Grievances.
Neil Jordan made his first full-length movie in 1982. The movie was called Angel and starred Stephen Rea as a saxophonist who witnesses the brutal murder of his manager and a def mute girl and sets out to avenge her death. The movie was a big success for Jordan and launched his career as a film director.
The local Irish filmmakers however did not welcome the movie. The film had been financed partly by the Irish Film Board, which had just been formed, and although seven board members where suppose to be on the Irish Film Board, only three members had been appointed. One of the three was John Boorman who had just finished a film called Excalibur (1981). Neil Jordan had worked on Excalibur and made a documentary about the making of the movie. Boorman was also the director of the film company making Angel. The collaboration between the two men sparked a resentment felt by Irish filmmakers when Angel got a grant of 100 000 pounds and was the only movie to get funds from the Irish Film Board in 1981.[1]
The attitude of the independents to the Film Board’s investment in Angel, and the response by both Jordan and Boorman to the criticism of the Board’s decision, was to have a long-term negative effect on Irish film production.[2]
The controversy surrounding the financing of the film was very negative although the film proved to be a success. Neil Jordan had up to this point only been known as a short story author since his publication of Night in Tunisia and Other Stories in 1976 and had won numerous awards for his writing. Now he had entered the film industry with considerable ease, gotten financial support from the Irish Film Board and Channel 4 in England and made a full-length movie without almost any experience in filmmaking. But the controversy had much influence on the rest of his career, his next movie The Company of Wolves (1984) was made in England and he was accused of abandoning Ireland as a filmmaker, as he himself says in an interview published in the book World Cinema:
As for abandoning the Irish scene, well, I was kind of thrown out. The reason I went to England to make Company was because the reaction to my making Angel in Ireland was so vicious there, both from critics and from my peers. … I think it was really that I had never directed a film before.[3]
With the controversy of his first movie, Jordan is in a sense pushed out of the Irish film scene, getting offers to direct a movie in England. The hostile environment that had developed with the financing of his first movie essentially makes Neil Jordan an international director, his next two movies The Company of Wolves and Mona Lisa (1988) are both filmed in England and with Mona Lisa Jordan gets his first taste of real international fame, getting nominated for an Academy Award in the United States and the Golden Palm in the Cannes Film Festival.
