Author interview: Jordan’s engaging life story challenges idea of memory

When Neil Jordan was first approached to write a memoir, he wasn’t sure he could do it but started on the opening chapter about his mother 'and I thought, this is interesting, and I kept going'

Neil Jordan speaking about his new book titled ‘Amnesiac’ at the Seafront venue as part of the Dalkey Book Festival. ‘I understand more things that I’ve done myself and I understand certain obsessions that have remained with me. Picture: Conor McCabe

• Amnesiac: A Memoir
• Neil Jordan 
• Head of Zeus, €19.99/ Kindle, €7.05

Every year, when The War of Independence is commemorated, Neil Jordan hears government ministers utter a famous quote from Michael Collins. ‘Give us the future; we’ve had enough of your past.’ And he laughs at the irony.

“That is truly weird,” he says. “Michael Collins didn’t say that. I wrote it.”

We’re sitting near the seafront in Dun Laoghaire, Co Dublin, discussing Jordan’s recent memoir, Amnesiac, and I’ve just asked him if the controversy around that standout movie irritated him.

He said that it came from academics, and that he found it odd.

“Gore Vidal used to say, ‘never give up the opportunity to have sex or go on TV, and I realise that people on campuses don’t get out very much, and a movie like Michael Collins gave them a great opportunity to take to the airwaves. And believe me — they took it.”

When the publisher Neil Belton first approached Jordan asking for a memoir, he wasn’t sure he could do it.

“When you read celebrity memoirs — and I suppose I’m sort of a celebrity — it can be so boring. You read things like, ‘Then I met Liza Minelli — and then I met the Pope’.

“But I said I’d try my hand and began writing the opening chapter about my mother — and I thought, this is interesting, and I kept going. And then they said, ‘could you put in more about movies?’.”

In his memoir Neil Jordan writes of the brilliance of Cillian Murphy as Kitten in 'Breakfast on Pluto'.

So, he has. He writes of the fairytale element of in The Company of Wolves, of Cillian Murphy’s brilliance as Kitten in Breakfast on Pluto. 

He tells of John Borman’s generosity — when he made a documentary of the making of Excalibur — and how that experience taught him so much about filmmaking.

He writes of his friend, the late Sinead O’Connor whose contributions to  Michael Collins and as the Virgin Mary in The Butcher Boy made such an impact. 

He tells of a dream he had when Graham Greene appeared to comment on some of the liberties he had taken with his adaptation of The End of The Affair. 

We hear stories of Stanley Kubrick and of the meanness of Weinstein. But it never reads like a name-dropping document of self-congratulation. Jordan is too modest for that.

It is a wonderful read — part memory — part conjecture — part analysis.

“Some people say they have total recall when they put pen to paper, but I found that wasn’t the case at all.”

I wasn’t sure what was my memory, what was family rumour and what was Chinese whispers, or a photograph? 

“I realised my memories were not reliable, so I started to write about that.

Jordan has led an eventful life. Son of a school inspector he says he was a bad student. At 12 or 13 he was a brilliant classical guitarist whose teacher wanted him to attend the Julian Bream school in London.

He hated English at UCD because of the analytical approach taken to works that he responded to emotionally. 

He spent a time, homeless, in London, and was once sold for sex by a pair of hippies. And back in Dublin, life wasn’t much better.

“I was literally unemployable,” he says. “Every time I attempted to become a teacher I was fired. I’d walk into a classroom, and it would immediately erupt into chaos. 

“I applied for a part-time job at my old school, St Paul’s Raheny, and a priest who used to teach me said ‘you are the kind of person who should never be teaching in a school, ever’.”

He writes of growing up in a rough Ireland, one of feral gangs and abuse. But he doesn’t quite buy in to the public outrage over the church’s worst demeanours.

The famous quote from Michael Collins uttered by many a government minister, ‘give us the future; we’ve had enough of your past’, was actually written by Neil Jordan.

“I was taught by John McGahern,” he says. “He disappeared one day, and nobody explained anything to us. 

“John assumed that the parish priest or the headmaster had demanded his removal, but my father told me you can only be removed for a criminal conviction in gross immorality. 

“It was the parents who came to the parish priest and demanded that he go. It seems half the society, maybe more than half, were complicit with the church.”

In 1972, when Jordan and his friend Jim Sheridan produced a play about a boy in Artane, Dublin, it caused a furore, but when, later, he was asked to direct Philomena, The Secret Scripture, and The Magdalene Sisters, he refused, wondering why they weren’t written at the time.

“Retrospective outrage is kind of useless really, isn’t it?” he says.

Jordan’s writing career was stratospheric. His first book, Night in Tunisia, published in 1979, won three major awards including the prestigious and lucrative Rooney Prize for Literature.

He was already an important member of the literary elite; in his early 20s he had set up a writing co-operative to publish Irish writers such as Desmond Hogan. But life as a full-time writer did not suit his overactive brain.

I wanted to do something else. It was a time when writing was seen almost as a vocation. 

“So, when I had published Nights in Tunisia and a novel called The Past, people like Brian Friel said that the entry into movies was the ultimate disgrace. But I just liked making them.”

Along with his movies, Jordan has published 10 novels, and written many film scripts that have never been made. 

He was at a festival in Korea recently where he met producers who had all the unproduced scripts he had written.

“I couldn’t believe it. I was about to make a movie once called the Killing of Carnival Row to be turned into a TV series. 

“My version wasn’t made but they said, ‘we loved your version. Bring it to Korea’.

It strikes me that in the memoir, Jordan is attempting to get to know himself.

“Perhaps, yeah,” he says. “I’m convinced we never, really, know ourselves.” And has it helped?

“No, actually.” He pauses. “I know more things that I’ve gone through. 

“I understand more things that I’ve done myself and I understand certain obsessions that have remained with me throughout the years that I wouldn’t have been aware of.

“I never met a grandfather. Never. It’s a strange thing,” he says. “I have these mythical beings I’ve never come across and I’ve often wondered what it would be like to know them. 

“I’m now a grandparent, and kids seem to give you this totally unearned affection.”

At 74, with no thought of retiring, he is trying to make a movie of his latest novel, The Well of St Nobody. 

I’m shooting in September but I’m not sure we’ll have the budget by then, but we will make it.

He’s also hoping to film his favourite novel, The Drowned Detective, a thriller based in Budapest, Hungary, that he wrote when he was making The Borgias for TV.

Is there anything left that he yearns to do?

“I’d love to do a Disney movie — a version of Puss in Boots or something like that.” He laughs. “But its not going to happen.” 

Meanwhile, he keeps writing: Something he claims to find incredibly difficult.

“You never know what it is you are writing,” he says. “I’m writing something at the moment and I’ve no idea what it is. It may be utter nonsense. 

“And I’ve written a science fiction novel. I’m not sure if its utter folly or genius.” He pauses.

“I do like treading in an untrammelled world.” As we leave , I remark that he really does have a remarkable mind. He seems nonplussed.

“Really?” he says. “You think? I’m just me.”