Although not a painter like his grandfather, mother and two sisters, Irish filmmaker Neil Jordan inherited the same artistic sensibilities but opted for a camera instead of a brush to create the visually rich canvasses of his always complex pictures. He first became established, however, as an acclaimed author of moody, turbulent short stories and novels dealing with passion, sexuality and the changes of the last generation in his native Ireland. On films he has creatively controlled, Jordan has crafted stories that involve unconventional love and the moral issues of violence and death. Elements of whimsy, fantasy, surprise and horror often crop up in his movies, including the political thrillers which stand as some of his finest efforts. At its best, his is a provocative cinema, which, though not as experimental as some would have it, nonetheless combines a stylistic freshness with pensive philosophical, social and sexual dimensions.
After enjoying success with his "Night in Tunisia and Other Stories" and the novel "The Past", Jordan entered films as a script consultant on John Boorman's striking "Excalibur" and soon after saw his screenplay "Traveller" (both 1981) directed in 16mm by Joe Comerford. The first of his political thrillers, it followed a couple forced into an arranged marriage as they embark on a smuggling trip across the border into Southern Ireland. His feature directorial debut. "Angel/Danny Boy" (1982), an intriguing study of a musician possessed with avenging the murder of a mute woman, mined a similar vein and starred Stephen Rea as the first incarnation of a gunman who would appear in subsequent pictures. After giving a haunting, Freudian revamping to the story of Little Red Riding Hood in "The Company of Wolves" (1985), Jordan broke through with "Mona Lisa" (1986), an absorbing tale of obsessive love that transformed the career of little-known character actor Bob Hoskins and garnered the director his first real international recognition.
"Mona Lisa" brought Jordan offers to work in Hollywood, where he quickly encountered studio interference on "High Spirits" (1988), a supernatural comedy distributed in a mutilated version that had little to do with the director's vision. His experience on the remake of "We're No Angels" (1989), which packaged Robert De Niro and Sean Penn in a script by David Mamet, also proved disappointing, so he returned to Ireland to tentatively tackle the subject of mother-son incest in "The Miracle" (1991), based on his award-winning story "Night in Tunisia". In 1992, Jordan's clever mixture of politics and sexual intrigue in "The Crying Game" catapulted an indie designed for art house distribution into a stunning cultural and commercial success. Picking up six Oscar nominations (including a win for Jordan's screenplay) and many critics' awards, it boasted one of the best-kept plot secrets (regarding sexual identity) in recent film history and also marked the reappearance of the gunman embodied by Rea.
Jordan returned in triumph to Hollywood and with his newly-acquired clout landed the plum, if daunting, assignment of adapting Anne Rice's tricky bestseller "Interview with the Vampire" to the screen. Once he got the cast he wanted (including Brad Pitt, Antonio Banderas and the controversial choice of Tom Cruise to play the vampire Lestat), its collective box office insurance coupled with the hands-off policy of producer David Geffen and the executive team at Warner Bros. enabled the director to handle his big-budget assignment like an independent. The result garnered mixed if generally favorable reviews and performed quite well at the box office. More impressively, "Interview with the Vampire" also proved thematically consistent with many aspects of Jordan's earlier work, its dank, downbeat tone meshing stylishly and well with its heady sexuality and metaphysical musings.
The financing by Warner Bros. transformed Jordan's most cherished project, gestating for more than a decade, into a reality. The epic story of "Michael Collins" (1996) had frustrated filmmakers for nearly four decades, with individuals from John Ford and John Huston to Robert Redford and Kevin Costner attempting to bring a biopic based on the life of the Irish Republican Army commander-in-chief (and still controversial Irish hero) to the screen. Full of action and period detail, "Collins" drew comparisons to "The Godfather", though there was the inevitable controversy when both English and Irish audiences found fault with its interpretation and condensation of historical facts. Celebrated cinematographer-turned-director Chris Menges volunteered to lens it and provided the rich earth tones and mobile camera work the director's vision demanded. Jordan had wanted Liam Neeson for the title role ever since completing the screenplay in 1983, despite the actor's then low-profile, and Neeson justified this faith, garnering his strongest notices since 1993's "Schindler's List." Jonathan Rhys Meyers' portrayal of Collins' enigmatic assassin continued Jordan's fascination with the gunman.
"The Butcher Boy" (1997) would seem the quintessential indie film, but it too bore the Warner Bros. logo. Adapted from the novel by Patrick McCabe, this harrowing tale of a young boy driven mad by his abusive upbringing was one of the last pre-DreamWorks movies green-lit by Geffen. Featuring an outstanding performance by Eamonn Owens (in his debut) as the disintegrating titular character, this arresting, sometimes hallucinatory (with the controversial Sinead O'Connor appearing as a scatological Virgin Mary) film opened to reviews ranging from gushing to puzzled and did almost no box office. Anticipating the zeitgeist, Jordan correctly assessed that the horror genre was ready for a terrifying film that took itself seriously (i.e., "The Blair Witch Project") and was far more psychologically based (e.g., "The Sixth Sense"). Unfortunately, "In Dreams" (1999), his first collaboration with Geffen at DreamWorks, proved a muddled and overblown affair in its story of a woman (Annette Bening) linked through psychic thoughts to a serial killer (Robert Downey Jr.). That same year saw him tackle the remake of the Graham Greene novel "The End of the Affair" for Columbia Pictures. A love triangle set in wartime England, it starred Ralph Fiennes, Julianne Moore and perennial colleague Rea and offered Jordan the opportunity to intriguingly examine a relationship from two points of view.