Cross-dressing for success

Cillian Murphy as transexual Patrick "Kitten" Brady in Breakfast on Pluto.

10 April 2012

Almost a decade on from Michael Collins and The Butcher Boy, Irish director Neil Jordan is back wrestling with the demons of his native land. And, judging by the way he looks this morning, as he glances repeatedly up to see if anyone is bringing his tea, the smart money would have to be on the demons. "This is the last time," he mutters. "I'm not going to do it again. I'm not. No."

The "It", of course, is making another film about Ireland, a country which, despite directing movies featuring Louisiana vampires, Riviera con men and (if the money finally comes together) the Borgias, the 55-year-old director finds it impossible to escape.

This latest, Breakfast on Pluto, is adapted from a novel by Patrick McCabe (author also of The Butcher Boy, which Jordan filmed in 1997) and tells the story of Patrick "Kitten" Brady, a transsexual growing up in County Cavan in the Seventies. Abandoned by his mother at birth, Kitten, upon reaching his late teens, decides to go looking for her.

Packing up his platform boots and Chanel No 5, he goes to London where he falls among whores, Wombles and an IRA active-service unit. It is a mesmerising performance by Cillian Murphy, an actor who has recently specialised in psychopaths (from Disco Pigs via Wes Craven's in-flight horror flick, Red Eye, to playing the caped crusader's nemesis, Dr Jonathan Crane, in Batman Begins).

The film also stars Stephen Rea, Brendan Gleeson and (in his acting debut) Bryan Ferry. Not to mention Liam Neeson, who is both funny and deeply touching as the provincial priest who takes a fatherly interest in Kitten.

Jordan seems genuinely pleased when I enthuse about Neeson's performance. "Isn't he wonderful?" he exclaims, the tea temporarily forgotten. "I've worked with him three times before and there's a new kind of quietness to his attitude. He's gotten better and better as he's gotten older. It's wonderful when an actor can make it look that simple."

Breakfast on Pluto has a chapter-bychapter style all its own, for which Jordan claims a rather mixed pedigree. "You remember that [girls'] magazine, Jackie?" he asks with a slightly embarrassed smile. "Well, the film's kind of a combination of that and an 18th-century picaresque novel, in which our hero travels far and wide and encounters this and that and loses his innocence. Except Kitten never loses his innocence.

"There was stuff in the book that related to other films I've done," he says. "The violence; the portrait of an Irish childhood. For me, it was like revisiting a lot of territory that I'd been to before, but with a different perspective. What I most liked about it was that here was a character who had no questions about who he was. Normally, in these kinds of stories, it's all about discovering your sexuality. It's about the passage from innocence to experience. But this guy just has a complete acceptance of who he is."

Breakfast on Pluto may be very accepting of sexual difference, innocence, priests who have difficulty with celibacy, even sex for money (Kitten, who loves to tell stories, finds a hilarious home-from-home in a Soho peepshow). But it also confronts the Irish national herd of sacred cows. "One of the reasons I wanted to make it is because it had a maturity of attitude coupled with a particular irreverence towards a lot of positions that people hold dear," says Jordan. Nevertheless, he hesitated long and hard before going for it.

"I finished the script about four years ago, and I tested Cillian then. He gave this extraordinary performance and he was extremely anxious to do it. He kept saying, 'When are we going to do this film?' But I was so unwilling to go back to dealing with issues of political violence."

Despite its intergalactic title (taken from a song by Don Partridge) and an extended side trip to London, Breakfast on Pluto is as firmly rooted in rural Ireland as Synge's Playboy of the Western World. Indeed, what Synge did for Irish theatre, Jordan could be said to have done for its cinema. For 15 years from 1982, when he all but created the Irish film industry with Angel, there was a new Jordan film every two years. And, every two years, the bar was raised.

There was the insanely ambitious Company of Wolves, which began his collaboration with Stephen Woolley and Nik Powell of Palace Pictures, a company which did for the moribund British film industry what Angel had done for Ireland. There was Mona Lisa, which won Bob Hoskins a Best Actor award in Cannes. There was The Crying Game, possibly the best film to come out of these islands in the Nineties, which won Jordan a Best Screenplay Oscar but came too late to save Palace from bailiffs.

And there was the Hollywood blockbuster Interview with the Vampire, starring Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt and a 12 year-old Kirsten Dunst - a cast mere money could not have bought. Then things started to sputter until, in 2002, Jordan seeme confirm everyon suspicions by announcing he was giving up making films for a couple of years to concentrate on his writing. Had the prolific Jordan finally run dry?

Well, on the basis of Breakfast on Pluto, no. The new film is right up there with Mona Lisa and The Crying Game but with a better soundtrack. Kitten finally finds his mother to the strains of Van Morrison's Madame George, the most heart-stoppingly beautiful song of the era.

There is a lot of other music from Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep to Zadok the Priest, much of it costing an arm and a leg in music clearances. Not Madame George, though. "I mean, that's an iconic song," marvels Jordan. "If you used it in a Levi's ad, you'd get two million, wouldn't you? But Van gave it to us astonishingly cheap."

Now that he's made Breakfast on Pluto, Jordan reckons this is the last time he is going to have to tackle the subject of political violence. "I think it's over now," he says, admitting that the film has added resonance in an era when terrorism is renascent but the IRA is standing down.

"It's almost like the so-called men of violence got scared. They saw men of supreme violence who were far better at it, far more uncompromising, than they were." He should know, he says: it was his generation who were recruited when they were still in their teens.

"I always think they get these characters wrong in movies. They always cast guys like Gerard McSorley, you know? Kind of grey bearded men who speak in a Nordie accent. But, actually, they were all young men in bell-bottoms. In 1972, Gerry Adams and Martin McGuiness would have been in their early twenties. They would have been the age of the characters in the film. I know a lot of those people now; they're all middle-aged and they're all fucked up."

Try as he may, Kitten cannot escape the men of violence. One of his best friends, Irwin, joins the IRA. Another is blown up by a bomb. Kitten himself is suspected of being a bomber and is beaten up by the Special Branch. But what makes Breakfast on Pluto Jordan's most upbeat film is that Kitten's innocence wins through, right from the moment, early in the film, when he discovers a cache of guns in a caravan.

After a moment's reflection, Kitten hauls the guns out of their hiding place and throws them into the sea. It seems, I suggest, like an impulsive, spur-ofthemoment action, whose consequences Kitten doesn't really foresee. "Oh, I think he does," Jordan vehemently disagrees. "That's why I love the character. I mean, he doesn't run from the caravan, does he? He knows what guns are for. And he knows you shouldn't kill people."

"Simple as that?" I ask. "Simple as that, really," says Jordan, with the certainty of someone who has spent a quarter of a century weighing all the issues only to come to a staggeringly simple conclusion - and, finally, get his tea. "After all, it's not a nice thing to do."

Breakfast on Pluto is released on 13 January.

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