Child Is Father to the Movie

With the release of “The Crying Game” in 1992, it was clear a significant new talent had arrived. Irish director Neil Jordan had released critically acclaimed films before--most notably “Mona Lisa” in 1986--but none of his preceding five films had captured the public imagination quite the way “The Crying Game” did.

An exquisitely nuanced meditation on the themes of mercy and the unfathomable mystery of love, the film elicited an enthusiastic invitation from Hollywood that led to Jordan directing the sprawling horror film “Interview With the Vampire” in 1994 and the Irish historical epic “Michael Collins” in 1996.

With Jordan’s new film, “The Butcher Boy,” which opens Friday, he returns to the intimate canvas he handled so masterfully in “The Crying Game.” An adaptation of Patrick McCabe’s 1992 novel, “The Butcher Boy” is the harrowing tale of Francie Brady, a young boy driven mad by his abusive upbringing. Marking the astonishing screen debut of 12-year-old actor Eamonn Owens--who appears in just about every frame--the film also stars Jordan’s longtime colleague Stephen Rea, Fiona Shaw and musician Sinead O’Connor (as the Virgin Mary!).

A resident of Dublin where he lives with his longtime companion, Brenda Rawn, and their three young sons, Jordan was born in County Sligo and was the second of five children in an artistic family; two of his sisters are painters, and he has an abiding interest in the visual arts. Jordan recently passed through L.A. en route to London, where he’s putting the finishing touches on his next film, “In Dreams,” which stars Annette Bening and Robert Downey Jr., and he discussed his new film over coffee at a Hollywood hotel.

Q: When a child experiences trauma of the intensity depicted in “The Butcher Boy,” to what degree can they hope to recover?

A: In a way, everyone’s childhood is a wound. Childhood is a damage, and for me McCabe’s book is a metaphor for the way kids are marked by experience. Obviously Francie’s case is more extreme than most, but I think the book reminds many people of their own childhood--everyone remembers being misunderstood, and having a mental reality that’s more pressing to them than the external world. Children feel things with an intensity that’s never equaled again in life, and I think we stop feeling with that intensity because it simply becomes unbearable. Out of necessity, civilization teaches people not to feel as much, and Francie hasn’t been civilized.

Q: Do you agree with the theory that most lives are shaped by a handful of pivotal events in childhood?

A: Yes. When I write fiction I remember things from my childhood with terrifying clarity, and it makes you wonder: Where does all that memory come from? It’s kind of scary. In my last book, “Sunrise With Sea Monster” [published in the U.S. under the title “Nightlines”], I invented a kids’ life and used my own memories for portions of it. The exactitude with which they came out was startling and hard to account for. Perhaps emotional development stops at the age of 18, and we spend the rest of our lives trying to understand what we’ve experienced up to that point.

Q: What’s your most vivid childhood memory?

A: It’s hard to zero in on just one, but I do recall perceiving the world as a brutal place. The street boys were nasty creatures, and I remember the violence kids inflicted on one another vividly. Children are by nature cruel if they’re allowed to be, because caring and nurturing aren’t innate qualities in people. Those things are taught, and if you left kids to themselves they’d murder each other.

Q: What aspect of the story did you relate to? What little I’ve learned about your childhood sounds fairly idyllic.

A: It’s true that my parents never beat me. Does that disappoint you? Sorry, but they were sweet, educated people, and I grew up on the north side of Dublin, where I attended school like everybody else. Despite the fact that ours was a poor society, there was an obsession with education, which is a very Irish thing. I grew up taught by Catholic priests, and it was difficult to imagine anything outside of the world I knew. Comparatively speaking, it wasn’t a miserable childhood, and I didn’t find Catholicism oppressive--I quite enjoyed it actually. I’m not a practicing Catholic now, but I believe in God on my good days.

Q: And on bad days?

A: I’m just busy.

Q: You once said, “My holy Grail theme is a character who fixates on a love object whose true identity is a mystery to him”; who is Francie Brady’s love object?

A: His friend Joe. The Joe of Francie’s imagination always fulfills his expectations, but the real Joe will inevitably disappoint him. Obsessions often have little to do with love, by the way, and it’s interesting to be the subject of someone else’s obsession. I’ve had people obsessed with me several times, and I inevitably found myself telling them “you may think it’s me dear, but your obsession is about something else entirely.” And having been there myself, I know an obsession can only be resolved by the person afflicted with it.

Q: What or who is the force of evil in “The Butcher Boy”?

A: Evil takes the form of small town, bourgeoise pettiness. Both Francie and his father feel condemned by the way people look at them, and in a sense, the tragedy of the story isn’t so much Francie’s, as it is this community’s, which is incapable of responding to the chaos of a child’s emotions.

Q: What aspects of the book had to be jettisoned in order to turn it into a film?

A: The chaos of the book. The book is a stream of consciousness, and Pat McCabe allows himself to drift in a phantasmagoric way through all kinds of events; the film required that I impose some order on that drifting and organize it into a coherent narrative. When I read the book, I immediately felt it should be made into a film, and my plan was to produce it. Pat wrote several drafts of a screenplay, but because he was so close to the material he couldn’t disentangle himself from it. So I decided to have a go at a screenplay using bits of his drafts. The minute I began writing, this boy’s voice entered my brain and I couldn’t stop.

There’s something so compelling about the way this kid looks at the world--he’s such an eternal optimist. The worst things happen to him and he soldiers on, his spirit never flagging for a minute. I wanted the film to have that spirit, and I also wanted to suggest that the fantasy world Francie retreats into is a moral one, with genuine things to teach him and the people around him, if they could only listen.

Q: What elements must a story have in order to interest you?

A: It has to present me with new challenges, and go places the movies I’ve made haven’t gone. “The Butcher Boy” presented the challenge of using a voice-over, of blending interior and exterior worlds, and presenting an image of childhood that’s accurate to how children actually experience it. To find a specific language for this movie was difficult, because the emotional world it depicts is on one hand so strong, and on the other hand so elusive.

Q: Did you have second thoughts about upending Eamonn Owens’ life by making him the star of the film?

A: It’s true Eamonn had never even been to the cinema when we met, but I don’t worry for him because intelligence will out and he’s a gifted kid. I’ve worked with many kids and I’ve noticed it’s invariably the mother who accompanies the child. Eamonn, however, was always accompanied by his father, who’s a lovely fellow who gives Eamonn a tremendous sense of rootedness. Not all young actors are so lucky, of course.

Q: Why have actors been elevated to such an aggrandized position in the culture?

A: We’re living at the dog end of the 20th century and this culture is becoming increasingly trashy--up until about 18 months ago, for instance, you could only get a movie made if one of four names was attached to it. The cult of celebrity that surrounds actors does them no good, because it puts them in a position where they can’t take chances and results in dull movies. People will still create things regardless of the forces that oppose them, however, and that situation led to the revitalization of the independent scene.

Q: What prompted you to cast Sinead O’Connor as the Virgin Mary?

A: I’d seen a short film she was in and thought she was good--and she looks so great with hair!

Q: What was the first film that made an impression on you?

A: The first Dracula movie I saw. It was one of the Bela Lugosi films and I remember him appearing in a girl’s living room, and that shape outside the window. It scared me for months because I believed vampires existed, and that these things really happened.

Q: Which of your films has revealed you the most?

A: Probably this one; you often reveal more of yourself when you’re not speaking directly about yourself. “The Miracle” was also quite personal in terms of its details, but not in terms of its story.

Q: Why do you need movies?

A: Ireland is a literary culture that’s never had much of a filmmaking industry, and my relationship with film began with writing. When I was 24 I wrote a book called “Night in Tunisia” that dealt with my experience of growing up in Ireland and being influenced by things that didn’t seem to belong to the culture; Ireland was a very traditional, almost superstitious place in the ‘50s, when rock ‘n’ roll and American films first began appearing there. Anyhow, the book led to a job writing for Irish television, and the minute I began writing screenplays, a vast set of free associations began chucking around in my brain.

Prior to that, I’d written a novel about a photographer called “The Past” that was entirely devoted to verbal descriptions of visual images. Because I was obsessed with visual images and photography, I decided to see if I could make a film.

Q: You come from a family of visual artists; who are your favorite painters?

A: There are so many it’s hard to narrow it down to just a few. Goya comes to mind, Piero Della Francesca, Picasso, Bacon, Cezanne--one of my sisters is currently living in rural France and she’s painting the same landscapes Cezanne painted early in his career. I don’t often go to exhibitions anymore because it’s an impoverished world these days. The last thing I saw that excited me was the 1996 Kienholz retrospective at the Whitney. In the late ‘80s, my sister was on a scholarship to Berlin where she had a very cold studio, so she used to hang out at Kienholz’s place to keep warm. Kienholz’s late work often got too definitive in its statements, but early pieces like “The Illegal Operation” are extraordinary.

Q: What are you currently reading?

A: I just finished “Independence Day” by Richard Ford, who’s a very fine writer. My favorite writers are Moliere and Shakespeare--I’d point out, however, that the fact that I enjoy Shakespeare doesn’t make me an intellectual. We live in a very stupid world, you’ve got to realize that. I’m also reading Celine and just got through “Journey to the End of the Night,” and “Death on the Installment Plan.” I’d never read Celine before and he’s really something else.

Q: You’re currently editing your next film, which is slated for release late this year. Can you talk a bit about it?

A: It’s kind of a spectral, haunted film about a woman played by Annette Bening who has a psychic connection to a serial killer played by Robert Downey Jr. Robert’s got quite a big role in the film and he was great on the shoot, as was Annette--they’re both extraordinary talents.

Q: What’s the chief pitfall a director must be on guard against in shooting a film?

A: Making a film is a strange experience because before the cameras start rolling I’ve got the entire movie mapped out in my head. The actual shoot is a vast logistical exercise that involves interminable periods of waiting to see what, in a sense, I’ve already seen. Intellectually it can be draining, but you must stay rigorously focused on your original vision of the film. Making a film involves 2,000 voices saying, “It should be this, it should be that,” and if you listen to them you’re screwed.

Q: Have you ever had a hero?

A: I’ve had several. A few years ago, three of my heroes--Olivier Messiaen, Francis Bacon and Antonio Carlos Jobim--died within a few months of one another. I admire Bacon for his ability to get a human image on the canvas through all sorts of extraordinary means. I admire Joyce, Beckett, John Huston, John Ford, Mo Mowlam [the British secretary to Northern Ireland]--there’s lots of people I admire.

Q: What’s the most significant change you’ve observed in yourself in recent years?

A: I’ve become a bit happier. If life is good to you, eventually you learn to accept it.

Q: What’s the central creative challenge for an artist at mid-career?

A: I hate it when artists accept knighthoods and such, because I think it means they’ve given up and died on some level. I work in England a lot and it seems like every time you turn around, somebody new has been made “Sir this” or “The Honorable that.” Could you imagine Francis Bacon submitting to such a thing? I agree with Bacon that you should work to the very end, then go out screaming.