Jordan's Love Affair with Movies

Neil Jordan is ready to talk.

The craggy, dark-haired director has been through hours of interviews already, but doesn't look it. Relaxed and slouching in a tweed coat, he looks at first glance more like an English professor than one of the foremost (and quirkiest) Irish directors working today. The rigors of a promotional tour aren't new to Jordan--he's weathered the gonzo publicity machines surrounding his more high-profile efforts, including 1992's The Crying Game, for which he won a best original screenplay Oscar, and Interview with the Vampire, which came out as the worldwide Brad Pitt craze was fast approaching a fever pitch.

Today, though, Jordan is far more interested in discussing his newest feature, The End of the Affair, an adaptation of a Graham Greene novel, starring Ralph Fiennes, Julianne Moore and Jordan favorite Stephen Rea. When it's pointed out that Rea has appeared in eight out of his ten films, Jordan deadpans, "Well, I owe him an awful lot of money from a bet years ago." When pressed on why Rea was right for the part of Henry, the film's jilted husband, Jordan replies, "I needed a strong and incredibly subtle actor for that. It's not an attractive part--men don't like to play a man who can't give his wife an orgasm. I wanted him to emerge with a dignity that is surprising." His instincts were right: the quiet pain and pride of Rea's performance is one of the high points of the film.

Jordan not only directed The End of the Affair, but wrote the adaptation of the Greene novel himself. "[The novel] has a combination of eroticism and spirituality I thought was fascinating" The themes that he explored through this love affair--he pushed the idea of commitment, and the idea of possession, and the idea of affection to such an extreme that you can touch on other areas that love stories don't often touch on. [Greene is] a great novelist of character, and he's kind of pitiless-he observes them at their worst and their best."

The new movie is rife with unusually frank love scenes; Jordan says it's no coincidence that his film, produced independently in the U.K., was made wholly outside the Hollywood studio system: "The End of the Affair is one of the most frankly erotic books ever written. I wanted to make my film's [sex scenes] as truly as the book does. When I see sex scenes between Hollywood actors, they're always terribly violent. They're always shoving each other's head against the wall, or ripping up a table full of crockery and throwing the girl down. I saw The Thomas Crowne Affair, and they were literally making love while climbing the stairs! I don't know anybody who behaves like that. The way that they make love in this picture is, I think, closer to what people actually do. I think they do that, in Hollywood movies, because they're afraid of intimacy. They're afraid of showing it. And they're worried about what the rating will be [Jordan's film secured an R rating from the MPAA without making any cuts]. Maybe that's become their language for sex, the violent stuff."

Though his method of directing actors is famously loose and free-form, Jordan meticulously controls the technical aspects of the filmmaking process: "I prepare everything-all the lighting situations, all the camera moves-prepare as much as I possibly can, and if you are that prepared you create a space where the actors can function better." But does all of this control during production give the director an idea of how a film will do commercially? "Haven't got a clue." Critically? "Haven't got a clue either. This is an adult movie, and it deals with themes that you don't see in the cinema very often." Jordan's best films tend to receive modest box-office attention and highly disparate critical assessments. One journalist called his recent The Butcher Boy "trash," while it appeared in over twenty others' Top 10 lists for 1997.

Despite his sometimes enormous success (Interview grossed over $110 million in the US alone), Jordan remains self-effacing about his work, an of course, his Oscar. "Nobody knows who got the Oscar for best script. It's the consolation prize, isn't it? It's the one, they should've given it best picture-'Oh, we'll give him best screenplay.' They remember best actor, don't they, and best picture, that's it. [pauses] They definitely don't remember screenplay."