Gemma Arteron and Saoirse Ronan play mother and daughter vampires in Byzantium.
Gemma Arteron and Saoirse Ronan play mother and daughter vampires in Byzantium.
After bringing The Borgias to television, director Neil Jordan has returned to vampire movies 20 years after making blood brothers of Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise. He talks to Kaleem Aftab
Neil Jordan struggles to keep a grip on the film business these days. It's very hard work, says the Irish Oscar winner. "I started out as a short-story writer and novelist, and now I realise that I had no idea how lucky I was to make my first three films in rather quick succession."
Those three films, Angels (1982), The Company of Wolves (1984) and Mona Lisa (1986), a heady mix of thriller, erotica and fantasy-horror grabbed Hollywood's attention. Jordan hit his purple patch, critically and commercially, in the 1990s with The Crying Game (1992), Interview with the Vampire (1994) and Michael Collins (1996) and the awards came thick and fast. A Best Original Screenplay Oscar for The Crying Game was the biggest of numerous gongs; Michael Collins won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.
But these days the director, 63, is lamenting his struggles to get movies made.
"When I started making films there seemed to be a constant demand for material," he says. "It was a bit like the cable TV situation is now. I only made
as a TV show because I failed to get it made as a movie for 10 years. It was Steven Spielberg who said, 'Why don't you make it as a TV show?' So I looked at it as a 40-hour movie.
Director Neil Jordan.
Nevertheless, thanks to Jordan's passion for making movies, he has just completed his 17th feature film in 30 years. Byzantium came about after he had a call from producer Stephen Woolley, who said that he had a script that Gemma Arterton had shown interest in.
"When I read the script it seemed so familiar to me. If it had not been a vampire movie it would have reminded me of a movie I made a long time ago, The Miracle, which nobody saw. The way that it was about storytelling reminded me of The Company of Wolves, and the fact that it was a vampire movie reminded me of Interview with the Vampire.
"When I first read it, it was more ambiguous, but I said to the writer, Moira Buffini, 'Let's not shy away from making a vampire film, a horror film, because they are pretty good'."
Despite carrying Jordan's signature, Byzantium is the first film that he hasn't scripted himself. Even if he had wanted to write a draft, he wouldn't have had time, between publishing a novel, Mistaken, in 2011 and writing The Borgias.
He didn't even read the play upon which Byzantium is based, staying hands-off in order to retain what he saw as Buffini's inimitable female voice. The story involves Arterton and Saoirse Ronan as 200 year-old mother and daughter vampires, hiding out in an English seaside town.
"Normally girls like vampire stories,
Buffy
and
Twilight
and all that stuff," Jordan says.
Saoirse Ronan in Byzantium.
As for Twilight, he's only seen the first film in the series and found some elements troubling. "It was definitely a metaphor for teenage chastity and affection. It's weird it's now become a Christian thing. How strange. It could have been approved in the Bible Belt, that movie. They didn't do anything but kiss did they?"
As if to reinforce his aversion to chaste vampires, Arterton's vampire in Byzantium doubles up as a whore. "Not that the movie is a metaphor, I saw it as a teenage love story and these characters aren't quite vampires. I prefer to see them as soucouyants. It's a lovely word, that. It's Caribbean, a voodoo version of a vampire. I felt that it was time to reinvigorate these creatures a bit."
Who: Neil Jordan, veteran director returning to vampire movies What:Byzantium, starring Gemma Arterton, Saoirse Ronan, Jonny Lee Miller and Sam Riley When: Opens at cinemas on Thursday
