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There's no point in making a film out of a great book. The book's already great. What's the point?

Neil Jordan

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Neil Jordan
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: February 25
Film Director
Film Producer
Novelist
Screenwriter
Showrunner
Television Producer
Writer
Book
Great
Already
Point
Making
Film

More quotes by Neil Jordan

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I had made a decision, although I hardly knew it yet. It's often that way with decisions, they're made in some hidden part of us and the awareness secretes itself slowly into that conscious part of us that imagines it decides.
Neil Jordan
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It's the same thing in a way, although writing a book is a very solitary thing.
Neil Jordan
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I've also worked hard portraying an Ireland which is fast disappearing. Ireland was a very depressed and difficult place in the 1980s, and I've tried to include that in the script. I worked really hard to find the heart of the book.
Neil Jordan
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You've got to play what people think you are, rather than what you are. You have to have a sense of what you are as you're playing what people think you are.
Neil Jordan
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Initially with The Butcher Boy, there was this kid growing up in this strange, weird environment that I remember from when I was a kid. And Patrick's vision was so complete there.
Neil Jordan
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But everyone gets burnt, don't they? Certain things are outside of your control. I suppose the only thing you can learn as a director is to not put yourself into situations where it can get outside of your control. And that's what happened.
Neil Jordan
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The truth is that seals look more like dogs. And I'm surrounded by seals because I live by the sea. They're odd bloody creatures. Not fish, they don't have gills, they should have legs, but they don't. They're the weirdest things, you know?
Neil Jordan
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Well, if you're talking about the current climate, there's a lack of content in American film because I think people are deeply confused about their emotions, and they don't regret certain aspects of their own foreign policy.
Neil Jordan
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If movies have to satisfy every possible quadrant before they're even made, they're dull. You only get great things when people overreach themselves.
Neil Jordan
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I can't do a film if I don't start with the writing.
Neil Jordan
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In Dreams...well, I was slightly overcompensating with that. I was a bit like a director for hire, so maybe I was putting too much imagery that was familiar to me into it.
Neil Jordan
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The Company of Wolves is about how society teaches young women to look at themselves, and what to be afraid of. It's about a girl learning that the world of sensuality and the unknown is not to be feared, that it's worth getting your teeth into.
Neil Jordan
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My conception of it was that in a normal film you have a story with different movements that program, develop, go a little bit off the trunk, come back, and end.
Neil Jordan
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I've had three novels published, and I was working a little bit in theater in Ireland. I wrote one film script just to see what it would turn out like.
Neil Jordan
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The most difficult thing is the organization of people and the expression of your intentions. It's very easy to have a picture in your head and to imagine that you've told everybody about what you need.
Neil Jordan
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For me, the filmmaking has to be about the dramaturgy.
Neil Jordan
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It is extremely difficult to get movies that cost more than $40 million to be made these days.
Neil Jordan
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Never make a promise - you may have to keep it.
Neil Jordan
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The Company of Wolves doesn't belong in any category, so it's difficult to prepare an audience for it. It's not a horror film, it's not a fantasy film, it's not a children's film - so what is it?
Neil Jordan
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I took two years away from making films to write a novel.
Neil Jordan