Entertainment
Neil Jordan: ‘I could have stayed in Hollywood and made Batman 3 but I came back here to make Michael Collins instead’
The director’s new memoir gives a raw insight into his life and career, from sleeping rough in London to Julia Roberts asking him to cast her. Here he talks about his pivot from literature to movies, and reflects on his love-hate relationship with LA’s film industry
Irish film director and screenwriter Neil Jordan on Killiney Hill, Dublin. Photo: Frank McGrath
The first time Neil Jordan moved to London as a young man, he was forced to sleep rough on the streets, in a park opposite Euston Station. He eventually found a job walking down Oxford Street wearing an advertising sandwich board. It was on a King’s Cross station platform that he encountered a couple of Scottish hippies who told him of a crash pad at the end of the Tube’s Northern Line. Soon, he is joined by an “imposing” Turkish man in a suit, who leads Jordan into the sitting room, to a sofabed. Dressed in a silk robe, the man lifts the duvet of the bed and falls in next to Jordan, surprised that he is still fully dressed. “Irish boys can make quite a bit of money round Piccadilly,” the man tells Jordan.
“How extraordinary, you think,” Jordan writes to his younger self in his memoir Amnesiac. “You’ve been sold.” When Jordan tells the Turkish man that this is, in fact, a big misunderstanding and no money has actually changed hands, Jordan leaves the house and the tearful, imposing man behind, wondering how many boys that Scottish couple has delivered to clients. He goes back to warming his hands on the fire in Euston Green.
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