Neil Jordan - Breakfast on Pluto

He wrote the first draft and then I began to rewrite the second. I changed the book considerably, because for example in the novel, the boy never encounters his mother. It’s almost like a mechanism to take him on a journey. The script became about this character’s infectious goodness.

I don’t know, maybe I should finally come out [laughs]. I don’t know what’s going on, I really don’t. I like people who find the way to be themselves by becoming other people, which is probably why I like actors. A lot of directors don’t like actors, they’re afraid of them or they wish they weren’t there or they wish they were digital things. But I really like actors and the process of seeing somebody actually become somebody else is always to the part when acting begins. Sometimes that’s why I like to work with people who are not actors too. When you see that happen it’s kind of extraordinary.

No I’m not, except when it’s black comedy. This is a comedy that’s wanting to be a tragedy and a tragedy that’s trying not to be a comedy. It would be one of those deeply tragic, depressing, Irish stories if it weren’t for the insistence of the central character in turning it into a fairytale. The mother’s gone, rapist priest, a bomb blows the village apart, kills his best friend. But Patrick insists on making life into a magic thing.

Pat had those little robins in the book, but they didn’t speak. I thought, “Maybe these robins can wander around and gossip in the ether and chat to themselves. Maybe they know stuff that the main character doesn’t know.”

It wasn’t important that he was a good looking woman. It was important that he was somebody who wanted to be the character. My first question actually was, “Can anybody actually deliver this performance?” So I tested Cillian and he gave it extraordinary emotion.

I sent Liam [Neeson] the script but I didn’t think he’d do it because he does big movies now. But he read it, he loved it and said, “Look, if I can manage it, I’ll do it.” With regard to Stephen Rea’s part, I wrote that specifically with Stephen in mind. Then I rewrote it when he agreed to do it. Brendan Gleeson was great and I think he’s an actor of genius with physical comedy.

The character lived through the lyrics of popular songs. You’ve got a situation where the position of popular music in this would be part of the character and story. So it won’t be just background. I said, “Okay, I won’t do the score. I’ll go through all that music I have heard in the 70s and find out which fit the story.

If something isn’t working, I can rewrite it very quickly. It’s a great thing to be able to do because sometimes you conceive of things and they don’t work or if the scene isn’t coming to life in some way. I think of films as things that are dreamt up. I don’t think of them as things that are directed in a certain way.

I don’t think I’m good territory if I haven’t written the stuff. With regard to that, it was a script that Steven Spielberg was thinking of making himself. The story never entirely made sense. So when they asked me to direct it, we rewrote it but even at the end the story still didn’t make any sense. Right now I don’t care if it’s a big movie or a small movie, if I picture the whole thing myself.

Yeah I’ve been trying to make a movie about the Borgia family for a while; it fell apart a few years ago. It’s big and expensive.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck