Poverty Row a Memory? Tell That to Neil Jordan

Don’t try to tell Irish director Neil Jordan about the joys of low-budget film-making; after his experience on his independently financed new movie “The Crying Game,” he sees things very differently.

“The Crying Game” is an odd, unpredictable story of a diffident Irish Republican Army terrorist who becomes involved with the sweetheart of a British Army soldier he has helped to kidnap. It was made, as Jordan tells it, “under conditions of extreme poverty”

But despite the appalling setbacks it suffered, “The Crying Game” has been rewarded with some of the most favorable notices of Jordan’s career, certainly the best since “Mona Lisa,” his brooding film about a small-time crook in London gangland.

“Game” is the fifth film Jordan has made with Stephen Woolley of Palace Pictures, until recently one of the leading film production companies in Britain. “But then Palace went bankrupt,” recalls Jordan, “and the film got taken over by a completion-bond company. Luckily, Stephen managed to stay on as producer, so the film didn’t get away from us.

“But at the beginning of shooting, Stephen was basically funding it off his own personal Visa card. All the cast and crew were working on deferred salaries. This film was grim; we shot part of it in an English studio where there was once a wealth of talent, but where they now mostly tape TV game shows.

“It felt like we were working in Zagreb or somewhere. It was no way to make a movie.”

On top of the production problems, there were political hurdles in Britain: the political context from which the story comes doesn’t help. The week the movie was released, there were IRA bombs going off in London. “Audiences have had to see for themselves that it’s not an IRA film, but a romantic thriller. In America, I think it will do even better. There won’t be the same nervousness, and the film will be seen for what it is.”

The critical consensus about Jordan, 42, is that he is a director at his best with personal projects. He has made two American films with substantial budgets, “High Spirits” and “We’re No Angels,” which excited neither critics nor audiences.

“I never really finished ‘High Spirits,’ you know,” Jordan said. “Usually you shoot a film then cut it. But that one was cut without me. (Film critic) Pauline Kael called me and asked to see my cut of the movie. I had to tell her it didn’t exist.

“I actually liked ‘We’re No Angels,’ but I think the studio (Paramount) had problems in marketing it. I could see that. I mean, you’re presenting a comedy, and you have Robert De Niro and Sean Penn in the lead, a script by David Mamet and me as director. None of us are exactly known as fun people.”

Jordan says that while he is prepared to work inside the studio system again, it would have to be on films he has written himself. “I wouldn’t function well in the context of a director for hire,” he says. “For me it all starts and finishes with the writing. You’re master of the ship if you’re writer and director.”

This was certainly true of “The Crying Game,” with which Jordan professes himself happy, despite the financial problems which beset its creation. “I try not to notice that stuff,” he said.

“The Crying Game,” with Stephen Rea, Miranda Richardson and Forest Whitaker, starts out as one type of film--a terrorist thriller--and then becomes a quite different story. Jordan has pulled this trick before, most notably in “Mona Lisa,” which began as a genre movie set among gangsters, then changed course to chart an unlikely romance between a prostitute (Cathy Tyson) and a driver (Bob Hoskins) assigned by hoodlums to guard her.

“I think films are one of the few media you can do this with,” Jordan said. “People’s expectations are so defined. You open (“The Crying Game”) in a fairground and you think, well, it’s a happy, charming film. Then the first third of the film is set in a glass house where the kidnap victim is being held, and you think you know where it’s going. Then it changes into something else.

“It’s something to do with the way life is now. Boundaries between these different genres are changing. The whole world’s changing. And people are far more cine-literate in a way perhaps they weren’t in the past.”

Of course, this genre-hopping--the very factor which makes “The Crying Game” such an effective, unpredictable film--scared off many potential American investors. “On paper, it looked impossible,” Jordan agreed. “It also deals with so many controversial subjects. There’s terrorism. And kidnaping. A black soldier is brutalized. There is a sexual element. Some (would-be backers) said we wouldn’t be able to do it convincingly, others said we’d offend everyone.

“In the end, we decided to do it without American money. We got pre-sales from Europe, some money from Japan, and a little from Britain. And at least that way we didn’t have any interference, over casting or anything else. No one said Dil (the soldier’s lover) had to be played by Whitney Houston.”

Now after “The Crying Game” and last year’s “The Miracle,” which starred Beverly D’Angelo, Jordan is looking at bigger projects.

“I’ve made two low-budget movies, and in some ways it’s like being a miniaturist as opposed to an oil painter,” he says. “It’s like using only watercolors.”

He hopes to make a film called “Jonathan Wild,” based on his adaptation of Henry Fielding’s 1743 novel. John Malkovich has expressed interest in the lead role. “It’s a gangster film, but set in the world of 18th-Century English gentility,” says Jordan.