Happy Birthday: Neil Jordan

Neil Jordan

Born: February 25, 1950 in Sligo, Ireland

I grew up in a respectable, lower-middle-class home. Our family was quite educated; my mother was a painter, and stuff like that. And I didn’t chop up my next-door neighbour. But I remember those emotions. It was a very strange world. Ireland is very grey, and it seems like nothing has changed for centuries. The only bits of colour were in churches, with statues and gaudy religious vestments. It was a very insanely Catholic country. And, you have an educational system run by celibate men in skirts, which is bizarre in itself. But, there’s just a sweet irrationality to the whole place. – about his life growing up in Ireland

But in a strange way, the more organization and the more preparation you do, the more freedom it gives to the performances and to those things that are totally dependent on those moments when you shoot. Visual things are very complicated. I can’t improvise visual events. I can’t improvise a sense of composition. I have to compare. I have to look at the street where we are shooting on. I have to know where the light is coming from. Obviously, you would have to know where the trucks are parked and stuff like that. But what you cannot legislate for is emotion, the way emotion displays itself in a scene and that always comes from the actors. That is the way I work.

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