Neil Jordan champions loners

To watch films by Neil Jordan is to be immersed in a world of outcasts. Notably The Crying Game seems linked to Breakfast on Pluto as a study in characters on the fringe, but it’s a theme that runs through several of Jordan’s films including Interview With the Vampire, Mona Lisa, Butcher Boy, and The Good Thief.
“I’m interested in characters who drift in and out of life,” Jordan tells Free Press Houston in an exclusive phone interview. “I’m fascinated by losers, people on the edge.”
For Breakfast on Pluto (opening in Houston December 23) Jordan follows the episodic journey of transvestite Patrick Kitten Brady (Cillian Murphy) across the landscape of 1960s and 70s Ireland and London. It’s a world where terrorism and bombs are common but so are the seeds of change.
Along the way Kitten gets kicked out of school (look for source author Patrick McCabe as a teacher), hangs out with an Irish rockabilly band whose leader fronts guns for the IRA, flees to London, becomes the assistant to a stage magician, and even hangs out in the park with a Womble (Brendan Gleeson).
Wombles were an English 60s oddity, “a group of people who went about dressed like strange misshapen elves,” explains Jordan. Much of McCabe’s book has found its way into Jordan’s film. Things like Kitten’s fondness for Mitzi Gaynor, or the use of the Bobby Goldsboro song “Honey.”
Jordan cast Murphy, an actor he feels “approaches his character from the inside.” In addition to support performances from Liam Neeson, Stephen Rea, and Ian Hart, Breakfast on Pluto also features musicians like Gavin Friday, and a really perverse sneering Bryan Ferry effective as Mr. Silky String. “This was a part I originally was going to cast with a Ralph Fiennes or Jeremy Irons. Then Ferry came along. Rock and roll performers can be really good actors,” maintained Jordan.
Also known as a writer, Jordan most recently penned Shade (2004), a novel where the ghost of a woman investigates her murder. “I grew up in an Ireland without a film industry, so I’ve always considered myself a writer first,” notes Neil.
As to why it is that directors like Jordan or Stephen Frears or Alan Parker always seem to be the go-to directors Hollywood approaches when they want a film about lower middle class and poor families (Angela’s Ashes, Dirty Pretty Things) Jordan mused: “Hollywood always has been a fantasy factory, kind of an airbrushed reality.”