Neil, an artist of many identities

He wants his novel, Mistaken, to be appreciated as literature. If it screamed “film me,” he says, it wouldn’t be a book.

No chance of a screen adaptation? “Well, somebody tried to buy the film rights — some Hollywood company — but they thought I would direct it and I couldn’t think about that,” he says. It’s hard not to think about film when thinking about Neil Jordan. While Mistaken takes him back to his first love, fiction, and while he has five other well-received titles under his belt, he is known to most as the director of such modern classics as Mona Lisa and The Crying Game, blockbusters like Interview with the Vampire, and the historical epic, Michael Collins.

“Yeah, there are people I work with on film and I say I have a book coming out and they say ‘you write books’?” he says.

He shouldn’t worry about the two worlds colliding: Mistaken, the novel, would test the genius of most movie directors. Two boys from opposite sides of the tracks separately become aware of each other as doubles through incidents of mistaken identity.

The story follows them into adulthood, as they use and abuse this apparent coincidence.

Dublin, from the ‘60s to present, is the backdrop, its streets and landmarks described so vividly the text would be a set-builder’s dream, and there is rich dialogue to take the hardship out of penning a script. But there is sufficient switching between past and present, the real and the imagined, to test an ambitious film-maker.

So the novel has built-in protections against predatory filmmakers and Jordan is well pleased. “It’s strange,” he says. “It’s such a big thing now, when film rights are sold — it’s like a literary event in itself. But I don’t, I couldn’t, no.” He pauses, aware his nose may have grown an inch. “Well, if Ken Loach — no wait, he wouldn’t do it — if Danny Boyle wanted to make it into a film, I couldn’t say no to him.”

That instinct to protect the written word proves Jordan is as much a writer as a film-maker. Not long out of university (he studied history and English at UCD), he co-founded the Irish Writers’ Co-operative, in 1974, and, two years later, produced his first major work, Night in Tunisia, an award-winning collection of short stories.

Films came later, beginning with Angel, in 1982, which he wrote and directed, and followed by The Company of Wolves, in 1984, and Mona Lisa, in 1986, which he directed and co-wrote.

Jordan’s work in the visual medium began a bit earlier — he wrote a few scripts for Wanderly Wagon. “Probably the first writing I got paid for,” he says. “I wouldn’t make too much of it, though.”

Writing for it required the skill to make the incredible credible that has been evident in Jordan’s work since. Colin Farrell as a west Cork fisherman who thinks he’s netted a mermaid? That was Ondine, Jordan’s last film, shot around Castletownbere where he owns a house.

In Mistaken, the situations veer increasingly into the unlikely, but when the inevitable shocker comes, it is bizarrely believable. “I like to push things to the point of implausibility,” Jordan says, “to get to that stage where I have to ask ‘is this plausible?’ and stop there.”

For Jordan, the characters represent a common preoccupation. “I think everybody has this sense that there is another version of themselves out there, somewhere, or, perhaps, another possibility of themselves and they would be that person if they had done something differently, or had done this or not done that,” he says.

So what does he imagine the other Neil Jordan to be up to? “He’s in prison in Phoenix, Arizona, or somewhere like that — for identity theft or computer fraud.

“I kept having problems at airports in the US — being stopped and checked out,” he says. “It was only when I went to the US embassy, I found out my name was coming up as a felon.”

A more likely alternative version is closer to the real thing. “He’s me only living in Los Angeles — and he’s warm,” he says, looking out onto a wintry evening and grimacing.

Jordan, 60, has spoken before of his desire to live at the heart of movie-making, and of the five children and two grandchildren who keep him in Ireland.

“I should have lived the last 15 years in LA. You can do a lot of work there. I always find it very refreshing — it’s like, ‘oh there are people here who do what I do’,” he says. He hasn’t done too badly here, though, given that home is in Sorrento Terrace, the country’s most exclusive address, in Dalkey, south Dublin.

Mistaken reveals warm memories of growing up in the capital, where his Sligo-based family moved when he was a toddler.

“I said I’m going to set it in the Dublin I remember and I’ll try to be as accurate as possible and see what comes out of it. It turned out to be quite an attractive place.

“I don’t remember the Ireland of the 1950s and 1960s that other people describe. The grim, backward, priest-ridden Ireland — that’s just not how I remember it,” he says.

But then, even the grim, economically backward, debt-ridden Ireland of today holds a creative charm for Jordan, who feels compelled to make another film here as soon as he can.

“I feel there is something interesting to be made. Ireland used to be a haunted landscape — haunted by old ruins — and now it’s haunted by these half-built shells of modernity. You turn a corner down a country road and find a half-built hotel full of marble — it’s like a curse,” he says.

Before he gets around to that, however, he has to give his writing career some attention. He wants to get to literary festivals with Mistaken and have his earlier books reprinted, as his years of multi-tasking have left them a bit neglected.

He says he’ll start this month, but, almost in the same breath, he’s talking about simultaneous plans to promote his latest screen project, a lavish ten-part TV drama, The Borgias, about the 15th century Italian dynasty famed for corruption, conspiracy, murder, political intrigue and orgies.

They also produced a pope, Alexander VI, who apparently made it to the top of the Catholic Church without ever encountering the Ten Commandments.

Jeremy Irons plays the key character and the series has been snapped up in the US for broadcast, beginning in April. Jordan originally wrote the story as a movie, 10 years ago, but couldn’t secure backing for it, so getting it made now, in such an expansive manner (“I’m in charge of three directors,” he says, wide-eyed) is a huge thrill for him.

It was shot in Hungary, where the elaborate sets recreating Renaissance Rome are still in place, as Jordan is hopeful that further series will be ordered.

A busy year looms, then, and that’s not counting other film projects he can’t talk about, yet. Neither does it include his plans for a screenplay of Paul Murray’s acclaimed novel, Skippy Dies, which made the 2010 Booker Prize long-list.

Jordan bought the film rights to it and is determined to get it on screen. “It’s going to take a while. It’s such a good book, but it’s challenging. It’s 670 pages long, for a start,” Jordan says.

Close to 700 pages and still he’s not put off.

Mistaken, at a mere 314, could be in trouble yet.