Beautiful dreamer

"End of the Affair" director Neil Jordan talks about sex, Catholicism and why "God is the greatest imaginary being of all time."

By Michael Sragow

Dec 9, 1999 | Think of writer-director Neil Jordan as the highly literary Irish cousin of Monty Python wild man Terry Gilliam. Each has replenished adult and arrested-adolescent films with movie magic, taking tales of redemption and damnation to infinity and beyond. Contemporary cinema would be less colorful without movies like Gilliam's "Brazil" or "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" and Jordan's "Mona Lisa," "The Miracle" and "The Crying Game." Even when a Jordan or a Gilliam film fails to cohere or catch fire, it opens up multiple air pockets in otherwise dusty imaginations.

Interviewed during a brief jaunt to San Francisco to discuss his loving, subtly irreverent adaptation of Graham Greene's "The End of the Affair," Jordan was more restrained than Gilliam would be in similar circumstances. But as he warmed to the subject of the novel, he too spoke with the sureness and calm outrageousness of a born fabulist. There was an inward-outward tug to his conversational flow. He has a way of making his listener feel part to his thinking while it surges to otherworldly realms. You can sense a silent chuckle beneath his outward seriousness, so the laughter is explosive when he gets off an explicit joke.

During the interview, Jordan spoke about where his interests and Graham Greene's intersected when he adapted the writer's novel. After the interview, I found my copy of Jordan's published film diary and script to "Michael Collins" (1996), which showed how close the making of this film was to his concerns as a director. At one point he writes of seeing "Vanya on 42nd Street" to check out Julianne Moore; she didn't get the part of Kitty Kiernan in "Collins," but he thought she was "a remarkable actress," and three years later he would cast her as Sarah Miles in "Affair."

Jordan remarks that "goodness is essentially undramatic" (a belief shared by his novelist anti-hero in "Affair," Maurice Bendrix), and goes on to say that though Liam Neeson was superb in "Schindler's List," the critical spotlight "went to Ralph Fiennes, who played a quite conventional caricature of evil." Of course, Fiennes appears in "The End of the Affair" as that Greene surrogate Bendrix, a writer of notoriously mixed character who hires a detective to follow the woman who was his wartime lover. How a single figure can embody opposing drives, thoughts or impulses preoccupies Jordan in his diary for "Michael Collins" as much as it does in his film "The End of the Affair." So does the need for works of theater and film to have structure and sense to them, no matter how far-out or lyrical. "Why is it," he writes, "that so many Irish plays now have the structure of a dream and use the language of poetry? There is a lack of astringency about the whole thing which is vaguely irritating."

Jordan speaks, of course, as a published fiction writer. Irish literary icon Sean O'Foalian praised him for (among other things) generating metaphors out of pop music and jazz -- "a new and releasing thing in Irish literature." Jordan has published three novels since his short-story collection "Night in Tunisia" appeared in 1976. Yet even in book reviews he has never ceased to be primarily identified as a filmmaker. Which is why, perhaps, he can be forgiven for repeating a passage from his film diary verbatim when he tells me, "We live in a world of brand names, I suppose. Heinz makes beans, Neil Jordan makes films."

I recently heard you answering questions on "The Connection," Christopher Lydon's PBS talk show out of Boston. Perhaps because of "The End of the Affair," callers were constantly trying to tie your work to Catholicism.

And it's not anything about Catholicism. I was brought up a Catholic and was quite religious at one stage in my life, when I was young. But it left me with no scars whatever; it just sort of vanished.

I like stories about the collapse of rationality, stories that bring characters to points where reason is no longer adequate, or where they come to grips with something that has no explanation from their past. I don't know if that is Catholic. Then again (laughter) -- it's definitely not Protestant!

I'd be quite a happy Hindu.

Because of reincarnation --

It would have suited me down to the ground.

You know, we do have this need for mysticism. That is in my movies. And I always like to do stories about gods and monsters and imaginary beings of all kinds.

And how does this fit into "The End of the Affair"?

Because God is the greatest imaginary being of all time. Along with Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, the invention of God is probably the greatest creation of human thought. And I guess that's what compelled me to do a film of this Graham Greene book -- the challenge of portraying a man who's in a triangular relationship that's really a quadrangle, and one quarter will never reveal itself.

And there was a kind of gravity to it that I liked. You see movies made from classics of literature, and you realize the filmmakers are trying to update things, to put a spin on them, to hip them up. Consciously or unconsciously, they're trying too hard to relate the movie to what they see as the audience -- say, by casting Gwyneth Paltrow in Jane Austen.

I'm 49, and like most directors I'm not getting any younger. Yet directors are constantly trying to relate to this chimera, and as a consequence often mess up what they do. With "The End of the Affair," I decided I was just going to do what the book is, try to make it for what it should be, not, for example, make it more "pacey." Because if there is something in it that is universal, it will come out.

Sarah Miles, the Julianne Moore character, is a married woman who has this highly erotic love affair with the writer Maurice Bendrix -- who's based on Graham Greene and played by Ralph Fiennes. Then she breaks it off immediately after he recovers from a terrible fall during the Blitz -- and the audience doesn't know how to react right away. That's risky, but it's also brilliant, because it forces viewers to acknowledge that the film isn't about sex: It's about transcendence.

It's definitely about transcendence -- and it's about infinity. It's about the experience of a woman who kneels over her lover's body and steps out of her time. It's like she goes into a whole other geological strata of being, and can no longer face what the rest of her life is like. That I really believe in.

What I felt more strongly watching the film than reading the book is that Bendrix has a moment like that, too.

Exactly. He experiences an out-of-body kind of thing. My mother almost died years ago; she went into the hospital in Dublin, and she described it almost this way. She saw her body down there and entered this kind of light-filled thing and knew she could have gone one way or the other -- and because of her grandchildren decided to go the way she did. I think to describe this as a religious movie is wrong. It's actually about mysticism, and I think people can't live without that in their lives.

Next Page: Greene's obsession with Catholicism

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