Neil Jordan

Neil Jordan is an Academy Award winning Irish filmmaker and novelist.

As a writer/director, Jordan has a highly idiosyncratic body of work, ranging from mainstream hits like Interview with the Vampire to commercial bombs like We're No Angels to a variety of more personal, low-budget arthouse pictures filmed in the UK.

He was born on February 25, 1950 in County Sligo. He was educated at University College Dublin where he studied Irish history and english literature. When John Boorman was filming Excalibur (film) in Ireland he recruited Jordan as a script consultant leading to him doing second unit work. His first feature Angel, a tale of a musician caught up in the Troubles, starred Stephen Rea.

Unconventional sexual relationships are a recurring theme in his work, and he often finds a sympathetic side to characters audiences would traditionally consider deviant or downright horrifying. His film The Miracle, for instance, followed two characters who struggled to resist a strong, incestuous attraction, while The Crying Game made complicated, likable characters out of an IRA terrorist and a transgendered woman. Vampire, like the Anne Rice book it was based on, focused on the intense homosexual relationship of two undead men who murder humans nightly (although the pair never have sex, they are clearly lovers of a sort), accompanied by an equally lusty vampire woman who is eternally trapped in the body of a little girl. While Lestat (Tom Cruise) is depicted in an attractive but villainous manner, his lover Louis (Brad Pitt) and the child vampire Claudia (Kirsten Dunst) are meant to capture the audience's sympathy despite their predatory nature.

In addition to the unusual sexuality of Jordan's films, he frequently returns to the Troubles of Northern Ireland. The Crying Game and Breakfast on Pluto both concern a transgendered character, both concern the Troubles, and both feature frequent Jordan leading man Stephen Rea, although the films, remarkably enough, are more different than similar, with Crying a realistic thriller/romance and Pluto a much more episodic, stylized, darkly comic biography. Jordan also frequently tells stories about children or young people, such The Miracle and The Butcher Boy. While most of his pictures are fairly realistic, he occasionally directs more fantastic or dreamlike films, such as The Company of Wolves, High Spirits, Vampire and In Dreams.

The critical success of Jordan's early pictures led him to Hollywood, where he directed the bombs High Spirits and We're no Angels before returning to the UK and making the more personal Crying Game. The unexpected success of that film led him back to American studio moviemaking, where he directed the hit Vampire before returning to the UK for his subsequent films. Jordan has not had a major hit since Vampire, although several of his recent films have done well by arthouse standards were popular with critics.

Interestingly, despite the apparent advocation of various alternative lifestyles in his pictures, Jordan himself has been twice married (to women) and has several children.

He was related to one of the victims of the Dublin and Monaghan Bombings in 1974.

He resides primarily in Dublin, Ireland.

Selected filmography

''Angel (1982)
The Company of Wolves (1984)
Mona Lisa (film) (1986)
High Spirits (1988)
We're no Angels (1990)
The Crying Game (1992)
Interview with the Vampire (1994)
Michael Collins (1996)
The Butcher Boy (1998)
The End of the Affair (1999)
The Good Thief (2002)
Breakfast on Pluto (2005)

Novels

Night In Tunisia (1976)
The Past (1980)
The Dream Of A Beast (1983)
Sunrise With Sea Monster (1994)
Shade (2005)

External links

Gourt Home::Gourt :: Neil Jordan

Selected filmography

Novels

External links