Marlowe Director Neil Jordan On Colorful Noir And His Past Horror Films [Exclusive Interview]

Neil Jordan is a prolific filmmaker. His work has spanned many genres over the course of his career, and he's not a writer-director whose movies can be placed in a box. Where to even begin listing his credits? There's "The Crying Game," "Interview with a Vampire," "Michael Collins," "Mona Lisa," and a movie we spent a good deal of time asking him about, "The Company of Wolves." Now, Jordan returns to the world of noir with "Marlowe." 

The filmmaker reunites with Liam Neeson for a Philip Marlowe picture, about the same literary detective character Humphrey Bogart played in "The Big Sleep" and Elliott Gould in "The Long Goodbye." This story is not based on one of Raymond Chandler's hardboiled novels, but Jordan does capture the vibe that defines the character at the heart of those stories. As Jordan told us, he wanted to make a colorful noir and even went as far to use "Blade Runner" as an influence.

Note: This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.

Hello, young man. Very young, you are. Is it Slashfilm?

[Laughs] Yes.

Is it a slightly horror-orientated kind of publication or site, is it?

It is not. If it was, I would just talk to you all about "The Company of Wolves."

Okay. We can talk about that. Don't worry, we can talk about it.

We'll definitely get to it. Starting with "Marlowe," was there anything in particular about Raymond Chandler's style you wanted to capture?

Well, I just wanted to see the character live again. Liam brought me the script, basically. I wasn't there at the genesis of it. I didn't buy the rights to the book and hire William Monahan. It was sent to me. William Monahan had written this great script, Liam Neeson was attached, and I really wanted to see what Liam could do with this character. I really did. Okay, so it's that template they call noir, that French word. You know that French word? I said, "Okay, I want to make a noir movie that is absolutely drenched in color and in dazzling sunlight." Obviously, people would say, "Well, why don't you make it in black and white?" I said, "I don't want to do that if that's what you're talking about. I just really want to make these images drenched with color, reds and yellows and kind of the heat of Los Angeles." We shot in Barcelona, so we're talking about the heat of Barcelona, but a similar thing.

I really wanted to see what Liam would do with this character, because I've done three or four movies with Liam in the past, and he's been firing weapons and using his fists, which he's very, very good at. I wanted to see what he would do with the slow contemplative burn, right? That's why I made the movie.

Was filming him across from Jessica Lange, just smoking and laughing, as enjoyable as it looks?

It was kind of thrilling, actually. I mean, William Monahan had written these large scenes, huge, dialogue-heavy scenes, and I normally write my own stuff or I collaborate. But in this case, it was Bill's vision, Bill's script that I wanted to realize. It was an unusual position for me to be in as a director, I'm saying.

So those scenes with Jessica and Liam, there's huge swathes of dialogue, and you have to find a way to get the camera to dance with them in a strange way, even though they're both sitting down, really. Jessica Lange is an extraordinary actress. Liam and Jessica had worked together, hadn't they? In "Rob Roy," I think it was.

Jessica has got this extraordinary quality, that it's almost like when she's delivering these things, it's almost like she's forgetting her lines. I'm sitting there listening, and I'm saying, "Has she forgotten the line?" But something's going on behind the face and behind the character, and then the line comes out. She's remarkable. Really remarkable. It's thrilling for me to see her on the screen again.

Were there any differences working with Liam Neeson now compared to when you collaborated in the past? 

Well, he is older, for one thing. It was very important that we flesh out this character in a way that Liam Neeson can play. I mean, the script was based on the book by John Banville, who took that Raymond Chandler character and did different things with it. He gave him an Irish background. Apparently, Chandler himself was born in Wexford. At a certain point, working with Liam, I said, "Okay, we're going to give you the same background as the book has," which I think released something in him because Liam has an Irish accent. I said, "Okay, you fought with the Irish rifles in the First World War, you know the west of Ireland." I think it allowed him the freedom to inhabit that character.

There's a scene with Alan Cumming and Neeson in a car, in which Cumming says he's made out of tarantulas. Like you said earlier, it's packed with color and almost sensory overload.

Do you know how that was done?

I don't. 

It was a nightmare, actually. You know those circular LED screens? They used them in "The Mandalorian" and all that sort of stuff. So we had to get a whole series of backgrounds of Los Angeles streets of that period, and it was almost impossible. I was discussing it with the light and cameraman, Xavi Giménez, and the visual effects guy, a guy called Àlex [Villagrasa] from Barcelona, kind of a genius. I was saying, "How are we going to manage this? How are we going to do it?" Because we pulled from whatever source we could, various backgrounds that we could use even in a green-screen way. Eventually, this young genius said, "I will build them."

I said, "What?" He said, "I'm going to make them. Yeah, I'll make them for you. I'll design them. I'll build 3D images on the computer. I will give you the entire kind of background that you need for these two characters to drive through."

So we have a circular LED screen, and he's built these backgrounds. And we started shooting, and it was almost mesmerizing. Suddenly the entire city is passing by these windows. It was pretty cool, actually. I don't know how else I would've done it, but it's cool.

Barcelona really adds that heightened effect, too, kind of like Chandler's L.A.

First of all, it gave me the possibility to actually even deliver the movie, because Los Angeles in 1938 doesn't exist anymore. Are you from L.A.?

I've lived there for many years now.

Okay. Well, you could shoot around Hancock Park maybe, but you couldn't realize this movie in Los Angeles. I mean, when they shoot for L.A. in the '30s and '40s, they often go to Sacramento, but it's totally flat. Los Angeles is the city of canyons and hills and all that sort of stuff. So, it was a real problem.

I spent a lot of time in Barcelona. I said to the producers, "Let's just look at the hills around Barcelona and the environments around Barcelona." We began to look at them with the designer, and suddenly it became apparent we could make the entire movie here. It would be almost be like a science fiction version of what the city could have been at the period.

I said to the light and cameraman, "Look, this is an alternative reality of this possible L.A." And he's going, "Okay, what kind of template do we have?" I said, "Well, let's have a look at 'Blade Runner.'" So we looked at bits of "Blade Runner." We dragged in those neon elements and stuff like that. Piece by piece, we eventually arrived at our own version of L.A., which suited the movie perfectly, I thought.

I would not have expected "Blade Runner" to be an influence on this movie.

He threaded little bits, little threads of kind of neon through things and all that sort of stuff. I wanted to make a noir-ish movie that was drenched in color, that was full of color. Sounds like a total contradiction in terms, but that's what I wanted to do.

Hey, Robert Altman did it with this character.

He did, didn't he? He did, yeah. He shot it in Los Angeles, what, in 1974 or '75? Yeah, but it's cool. Yeah, it's good.

When you make a Philip Marlowe movie, do you revisit the past films?

Of course I looked at Howard Hawks' "The Big Sleep," and I looked at Edward Dmytryk's "Murder, My Sweet." I looked at the Mitchum version. I can't remember who directed that. I know it was designed by Dick Sylbert, and actually, it's a movie where the design actually is the movie — the design and Mitchum's performance.

Yeah, I did look at them, but I wanted to make something new, something quite new, because it was a new version of a Chandler novel, and it was a new version of the character.

Have you seen Neeson's Mitchum impression? It's great.

No, I know. When he wore the three-piece suits and he came on set for the first time, he said, "Neil, I'm thinking of doing Mitchum's walk when he starts striding." I said, "No, Liam, do not do that. I want your version of this character. I don't want your version of Robert Mitchum. I want your version of Philip Marlowe."

When did you first meet Liam Neeson?

I know when I met Liam for the first time. Do you remember that movie, "Excalibur"? I wrote part of that, but I wasn't credited. I didn't get credit for it. I was a friend of [director] John Boorman's at the time, and I did a doc. He had me around the set, and I made a documentary on making the movie. And that was the first time I came across Liam Neeson.

That was basically your film school, right? Great movie, by the way.

It was a great movie, wasn't it? Yeah, I couldn't afford to go to film school. I'm Irish. They didn't make movies in Ireland at the time. I was a writer, John read my work, and he asked me to write a script with him which I did, which he could never get going. It was called "Broken Dreams." And then John said, "Look, I'm doing this movie called 'Excalibur.' Would you go through the script with me?" So we began to go through the last draft of the script with John, and I think it was a 300-page script. I began doing some editing, some writing on it.

And then "Star Wars" came out, and I saw "Star Wars." I said, "John, John, we can get this all down to an absolutely workable nut." And he says, "No, I'm off to shoot the movie now." I was going, "You can't, you can't, you can't! We haven't finished yet." But he did.

I think John really wanted me around to bounce ideas off, so he proposed that I make a documentary on the making of the film, which I did. And that's the only reason I ever learned about filmmaking. I never wanted to make a movie. I showed John that documentary recently. John is now 90, and he's got movement issues and stuff like that.

So I rented a little cinema in Dublin, and I showed John that documentary, which he'd never actually seen. He was just incredibly moved by it. He was kind of crying. It was a very moving experience, actually.

That is very lovely. I'm going to circle back to "The Company of Wolves."

Sure.

That is a beautiful movie. Such a vision. It's a broad question, but where did that come from? Just the colors in that movie are so lavish.

Oh, that was the weirdest movie. That was the weirdest film you can imagine. I mean, [writer] Angela Carter was somebody I knew. Angela sent me a short version of a little radio play she'd written on a short story, and I read it. She wanted to make a movie of it. It was too short. But she had a book called "The Bloody Chamber," which is her version of traditional fairy tales turned on their heads with a very savage and neo-feminist kind of spin on everything.

I said to Angela, "Look, if we construct this Russian doll kind of template for a movie...” — within the film, somebody's telling a story, and within that story, somebody else tells a story, that kind of thing — I said, "Maybe we'll be able to combine a lot of your other fairy tales in the script or in this thing." Strange thing to say.

Anyway, I went over and began to work on it, and we came up with a script called "The Company of Wolves," which is wonderful. The grandmother was a storyteller, and she weaved in and out of all these fairytales and stuff like that. It was an insane script. Stephen Woolley, who wanted to make his first movie as a producer, managed somehow to get the money to make it.

Those werewolf transformations hold up beautifully.

They all had to be done for real. There was no CGI available to us. There was latex and people pulling latex and latex constructions, and a ridiculous amount of people doing the puppetry behind what the camera sees. But I had a wonderful designer, Anton Furst, who went on to win an Oscar for "Batman" with Tim Burton and all that sort of stuff. We built this imaginary forest and this imaginary kind of village in this forest, and we somehow managed to get the money to make the movie, and people let us make this crazy movie.

It's insane.

It's hard to imagine it would happen these days, but maybe it would. All of the inventive stuff at the moment seems to happen in horror, doesn't it? Ari Aster, and the really interesting movies that are coming out generally belong to the zone of fantasy and horror these days, don't they? It's where directors can let their imaginations go insane, as I did in that film.

Are you working on any horror movies at the moment?

Me? I'm always working on a horror movie. I have a ghost story. I wrote a novel called "The Drowned Detective," and I'm working on it as we speak. Actually, it's sitting beside me here. I kind of want to make the best ghost story ever made, because I never really believe in ghost stories, know what I mean? I want to create something that actually is so believable that you can't escape it. Yeah, I'd love to do it.

I hope we see it. You've said before you can capture a side of an actor on film they didn't even know existed. Say for Bob Hoskins in "Mona Lisa," what new side of him did you want to show?

Basically, I had written the script for "Mona Lisa," and I wrote it with another writer called David Leland. It was rather harsh and savage. David had one sense of what this story could be. I met Bob Hoskins and I showed him the script, and suddenly, I saw a totally different character. I saw this guy with this huge heart, with this great capacity for violence, but actually this huge emotional kind of thing.

I rewrote the script entirely for Bob, basically. I met with him, went off for two weeks, came back with a different script, gave it to him, said, "What do you think now?" And he loved it. I really wanted that movie to be about a man who generally didn't understand women, and that's what Bob played. It was lovely to do.

Has that happened often in your career where you're writing something and then you meet an actor and then you see a character very differently?

All the time, yeah. That's what I love to do. I mean, that's what I do. I don't rehearse. I know most directors rehearse, and some of them put out chalk on the floor and all that sort of stuff. I don't do that. I get actors to read what I've written and then I see, okay, I can do something better here, or I can do something different here. I see them inhabit something and I rewrite it very quickly and that kind of thing. I did that movie with Isabelle Huppert. What was it called? "Greta"?

Yeah, that's a fun one.

That kind of process was really at the heart of what we did. I use rehearsal to rewrite, basically. And when I do rewrite, it's generally around actors and what actors are doing or what they're not doing or what they should be doing.

You famously made a very bold choice in casting Tom Cruise in "Interview with a Vampire." You made his charisma frightening.

I saw exactly that.

That's why you cast him?

Well, it's an icy kind of beauty, an icy control and beauty. I also saw, I suppose, that Tom's life — because he was the biggest star in the world at the time — he has to retreat to the shadows because he can't expose himself too much. Do you understand what I mean? I saw kind of a parallel between the life of a vampire and the life of a very, very big star, let's put it that way. Tom had the same instincts as myself, and everybody said he was miscast, but he proved them wrong, didn't he? He did.

"Marlowe" is now playing in theaters.