Neil Jordan discusses his new film "Ondine"

It just came together, I was in Hollywood when the writer’s strike happened and, like a lot of directors, writer/directors, one has to stop working for a while and I went back to Ireland. I had this image of this fisherman pulling this girl out of the water in his net and thought that this was a really captivating thing that hadn’t been seen before. And if this started a story, where would it go? You know, so. And I began to read all these different legends, you know every culture has its different legends of sea creatures and I suppose the classical is Hans Christian Anderson’s “The Little Mermaid.” But, you know, the Irish version is of a woman who is a seal who throws off her seal coat, comes on land and falls in love with whoever sees her first, you know, a fisherman. And, uh, I decided to play with those kinds of ideas and the script developed into what it is, really. And from that I wrote quite quickly. Really I thought, ok if this story can be about people who lead very, very tough kind of, lives, who welcome this fantasy into their life because they kind of need it in some way because they find out that it has no basis in myth or fantasy and insist on life turning into a fantasy itself. This film basically followed the character, this guy, and I always imagined that he couldn’t read, you know? But never told anyone about it and his daughter is slightly more educated than he is and so there’s a certain naivety to the character, he’s an outsider for reasons, like his alcoholism and his background. I think character is the center, generally, of a good story and always of a good performance, so maybe the performances that come out in my movies are because, perhaps, I’m looking around at the writing and I really write scenes that are, for example, Alison is playing these roles that if certain things don’t turn out as I thought they would, would I rapidly rewrite that for their specific personalities, for their instincts, for their dynamic. For a movie like this, we just needed about twelve and a half million dollars, which is what we got and it’s the best of all possible worlds. It’s because you’re totally left…it’s also kind of terrifying because you’re, I suppose in the studio system, there’s constantly people looking over your shoulder, and giving you notes from executives. And I suppose you do feel you’re a part of some sort of net. Whereas with this, it’s almost like you’re walking a tight rope on your own, really. If the movie stands or fails, it’s what you’ve written and what you’ve imagined, so it’s a lovely thing to do, a little bit scary too…I think the best thing is to know nothing, really. I really do, you know. I mean, I didn’t go to film school, I read as much as I could, I made a little documentary on a movie John Boorman made called “Excalibur,” and so that taught me something. But I think you often find with filmmakers is that their first few movies offer a freshness, that they’re gonna lose as they learn how the business works and I think the problem is often to find that freshness again. So, I think naivety and lack of training is kind of a gift, that you don’t realize that because when I made my first few movies, you know, all I shot was what I wanted to see and that was it, really. And I suppose they kind of have a naivety and a cragginess and a freshness that sometimes you spend the rest of your time trying to recover. Well, I mean there are two kinds of filmmakers, aren’t there? The kind of filmmaker who has the same kind of landscape their whole lives, really. And there’s a kind of filmmaker who actually, you know, likes to do, with each film that comes, each new movie they make, they might do something different that they haven’t done before and that I am, I suppose. I mean, often I choose I project because I’ve actually never done this kind of thing before. Like, for example with “Ondine,” I’ve never done something as, uh, terribly simple as this, really. And, uh, something that just depends on landscape and a camera and the emotions of several actors, really, to kind of tell the story or to create the fantasy that was necessary for the film, you know. So, I mean, I do like to, kind of, do and I often choose projects because they’re precisely things that I haven’t done before and there’s a landscape there, a certain set of colors that I want to explore.