with the sheer, and almost naive boldness of his political dramas has remained undiminished. For its depiction of a musician's descent into terrorism, Angel was lambasted by nationalists for "reinforcing British stereotypes of the Irish as prone to violence". The Crying Game was attacked for what was considered a favourable portrait of an IRA character, and the biopic Michael Collins, which dealt with the controversial Sinn Féin leader of the 1920s, was attacked by Nationalists, Unionists and the right-wing English press for historical inaccuracy and for being a piece of "neo-fascist propaganda" for the IRA.
"I found a lot of the argument very untruthful," Jordan says. "These were areas we never intended to get into. All we were tying to do was use the language of the gangster movie to tell the story." Overall, however, he feels he has achieved what he set out to do with his political films: "I think they had some impact. Now it's all about change, isn't it?"
Neil Jordan was born on Febru ary 25, 1950, in Rosses Point, County Sligo, the second child of Michael and Angela Jordan. A few years later, the family relocated to Clontarf on the north coast of Dublin Bay, consolidating a fascination with the sea that Jordan continues to indulge both in his life and art. Life in the Jordan household was relatively free, though rather strict. Michael Jordan was an educationist involved in broadening the Irish school curriculum and was writing a thesis on the adverse effects of different kinds of popular children's literature. While he forbade his own children to read comics, he kept a pile in his study as part of his research.
He forbade television, and he limited cinema-going to "once every two weeks, whereas all my friends would go twice a week", Jordan says. Any artistic stimulation the young boy had was provided in classes run by his mother, an artist, by his father's library, which was crammed with Joyce and Graham Greene, and through playing the guitar.
In school, Jordan generally performed badly: "I was a slow learner," he says, "which was ironic because my father was an educationist. I was a living refutation of all of his theories. The only thing I had any interest in was literature." After attending a local primary school in Clontarf, Jordan moved on to St Paul's College in Raheny, a mid-level private school.
"He was a very reserved boy, but in no way a loner; he always mixed with people," remembers his English teacher, Father Joseph McCann. "Though his English compositions were quite conventional for a boy of that age, if you looked at them again it was always possible to see some new angle." In his final years, he won the school president's prize for a short story entitled Sunday.
At University College, Dublin, Jordan studied medieval literature - his thesis was on the lives of the saints - and English literature, which he didn't enjoy: "I didn't understand how they thought it possible to dissect a book like a piece of meat. It seemed far too clinical." He maintained something of a low profile, and though he was drawn to the college drama society, always remained somewhat apart from the crowd.
"He was a very good-looking guy, with long black hair and sallow skin, and he reminded me of Yeats as a young man," remembers filmmaker and journalist Michael Sheridan, who was a contemporary of Jordan's. "He was a withdrawn, shy type of person who didn't mix very very easily; like the rest of us in college, his social graces were limited. But he had an air of mystery which people recognised and drew them to him."
During his college years he met Vivienne Shields, a law student who would soon become his wife: "We just met at the university one evening, as you do," Jordan remembers. "All my friends were getting married, so I thought that I had better do so as well."
When he left college in 1971, it was almost impossible to get a job: "With the degree I had, I was basically unemployable. If you go back to 1972-74 in Ireland, there was nothing to do, no jobs to be had." And so, at the first opportunity, he headed off with his wife to London, and worked on a series of labouring jobs, writing short stories in his spare time.
He returned to Dublin in 1973, for the funeral of his wife's aunt, decided to stay, and picked up occasional jobs as nightwatchman and teacher. While Vivienne found work in law, Jordan minded the kids and wrote. "I suppose you could say I was a bit of a house-husband," he says. "I couldn't actually find a job. Vivienne was the one who was earning the money."
Around this time, though, Jordan teamed up with the future film director Jim Sheridan and his brother Peter to put on a number of theatre projects around Dublin. Sheridan remembers they met at a lecture, "and I think that within three months we were doing a show called Journal Of A Hole, in the Project arts centre." Another piece they performed was Oedipus Rex, with Jordan playing Tiresias. "The reviews were all terrible," says Sheridan, "but Neil was quite brilliant as Tiresias. All he had to do was come out and exert his personality rather than act, and at that he was very good, very powerful."
It was also at this time that Jordan began to rent out his talents as a musician. It would turn out to be a formative experience. He joined a group called Eilis to play saxophone and banjo: "Neil certainly brought a distinctive flavour to the material," remembers Niall Stokes, founder of the band. "We did stuff that had a vaudeville feel, where the banjo worked well. He wasn't a virtuoso but he was a good player."
Many of Jordan's experiences with Eilis would form the basis of his first film, Angel, the story of a musician who swaps his saxophone for a gun. "I once arranged a gig in the lunatic asylum in Portlaoise," remembers Stokes. "While we were doing our sound check, the patients started to filter into the hall, watching us as we tuned up. It was a very strange experience, and one that ended up directly in the film."
Throughout all of this, Jordan was writing, producing the stories that would eventually be published in 1976 as Night In Tunisia, with the help of a group that he had co-founded, called the Writer's Co-Op. The stories were immersed in the imagery of Jordan's childhood: sad and lonely beachfront vistas, unsuccessful musicians, all shot through with shimmering, subterranean sexuality.
The opening story, Last Rites, is particularly bleak and brutal piece about the suicide of a labourer in a public bath. "Incredibly savage," he reflects now, "It must have just been the way I felt, I suppose, as if I hadn't any prospects. I was working in that place and I was going in to shower there every day. That idea just grew from that." The collection picked up the Guardian Fiction Prize, signalling for Jordan a bright literary future.
However, at this time he was also being pulled in another direction. He began writing for television and radio, producing some episodes of a dramatised biography of Sean O'Casey, and a couple of TV and radio plays. Jordan attracted the attention of the film-maker John Boorman, who says: "I became aware of him through the short stories; they had a very cinematic quality. I recognised that he had a vision and a talent." As a result, Boorman took the unprecedented step of diverting £25,000 from the budget of his film Excalibur so that Jordan could make a documentary about its making.
At the same time, he set about producing a new script for himself to direct, the work that would become Angel, the story of a Northern Irish musician's descent into violence. After showing the script to Boorman, Jordan convinced him to come on board as executive producer. However, Boorman was also chairman of the Irish Film Board, which would provide a chunk of the funding.
Though Boorman resigned his position before the decision was made to fund Angel, this apparent conflict was to kick off the first, though not the last, major controversy of Jordan's career. Boycotts were organised and irate meetings held: "There was one meeting when everyone was blackballing Jordan," Michael Sheridan remembers, "and he is reputed to have left in tears."
For the lead role, Jordan cast an actor well known in Dublin theatre circles named Stephen Rea, who would become his long-time collaborator. "He was monosyllabic, and I didn't say anything at all," Rea remembers, "so it would have been difficult for us to know each other very well. It's really only over the years that I could say I knew him, he really was very shy and very difficult to talk to." Rea remembers tension on the set of Angel: "I had a sense that a lot of the crew rather resented that someone so inexperienced was directing a movie."
When the film was shown at Cannes, to attract video distributors, it became a late-night sensation: "It wasn't in competition: it was showing in some backstreet cinema at midnight," remembers Stephen Woolley. "I saw it and thought it was absolutely fantastic. I wanted to buy it for my own film company, Palace, which was then still quite small."
After a battle with Channel 4, which initially didn't want to release Angel for cinema distribution, it ran in Woolley's Scala cinema in London, and became a critical hit which drew modest audiences. But the film did lead to a meeting between Woolley and Jordan that would change both of their lives: "Neil flew over to London and he stayed with me. I had a copy of his short stories which I had read. We just started talking about stuff, what kind of movies we liked and that was it."
Jordan showed him the script that would later become The Crying Game, then titled The Soldier's Wife. But since a rather similar film - Cal - had just been released, Channel 4 mooted the idea of adapting Angela Carter's post-feminist short story, The Company Of Wolves. The resulting film turned out to be a hit in the UK, bigger than Ghandi or Splash.
Then, in 1986, came the picture that really brought Jordan to public attention for the first time: Mona Lisa. He had hatched the idea after he read a crime report about a prostitute's "chauffeur". From a treatment by Jordan, the screen-writer David Leland wrote the first draft of the script, and Jordan produced a second draft.
It was sent to Bob Hoskins, who had first attracted Jordan's atten tion in The Long Good Friday, but he initially turned down the central role. Then late one night, Hoskins recalls, he got a knock on the door and opened it to find a bedraggled Irishman enquiring rather brusquely: "Why don't you want to do my script, what's wrong with it?" Hoskins tried to explain that the central character was simply too violent, no more than a pimp, and that if Jordan came up with a second draft, then he might reconsider. Jordan went off to produce the rewrites, and Hoskins took the part.
It was after the critical and box-office success of Mona Lisa that Jordan made the first and most major of his wrong turnings. First, he decided to go to Hollywood; and second, he decided to do a comedy. High Spirits was from the offset something of a bad idea: "Never let me do a comedy again," Jordan said after it. The result, a mish-mash starring Steve Gutenberg, Daryl Hannah and Peter O'Toole, was a disaster.
The studio moved in at the last minute to re-cut the film, pulling Jordan from his holiday in order to bully him into making the necessary alterations. Immediately afterwards, he turned to We're No Angels, a script that David Mamet had written for himself to direct. Yet again, though not quite of the egregious quality of High Spirits, the film misfired and didn't do well at the box office.
After We're No Angels failed, Jordan recoiled from the Hollywood experience to make The Miracle, with his then girlfriend Beverly D'Angelo playing an actress whose son falls in love with her when she returns to Ireland after many years away. Since the breakup of his marriage to Vivienne Shields, he had a number of girlfriends until hooking up with D'Angelo around 1986, in what has been described as a "tempestuous" relationship.
By the time of The Miracle, complications had arisen in the form an affair Jordan had had with an architect named Mary O'Donaghue, when they produced a child. "The shoot degenerated into soap opera," recalls one observer. "It all came out in a very public way and it proved very difficult for all involved." For D'Angelo, it meant the end of the relationship. "I can remember that I really couldn't give myself to that role because of events that were going on around me in my personal life," she says, refusing to elaborate. Shortly after the split, Jordan got together with his personal assistant Brenda Rawn, his current partner.
The Miracle was also a commercial failure, making Jordan's next project, The Crying Game, very difficult for producer Stephen Woolley to sell. Even when funding had been put together from a patchwork of sources, the difficulties were not over: "I didn't have enough cash, we had started the film and we couldn't pay anyone," recalls Woolley. "I was using the money from my cinema, the Scala, or maxing out my credit cards."
To add to the complications, Jordan and Woolley were living under the same roof throughout: "We would just use a cup in the morning when we got up. Neither of us ever washed up. There were hundreds of cups everywhere. We couldn't take our own company, so it was quite intense."
At first, The Crying Game failed to find a major distributor, and played at a limited number of cinemas in England. Jordan was now seriously talking about giving up filmmaking and going back full time to novels. Then, having refused to contribute to the funding, Miramax suddenly decided to pick up the film's US distribution, and it became the surprise hit of 1992, transforming the way that arthouse pictures were viewed in the industry, and eventually grossing about $70m. It was nominated for six Oscars, including best picture and best screenplay, for which Jordan was famously late picking up the golden statue.
"I was waiting in the bar and suddenly everyone was yelling 'you have got to get up on stage'." As an excuse, he told the billions of viewers that he had been in the bathroom. "He thought that waiting in the bar would seem too Irish," explains Rawn, "but in LA, being in the bathroom had even worse connotations."
Winning the Oscar began an entirely new phase in Jordan's career. Until then he had been pretty much written off as a major force, but now the offers came flooding in. His first choice was to launch himself into a project that had been brewing since the early 80s: the biopic of Michael Collins. However, even after the success of The Crying Game, no Hollywood studio was willing to risk the necessary multimillion-pound budget for a film about a man who was essentially an Irish terrorist.
So, Jordan returned to Hollywood, at the request of David Geffen, to make the $60m Interview With The Vampire, based on the cult novel by Anne Rice. Much to Rice's chagrin, the film was to star Tom Cruise as Lestat, the lead role. Slated by the critics, the film ended up making $250m world-wide. In Hollywood terms it turned Jordan into a big hitter. At the same time, he brought out an elliptical novel called Sunrise With Sea Monster, which dealt with a young man returning from the Spanish civil war, a startling contrast to the overblown gore and indulgence of Interview.
For Jordan, though the film may not have been his greatest artistic success, its commercial triumph enabled him to start work on Michael Collins. The script had originally been commissioned by David Puttnam in the early 80s, but it languished as a rival version, which was to star Kevin Costner, constantly threatened to beat it to the screen. However, around 1995, when Costner's project finally collapsed, and the IRA ceasefire made the prospect of doing the film far more palatable, the money finally came through. Jordan returned to the script and completed it within weeks.
Liam Neeson remembers how he got the title role: "He had seen me do a production of Brian Friel's play Translations. He asked to meet me and we met on a Sunday afternoon in 1984. He said he wanted me to play Collins and that it might be a long difficult road. I began researching as much of Collins as I could and the bug got under my skin."
Right from the offset, however, the project was destined to be controversial. Collins had been one of Ireland's most contentious figures, a man who invented modern urban guerrilla warfare and helped "bring the British Empire to its knees" in Ireland, but had done so with great brutality. To add to his curious position in the country's mythology, he had also been the genius behind partition, which had created Northern Ireland and sparked the Irish civil war of 1922-23.
Shooting began in January 1996, at a breakneck pace. In one of the most astonishing gestures of support that any nation could offer a film project, 5,000 Irish extras turned up for the first day of shooting, none being paid and many being expected to bring their own costumes. However, almost as soon as the film was out of post-production, the controversy began. The points that were most objected to were: showing that the British used tanks on the first Bloody Sunday, August 22, 1920; the introduction of a meeting with Eamon De Valera, the Sinn Féin leader, before Collins's assassination in 1922; the cruelly accurate depiction of De Valera by Alan Rickman; and the combining of a number of characters into one.
It was these contradictions, however, that Jordan set out to explore: "One reason why I wanted to make Michael Collins was because he was actually a very contradictory figure - the figure that republicans loathed. Yet he was the most successful exponent of physical force that ever existed here. The guy gave rise to all of these contradictions and I thought that it was very fascinating." The film went on to take more at the box office than any other in the history of Irish cinema.
After Michael Collins, Jordan set about making what many regard as his most successful film on an artistic level, the adaptation of Patrick McCabe's novel The Butcher Boy. And then, true to his history of unpredictability, he moved on to make In Dreams, a curious psychothriller involving apples and starring Annette Bening, which was critically panned in the US and did very little business in Europe.
Jordan had been itching to make a film of The End Of The Affair for many years. And though it failed to pick up any of the four Golden Globes it was nominated for last week, it is likely to be in contention for Oscars. However, what is most remarkable about the film is the way Jordan has made Greene's concerns his own: the Catholic imagery, the possibility of spirituality, even the religious theorising that bung up the end of Greene's novel, are all given a sparkling visual dimension.
And in a move that is sure to raise a few eyebrows, the film even makes it to the sea: "When I re-read the book, I just thought that it would make a wonderful movie, that the love affair could be told from two viewpoints. And the themes are really not all that different from my other work. What comes up in my films is I'm kind of interested in the point where rationality breaks down and doesn't explain things any more."
Life at a glance: Neil Jordan
Born: February 25 1950, Rosses Point, County Sligo.
Education: St Paul's College, Raheny; University College, Dublin (BA 1971).
Married: 1971 Vivienne Shields (two daughters, Sarah, Anna). Current partner Brenda Rawn (two sons, Dashiel, Daniel).
Publications: Night In Tunisia (short stories) 1976; The Past 1980; The Dream Of A Beast 1983; Sunrise With Sea Monster 1995; Nightlines 1995.
Films: Angel 1981; The Company Of Wolves 1984; Mona Lisa 1986; High Spirits 1988; We're No Angels 1989; The Miracle 1991; The Crying Game 1992; Interview With The Vampire 1994; Michael Collins 1995; The Butcher Boy 1997; In Dreams 1999; The End Of The Affair 2000.
Awards: Oscar for best original screenplay, The Crying Game, 1992; Golden Lion for best film, Venice, 1996, for Michael Collins.
• The End Of The Affair is released in the UK on February 11
