Director Jordan's young heart

Jordan won an Oscar for his screenplay for The Crying Game

Irish film director Neil Jordan has told the BBC how an encounter with an alcoholic friend led him to focus on one of the major themes of his work - childhood, and the people trapped in it.

Although Jordan's films, such as The Crying Game and The End Of The Affair, usually share adult themes, there is an ongoing fascination with the early years.

Examples include Bob Hoskins' cry of "I'll never grow up" on Brighton pier at the end of Mona Lisa, or the young girl in Interview With The Vampire realising that she is stuck forever on the brink of puberty, and will never become a woman.

Meanwhile Jordan's new book, Shade, features two central characters who either cannot or will not grow up.

Jordan told BBC World Service's Masterpiece programme that he remembered an alcoholic friend of his once saying, at the age of 50, "isn't it really terrible to be an adult."

"I understand exactly what he meant," Jordan added.

"That feeling of being responsible for yourself, that feeling of being alone, of having the rational part of your life being the dominant part.

"I do understand exactly what he means. And the state of adulthood is terrible in a way - as adults, we wish we could get back to being children, and we can't."

Literary heritage

Although Ireland has an intensely rich literary heritage, Jordan is one of only a handful of Irish screenwriters and directors, and by far the most high-profile - he won a best screenplay Oscar for The Crying Game in 1992.

His first film, Angel, was released in 1982 and gave an immediate indication of Jordan's evident talents. It centres on a man who witnesses the murder of a girl he had only just met, and his subsequent descent into a psychopathic fury driven by a desire for revenge.

If you examine not what you expect to happen but what generally happens... you end up with a more unexpected thing Neil Jordan

Since then he has flitted between independent films such as The Butcher Boy and Mona Lisa, and big-budget Hollywood productions such as Interview With The Vampire.

Every so often he writes a novel as well. In fact, Jordan began his career as a novelist, but turned to filmmaking because it gave him a "sense of liberation".

"It was the one thing that no Irish author had ever done," he said.

"If you're a playwright, you've got O'Casey, you've got Synge, Yeats, Beckett. If you're a prose writer, you've got Joyce, Stevens... So it was brilliant for me to find a way of telling stories that nobody had done."

The killing that begins Angel is politically-motivated, and since then a number of his films have tackled the political situation in Jordan's home country, from the historical biopic of Michael Collins to The Crying Game, in which Stephen Rea played an IRA member.

Jordan remembers his young adulthood being about "the absence of sex, drugs and rock and roll, and the presence of politicial violence.

Unexpected twist

"When I came to make the Crying Game, there was something in the air at the time," he added.

"People who had attached themselves to certain points of view were beginning to change.

"I made that film to take a Republican terrorist - someone who does psychopathic and unconscionable things for reasons that they themselves can argue about rationally - and confront him with everything that is the opposite of himself."

The Crying Game ends with one of film history's greatest twists, as the woman Rea's character is in love with is revealed to be a man.

It showed two of Jordan's themes coming together - the love of a man for what he termed "the wrong thing" and a play on the unexpected.

Julianne Moore and Ralph Fiennes starred in The End Of The Affair

But Jordan also said that the unexpected could be positive - such as in The End Of The Affair, where Ralph Fiennes' character Bendrix bonds so strongly with the husband of the woman he is having an affair with, Henry Miles, that he eventually asks him to move in with him.

"It's often like that," Jordan said.

"If you examine not what you expect to happen but what generally happens in a story of this type - proabably what would happen - you end up with a more unexpected thing."