What is independent cinema?

Neil Jordan

As Jordan himself states, he is issued from a literary background. He cites William Butler Yeats, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett as cultural and aesthetic influences. “[…] It was a writer’s culture; it always has been”. To him, movies were inaccessible to the Irish:

When I grew up, I used to love movies but they didn’t seem to belong to the culture I lived in. Nobody Irish had ever made a movie […] If you grew up in [Ireland], writing was the main culture.

He still cites cinema mainstays as influences on his work:

I was interested in European and American films of the forties and fifties. I was into everything I saw. Nicholas Ray, Fellini, Buñuel, Kurosawa.

But, to him, influences could come from anywhere, even The Twilight Zone. It is more apparent now with the mediatization of life. The present conjecture is responsible for the appearance of works like The Matrix and Kill Bill, veritable potpourris of influences and pop references, whether consciously as dense and populated as they are or not.

Jordan works in a poetic style, whether in film or in literature. He blames that effect on the power of film:

I think cinema’s probably the most poetic medium ever invented, in a strange way. Even the most vulgar, noisy movies, it can lead to a kind of poetry you don’t find in any other medium.

That’s a self-deprecating quote. To deny the influence of the artist on the image is some nonsense. There is no denying that poetic imagery can be found in “vulgar, noisy movies”, as Jordan labels them, as John Woo’s slow-motion shots and Michael Bay’s low-angle shots are examples, but the poetic aspect of a movie like In Dreams does not come from the medium, but the interpretation that Jordan makes of his subject and the tools he uses to produce those lush, dreamlike images. As a way to adapt his storytelling style to what was needed in The Company of Wolves, Jordan turned to paintings:

We looked at a painter called Samuel Palmer. If you want to see how to eroticize landscape, look at his paintings; they’re beautiful.

Palmer’s influence on The Company of Wolves is similar to H. R. Giger’s on Alien. On Interview with the Vampire, Jordan once again adapted to the subject matter and worked to create a unique world for Anne Rice’s vampires:

I was just trying to create something that was dead, like a funeral home. The whole thing is a series of funeral interiors. […] It was about making their entire world like a coffin: Los Angeles, Paris, San Francisco.

Jordan’s outlook on the whole production process is fatalist and resigned. He leaped into directing after his television scripts were mishandled by their directors: “I was so depressed by the experience of seeing them realized that I had to do it myself.” Angel, Jordan’s first film, came out of an arrangement with director John Boorman and Channel 4 in Britain:

They [Channel 4] were worried about me never having directed before. I asked John [Boorman] to produce it for me, which gave them some security, and so they let me make this movie.

But, the director regrets his lack of preparation for directing the film:

That’s the problem with a lot of first-time directors. You get a very clear image in your head, but you don’t realize that to actually get it on the screen, you’ve got to do all this basic preparation.

As the subject matter was a little sensitive, the production was up against mountains of resistance from the different groups who didn’t agree with Jordan:

I was getting death threats because I was making a film about sectarian killing, and some people thought it was about the IRA.

This apprehension towards the film echoed right through to the limited distribution of the film. But the director accepts this interdependence between the filmmaker and the distribution outlets:

It’s silly to pretend that you’ve no relationship with Hollywood. Every director does, anywhere in the world, even independent directors, because in the end their films have to be distributed by that system.

Like Richard Linklater, Jordan has come to terms with Hollywood and has learned to navigate its waters without compromising his vision.