Neil Jordan Q&A

The director discusses the current Time Out film of the week, 'Breakfast on Pluto'.

Jan 11 2006

The director of 'Mona Lisa', 'The Crying Game' and 'The End of the Affair' has taken familiar elements from earlier films – cross-dressing, the Troubles, the sex industry – and fed them into 'Breakfast on Pluto', an imaginative adaptation of fellow Irishman Patrick McCabe's novel about a dreamy young transvestite, Kitten (played by Cillian Murphy), who travels from Ireland to London at the height of glam rock. We spoke to Neil Jordan about his second adaptation of a McCabe novel after 'The Butcher Boy'.

What grabbed you about Patrick McCabe's novel?

It's an extraordinary amalgam of things. The book is quite different from the movie, but it has the same combination of violence and savagery and glam culture and music. I particularly liked the central character of Kitten. I think he's amazing – the fact that he's a young man in '70s Ireland for whom sexuality is not even an issue.

He doesn't once struggle with the fact that he's gay and wears women's clothes.

It's terribly refreshing. It's not a movie about a guy trying to realise that he's attracted to his own sex, or somebody discovering that there's a woman inside him, or any of these things… There aren't many people like that; it's all totally there for him from the age of four.

Why the 1970s?

It's the period the book happened in. It couldn't have happened in Joe Strummer's London, for example, as there wouldn't have been the same glam thing, the same androgynous thing. I was 20 in that period, and I remember it clearly. I moved from Dublin to London and was homeless – not homeless-homeless but, you know, new to the city – and London was incredibly glamorous then, and it was comforting for an Irish person because there was nothing back home. It was oddly welcoming. I was able to plunder my own memories for the film.

What did you tell Cillian Murphy about playing his character, Kitten?

I didn't want him to be camp. I didn't want it to be 'La Cage aux Folles'.

The film opens with digital birds talking to each other. It's a strong symbol of the style of storytelling you seem to be going for – a marriage of fantasy and realism.

The little robins were in the book too, but they didn't act like a Greek chorus there. The book was so unusual that when I began working on the script myself I just took the attitude: why not? Usually with movies, first you ask: why?

We see the IRA at work, but this couldn't be a less political film.

It's not about the Troubles at all. But those events would be the experience of most Irish people at the time. They'd be moving on with their lives and now and then there'd be these eruptions of violence that didn't make sense. They'd perhaps know one or two people who were involved in that stuff. It would be a grotesque intrusion into everyday life.

Kitten couldn't be less politicised. Yet the Troubles follow him.

Yeah, as an Irish person it was everywhere back then. I remember I was in the Royal Albert Hall years ago, where a girlfriend of mine was singing. I left my bag under my seat when I went to see her backstage. When I came back, there were about 35 secret service men who jumped on me. They had my bag on Kensington Gore and were about to blow it up.

The film has opened in America. Have the reactions been different there?

I haven't a clue; it hasn't opened here yet. But in America at the moment, it's a bit like Britain under Thatcher. In the '80s, you had people like myself and Stephen Frears and Ken Loach, and every movie we made was regarded as a searing indictment of Thatcherite Britain whether it was that or not. It's rather similar in America at the moment.

So you never made a searing indictment…

…of Thatcherite Britain? No! Because I was never from Thatcherite Britain. I didn't like Thatcherite Britain; I liked Britain before then. It was one of those odd things.

'Breakfast on Pluto' opens on Friday.

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