Neil Jordan has spent his career telling strange, twisting stories that have mesmerised, surprised and occasionally misfired. Mona Lisa, The Crying Game, The Company of Wolves, Breakfast on Pluto – these films all veer off in unexpected directions, ambushing the audience. But it turns out the director saved the biggest twist for himself. Watching some of his films at a festival some years ago, Jordan was startled to see his own private life up there on the screen. It seems he had unknowingly channelled his relationships with his father, his wife and his children into stories about gangsters, terrorists and hot vampires. “I was shocked at how much of myself I revealed,” he says. “It was like a physical shock.”
That Jordan burgled his own psyche injects fresh meaning into a highly idiosyncratic body of work that spans mainstream hits like Interview With a Vampire and Michael Collins, Hollywood duds such as High Spirits and We’re No Angels, and art-house darlings such as Angel and The Butcher Boy. The disclosure is one of many plums in his new book Amnesiac, a memoir of a life (and imagination) less ordinary. It hop-scotches from a childhood in 1950s Catholic Ireland to bohemian 1970s London, then on to a shimmering 90s Los Angeles, before reaching a peripatetic lion-in-winter stage, with Jordan, now 74, making forays from Dublin for TV and film work.
