Neil Jordan's epic 1996 film, Michael Collins, will be re-released in cinemas next Friday

FILM-MAKER and writer Neil Jordan (65) stretches and flexes his right leg.

“It’s getting there,” he says, referring to the injury, a smashed kneecap and severed tendons, that put him “out of commission” for almost two years after he fell in front of a bus in Dublin city centre in 2013.

The accident confined him to his home in Dalkey, south county Dublin, for the best part of a year and, for a further two years, his movement was so restricted he was forced to stop making films.

And yet when Weekend asks him how he got through that time, he’s entirely upbeat.

“I’m lucky because for two years I couldn’t take a plane, I couldn’t direct a film, but I was able to write a book.

"It was lovely for me to rediscover the pleasure in words. I wrote two books,” he says.

A new novel will be published next year and The Drowned Detective — a bewitching study of jealousy set in Eastern Europe — has just been published.

If there were times of frustration during his slow recovery, he’s not dwelling on them.

He says he was helped through by those closest to him — including his five children, Anna, Sarah, Dashiel, Daniel and Ben — and happily used the time to write in an empty room: “When you can see nothing, you’re not distracted by things.”

It’s easy to forget Jordan’s extraordinary talent as a writer — his first collection of short stories Nights in Tunisia in 1976 was followed by five novels — though there’s a risk the books will be overshadowed yet again this month.

Just as his deeply evocative crime thriller hits the shelves, his epic 1996 film Michael Collins will debut on Blu-ray and be re-released in cinemas next Friday to celebrate its 20th anniversary.

He’s watching it again for the first time since he made it when Weekend arrives, forcing him to hit pause just as the Civil War is breaking out.

“I want to know what happens next!” he says.

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So how does it look 20 years on?

“The performances hold up,” he says.

“Liam Neeson, Aidan Quinn, Stephen Rea, Julia Roberts… they all did justice to the dynamism of the characters.”

He is struck, too, by the crowd scenes, all of them shot before computer-generated imagery.

“Those crowds were real. There is nothing more turbulent and dynamic than 4,000 people being in a space — you can’t recreate that by digital reproduction. It doesn’t give you the same effect.

"I think movies have lost a lot. I’m sure they’ve gained a lot too, but your belief in the photographed image has collapsed in a way.”

Those 4,000 extras were one of the reasons the filming of Michael Collins was exceptional. They queued in their throngs at the old Grangegorman Hospital in Dublin where some 80 craft workers had spent four months building the biggest film set ever seen in Ireland, complete with full-sized replicas of the facades of the GPO and the Mansion House as they were 100 years ago.

It was a big, expensive Warner Brothers production with a reported budget of $25m, and it was packed with Hollywood stars: Liam Neeson had just been Oscar-nominated for his role as Oskar Schindler in Schindler’s List and Julia Roberts was already a huge name.

“If I hadn’t got large stars, I wouldn’t have been able to make this film,” Jordan says now, recalling that it was Julia Roberts who approached him, asking to play the role of Michael Collins’s fiancée Kitty Kiernan.

“She was passionate about the project. She came to my agent. I went to meet her and she had read the history. She knew Kitty Kiernan and was really interested in the character. I am so grateful for her interest.”

Michael Collins also had another unexpected resonance. While filming was going on, the events it depicted were unfolding, in parallel, in real-life with the emerging peace process in Northern Ireland.

As Neil Jordan puts it: “There was almost a re-enactment of the same process that Collins went through — decommissioning, getting rid of violence and seeing that the IRA entered the political arena — though I think it was to the benefit of the film.”

He says the timing was probably part of the reason the film generated such vehement debate.

It remains one of the highest-grossing films here and perhaps one of the most controversial.

There were arguments about the film’s historical anomalies and, says Jordan, there were anomalies, but necessarily so.

For instance, the film seems to suggest that Eamon de Valera was directly responsible for Michael Collins’s assassination, but their proximity on the eve of the Béal na Bláth ambush was a dramatic invention.

“I can’t tell the story of the Irish war of independence, but I can tell the story of one man’s engagement with violent action and how he tried to quell the beast that had arisen and how it kind-of killed him,” he says.

When he was first asked to write a script for Michael Collins, he didn’t really identify with the real man: “I read all the biographies and I didn’t share this guy’s politics and I didn’t share this hagiographical admiration for him that so many of the writers seemed to have but, during his very short life, he was right at the centre of every piece of drama from 1916 to 1922. That’s why I thought it would be a good movie.”

And it was certainly celebrated as a good movie, even a remarkable one. In 1996, Irish Times film critic Michael Dwyer wrote: “When I first saw the film back in August, I described it as the most important film made in or about Ireland… Seeing Jordan’s riveting film for the second time last week only reinforces that view. Never before has any film spoken quite so eloquently and quite so powerfully to Irish audiences.”

It will be fascinating to see if that is still true when it is re-released next week. Its director thinks a younger generation will be engrossed.

Without wanting to discuss his own film too much, Jordan says he thinks it told the story of that time rather well.

“It portrays a middle-class, bourgeois revolution. It’s quite fascinating. They were Catholics. They were sexually innocent. They wore suits!” he says.

But Michael Collins does more than tell the story of the period between 1916 and 1922; it also tells the story of a capital city in the pre-Celtic Tiger years.

“We shot all over Dublin. We managed to create a portrait of a city that no longer exists,” Jordan says.

Ask him what Michael Collins might think of Ireland if he were alive today and he comes out with a deliciously mordant line: “He would have been very old.”

Then he warms to the subject, answering graciously and patiently questions he must have been asked several times before.

“The strange thing about Collins is that he was a very effective guerrilla leader but he was quite conservative politically. He was a Catholic, he was a nationalist and he had no truck with socialism at all, which is why I found it initially difficult to identify with the character.”

He thinks Collins would have ended Civil War politics a long time ago — “That’s what made Ireland such a tedious place up until the 1960s. I am sure he would have been more dynamic and he would have reached an accommodation with Britain far sooner.”

He imagines, too, that Ireland would have been part of the Second World War effort.

“Collins didn’t have that strange paranoia about Britain that de Valera had.”

Speaking about politics today, and the recent general election in particular, Jordan says Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael may as well come together, as the differences between them are almost “non-existent”.

There isn’t time to discuss his impressive back catalogue – even those films that directly relate to the so-called Troubles: Angel, Jordan’s directorial debut in 1982 about a musician who witnesses a paramilitary murder; The Crying Game (1992), the story of an unlikely friendship between an IRA gunman and his British soldier captive that won Jordan an Oscar for best screenplay, or Breakfast on Pluto (2005), the film adaptation of Pat McCabe’s Booker-nominated novel.

He recalls briefly the battle to get the finance to make The Crying Game:

“Making a film is an absolute joy. The problem is trying to finance the film, get the money, the actors. That is what is exhausting. I love being behind the camera. I love composing pics through the lens.”

If there has been a hiatus of late, it has certainly come to an end. As well as having a new book and a re-released film, Jordan is gearing up to make Riviera, a TV crime drama set in the south of France.

Monica Bellucci and Julia Stiles will star in the big-budget Sky Atlantic drama that is set to go into production this spring.

“It’s a story about wealth, money and corruption, a kind of film noir,” Jordan has said.

He’s looking forward to it, he says, just as our time runs out. Not to worry, with a book out, another on the way, a film on re-release and a TV series in the offing, there will be plenty of opportunities to catch up with Neil Jordan.

• Michael Collins is out now on Blu-ray, and is being re-released in cinemas next Friday. The Drowned Detective by Neil Jordan, published by Bloomsbury, is out now.