03/03/2016 Meet the Author


03/03/2016

Similar Content

Browse content similar to 03/03/2016. Check below for episodes and series from the same categories and more!

Transcript


LineFromTo

Neil Jordan is a storyteller, equally at home on the cinema screen

:00:00.:00:21.

His thriller, The Dran Detective, has all the ingredients of a movie.

:00:22.:00:25.

A fast-moving plot, a cast of dark and intriguing characters,

:00:26.:00:28.

a setting that disturbs you from the very first page.

:00:29.:00:30.

All of that and a strong whiff of the surreal,

:00:31.:00:32.

and you realise in this story that you are in the hands

:00:33.:00:35.

Neal, it's inescapable that you're a writer who straddles two worlds.

:00:36.:00:53.

When you're writing fiction, putting a story on the page,

:00:54.:00:56.

do you imagine yourself being behind a camera?

:00:57.:01:00.

In a strange way, it's a very lonely pursuit,

:01:01.:01:08.

In a strange way, you can be as alone on a set with 300

:01:09.:01:13.

To directe a movie correctly or to see it correctly,

:01:14.:01:17.

you kind of have to place yourself in a very isolated position.

:01:18.:01:20.

Otherwise, you are influenced by everybody and the media

:01:21.:01:24.

So, the loneliness of the writer is, in your view, essential, really?

:01:25.:01:35.

It's also accentuated by the position of the director.

:01:36.:01:38.

There is nothing as strange as being asked 25 different

:01:39.:01:40.

You are far better off to keep yourself in an isolated place

:01:41.:01:45.

and keep your brain clear and to see things as clear as possible.

:01:46.:01:48.

In a sense, you have that magic eye which is on this unit.

:01:49.:01:51.

You can move around the room, you see the room, you see

:01:52.:01:54.

the street, you see the bridge where at one point in the story

:01:55.:01:57.

a girl is apparently going to jump into the river.

:01:58.:02:00.

That's where I started making movies in the end because I was writing

:02:01.:02:09.

I started with a book of stories and over at a novel called The Past,

:02:10.:02:16.

which was entirely based around a photographer.

:02:17.:02:17.

I realised everything I was writing was basically to do with visual

:02:18.:02:30.

Sometimes when people describe novels is very imagistic,

:02:31.:02:32.

it seems to me to be a slight criticism.

:02:33.:02:34.

That is the kind of being I am and there is no point in resisting.

:02:35.:02:39.

We talk about images, but we can also talk about language.

:02:40.:02:42.

Crispness of the dialogue and the speed of the dialogue

:02:43.:02:44.

in this book is one of the things that will strike anybody.

:02:45.:02:47.

Writing novels is about having an ear for speech, in the end.

:02:48.:02:50.

It's a weird thing, it's kind of a knack.

:02:51.:02:53.

It's the one thing I most love to you, is to write dialogue,

:02:54.:02:56.

and I most love to write dialogue that doesn't say

:02:57.:02:59.

People very rarely say what they think.

:03:00.:03:10.

Even when I'm going through screenplay, sometimes,

:03:11.:03:16.

and people say, "Why don't they say, I want to get back to my wife?"

:03:17.:03:19.

That's the last thing you say in those circumstances.

:03:20.:03:22.

The fun or the beauty of dialogue is that it is elusive and bleak.

:03:23.:03:33.

The world in which Jonathan, your hero, the detective,

:03:34.:03:48.

former special forces man, the world in which she moves

:03:49.:03:50.

One world fell apart in Eastern Europe in 1989, 19 90.

:03:51.:03:54.

The world that we see here is one that hasn't yet been

:03:55.:03:56.

In Europe at the moment, you do feel whatever structures

:03:57.:04:01.

are holding the societal agreements to gather our collapsing

:04:02.:04:03.

This is not about Baghdad, Syria, anything like that.

:04:04.:04:07.

But it is about a place where certainties are collapsing

:04:08.:04:09.

and ancient legions rise to the surface.

:04:10.:04:21.

Your central character Jonathan, and absorbing character,

:04:22.:04:23.

is somebody who can't put it own life together, either.

:04:24.:04:25.

Didn't you want to give a somebody who had hoped?

:04:26.:04:28.

It's a portrait of a marriage, as well as everything else,

:04:29.:04:45.

and a portrait of two people who have been together for 20 years

:04:46.:04:48.

This mysterious thing has vanished from their lives, which

:04:49.:04:51.

It's an experience that happens in every person around

:04:52.:04:54.

It happens in every marriage, every relationship and every human

:04:55.:04:57.

being wear whatever is that sap of urgency seems to have gone

:04:58.:05:01.

to somebody else or something like that.

:05:02.:05:03.

Eventually they leave the environment and they go

:05:04.:05:06.

back to the certainties of somewhere like Wimbledon.

:05:07.:05:08.

There is a wonderful undercurrent in here which bus through from time

:05:09.:05:13.

A psychic character with imaginary people coming to tea.

:05:14.:05:30.

Do you have the feeling that we've all got that sense of the mysterious

:05:31.:05:33.

I suppose that's why religions are there.

:05:34.:05:51.

I've always wanted to construct a mystery that ended up in the zone

:05:52.:05:54.

of irrationality where the central character, the Demons

:05:55.:05:58.

the protagonists are looking for beyond the grave in some way.

:05:59.:06:01.

It's also something to do with desire.

:06:02.:06:09.

I always feel eroticism and death are sometimes combined.

:06:10.:06:11.

I do want to get too complicated here.

:06:12.:06:16.

Essentially what the book is about, anyway.

:06:17.:06:26.

There's one wonderful character in here, well,

:06:27.:06:28.

But one particular character, Gertrude, his own incarnation

:06:29.:06:32.

of Marlene Deitrich with a Pomeranian.

:06:33.:06:33.

This, clearly, was a somebody you enjoyed creating,

:06:34.:06:35.

writing about, talking about, and bringing into the room.

:06:36.:06:37.

There is no basis in fact for this person.

:06:38.:06:41.

I began to enjoy her and I had this image of her sitting

:06:42.:06:45.

in her apartment dressed in a yellow morning rope sipping something that

:06:46.:06:50.

Are you the kind of writer who finds that a character wanders

:06:51.:06:57.

onto the stage almost unwritten, not fully formed, and you think

:06:58.:07:03.

Is that what she did? Yes, she came.

:07:04.:07:16.

That's the beauty of writing a book, as opposed to making a movie.

:07:17.:07:19.

If you came up with a concept like Gertrude in a film,

:07:20.:07:22.

or halfway through movie, or even as you're writing it,

:07:23.:07:28.

the producers or financiers are looking at it and they would

:07:29.:07:30.

question every aspect of that character.

:07:31.:07:33.

Whereas when I'm writing a book, I can say, I will see

:07:34.:07:36.

where she wants to go and what she wants to do.

:07:37.:07:38.

This strikes me as a story that could work on the screen.

:07:39.:07:41.

I always love that movie, Don't Look Now.

:07:42.:07:44.

It ends up in a similar terrain of the rational.

:07:45.:07:54.

I would like to make a movie of this book and Amazon have a film studio

:07:55.:08:01.

now and they have bought it and I am talking to them.

:08:02.:08:03.

I have never made a movie of the book I have written to date,

:08:04.:08:07.

Neil Jordan, thank you very much indeed.

:08:08.:08:11.

Download Subtitles

SRT

ASS