Neil Jordan

Neil Jordan ( born February 25, 1950 County Sligo, Ireland) is an Irish film director, screenwriter, producer and writer. His films, in which he tries to unravel the dark side of the human psyche, are known for their political and emotional character.

Career

Neil Jordan began after his studies of English Literature and History at University College Dublin, first as a writer. Its award-winning first novel Nights in Tunisia (1976 ) he published in the co-founders of Irish Writers Cooperative and used it later as a template for the film Miracle - A mysterious summer. Also in the film he started as a screenwriter with Miracles & Miss Langan ( 1979, TV) and Traveller ( 1981)

Movies

Neil Jordan's first feature film for which he himself wrote the screenplay, was in 1982 Angel. After this success, other films that helped him to international fame emerged. The Company of Wolves 1984 is far more than an insider tip (and no children's film ).

His film Mona Lisa with Michael Caine and Bob Hoskins stood at the International Film Festival of Cannes 1986 in the competition for the Palme d'Or, with its lead actor Hoskins won the Best Actor Award. For his ambiguous thriller The Crying Game Stephen Rea Jordan won the 1993 Oscar for Best Screenplay. He was nominated for Best Director.

The film Michael Collins, acting by Michael Collins and Eamon de Valera was almost able to return to this success. A year later, Jordan was awarded at the 1998 Berlinale for the literary adaptation The Butcher Boy ( based on the novel by Patrick McCabe ) Best Director Silver Bear. The film itself was in competition for the Golden Bear. The Brave One 2007 made ​​it number one in the U.S. box office.

Literary works

Jordan began his career as a writer of short stories, which appeared in 1976 collected in the band Nights in Tunisia. Jordan's books are movies sometimes not dissimilar. In particular, in the novel The Past ( 1980) he stands in almost impressionistic style with strong cinematic images influenced the cultural and political development of Ireland in the first half of the 20th century. In the 15 years later appeared Sunrise with Seamonster the subject is in a similar manner in the spotlight, but the perspective changes. The in The Past comprehensible, albeit contradictory inner development in Ireland is broken here. The Spanish Civil War, it is the turning point at which both cleave generations and political sentiments and human behaviors. The role of the past in the present as well as the relationship between reality and unreality play a role again and again. This is particularly in The Dream of a Beast (1983 ) for validity, a thematically reminiscent of Kafka's metamorphosis novel in which the ( gradual ) physical transformation of a "normal family man " in a not precisely defining the human-animal hybrid creatures on issues of existence, reality, perception, transience and mutability leads.

2011 Jordan received the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award and the Irish Book Award (Irish novel of the year ) for his novel Mistaken.

Filmography (selection)

• 2003: Intermission - Director: John Crowley
• 2003: The Actors - Director: Conor McPherson

• 2008: A Film with Me in It

• Nights in Tunisia. Narratives. Co -op Books 1976, dt seduction. Goldmann, 1996.
• The Past. Novel. Jonathan Cape, 1980.
• The Dream of a Beast. Novel. Jonathan Cape, 1983.
• Sunrise with Sea Monster. Novel. Jonathan Cape in 1995, dt Nocturno. Goldmann, 1995.
• Shade. Novel. John Murray 2005, dt shadows. Berlin Verlag, Berlin, 2005.
• Mistaken. Novel. John Murray, 2011.