Born in County Sligo in 1950, director and writer Neil Jordan studied Irish History and English at University College Dublin. His first book, Night in Tunisia, won a Somerset Maugham award and the Guardian fiction prize in 1979; he has published seven novels. His films include The Crying Game (1992), Interview with the Vampire (1994) and The End of the Affair (1999); he created the TV series The Borgias (2011-2013). His new film, Greta, starring Isabelle Huppert and Chloë Grace Moretz, is out now.
1. Film
Transit (dir Christian Petzold, 2018)
I found this absolutely fascinating. It’s based on a story set sometime during the second world war, but the director seamlessly transposed it to contemporary Paris and Marseilles. Characters that would have been Gestapo were played by the kind of policemen you see in France now, with bulletproof vests and all that. It’s about a guy who’s on the run, and Jewish figures desperate to escape the city. It’s like we almost exist in a parallel, paranoid universe at the beginnings of a global conflict that’s not yet happened.
2. Novel
This is about a sexual encounter between a young woman and an older writer, based on a relationship the author had with Philip Roth. It’s one of these beautifully fractured narratives where a female voice expresses what it probably shouldn’t: I do love when people expose parts of themselves they should not; this was a triumphant exhibition of that. It was interesting to see that kind of inappropriate encounter described from a woman’s point of view. And there’s a wonderful second part of the novel that involves an Iraqi immigrant.
3. Play
Cyprus Avenue, Abbey theatre, Dublin
This is a play by David Ireland, written from the perspective of somebody from what would euphemistically be called the unionist community in Belfast. It stars my friend Stephen Rea as a loyalist, and he gets this weird obsession that his newborn grandchild is Gerry Adams. I saw it in Dublin; it was extraordinary – incredibly brave and a great examination of a paranoid mindset. There’s a wonderful rant he gives about how the entire global culture has embraced this ersatz idea of Irishness, and he is wondering why loyalist culture can’t do the same for itself.
4. Music
Sonny Clark
I’ve been listening to Sonny Clark a lot at the moment – I like to listen to music in my office, in front of my computer. He was a bebop piano player who died at the age of 31, and he had this beautiful sense of delayed tempo. My daughter plays the piano – she put me on to him. I really like Softly As in a Morning Sunrise from Sonny Clark Trio [1957] – I love the way he plays the piano, and the way he’s got loads of laid-back beats going on in it.
5. Art
Black models: from Géricault to Matisse, Musée d’Orsay, Paris
I’ve just come back from Paris, where I saw this. They’ve taken iconic post-impressionist works, like Manet’s painting Olympia, or Cezanne, where there were previously unnamed black figures in the background. It tracks down the real people, and they’ve recategorised each work. The whole exhibition is a very well researched and documented attempt to give names to these figures who appear as shadows in works of the 19th and 20th century. It’s really rather wonderful, and it will probably come to London.
6. TV
Maniac (Netflix)
I like Maniac a lot. It stars Emma Stone and Jonah Hill, and it’s about two people who are undergoing some kind of weird medical experiment that expands their consciousness, allowing them to deal with their traumas. They then find something like a romantic engagement between each other, but it is an absolutely insane sci-fi thing that is just perched on the edge of the present. I like the outlandishness of it. I thought it was a lot of fun and I really enjoyed it – I wish I had written it myself.