Myth Making: Neil Jordan on Byzantium

Byzantium, the new movie from Neil Jordan, wasn't written by the Irish filmmaker (the scribe is Moira Buffini, adapting her own play A Vampire Story), but you'd never know from the content. It plays like the 63-year-old's greatest hits. "It was weird," Jordan says to me when I ask about Byzantium's similarities to his previous films ahead of its UK première at Glasgow Film Festival. "It was set in a small, rundown holiday town – I've done about six movies that have been set in those environments – and it seemed to have a strong sense of Interview with the Vampire in a strange way. It moved through time, as Interview with the Vampire did, and it was about storytelling."

This isn't to say Jordan is retreading the old ground of his biggest box-office success. There's plenty of originality in Byzantium, particularly when it comes to its mythology. Jordan calls it "the first historically accurate vampire movie." Instead of fangs, these bloodsuckers drain their victims using razor-sharp thumbnails that extend when they have a thirst on. And to join the vampire club you don't require to be bitten by, or drink the blood of, another vampire. Instead you have to enter an ancient hut on a remote island and murder your doppelganger, turning a nearby waterfall blood red. "Anything else is a lie," Jordan chuckles.

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“If there's a parable here it's a kind of feminist one about grabbing power and keeping it” – Neil Jordan

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One of Byzantium’s most appealing aspects is its collision of the archaic with the modern. It concerns two young women, Clara (Gemma Arterton) and Eleanor (Saoirse Ronan), on the run from a shady brotherhood of vampires (Thure Lindhardt and Sam Riley play two of the members). Half the film is a gritty noir set in the present day, where Clara, the more practical of the pair, is setting up a brothel in a dilapidated guesthouse. Eleanor, who's conflicted about the whole drinking human blood side of vampirism, meanwhile, is starting a tentative romance with Frank (Caleb Landry Jones), a terminally-ill young man to whom she reveals her and Clara's secret. The rest of the movie takes the form of operatic flashbacks to two centuries earlier, where we see Clara steal the gift of immortality from an abusive, syphilitic aristocrat (Johnny Lee Miller). The result is a ravishing hotchpotch of styles and ideas.

"I've always preferred metaphors and allegories," says Jordan when I ask about this lurid blend of fantasy and reality that characterises Byzantium, and his oeuvre in general, from cult 1984 fairy tale The Company of Wolves to his most recent film Ondine, the story of a fisherman who falls for a seal woman. "When I started making movies with Stephen Woolley we kept talking about Powell and Pressburger [the director/writer duo behind The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus and A Matter of Life and Death]. Their movies are stand alone in terms of the British movie tradition. They're colourful and they're challenging and they're very unrealistic. They were the kind of movies I was inclined to make." Jordan puts this tendency towards the fantastic down to his upbringing. “I was born in Ireland in 1950, so I grew up in a not entirely civilized country," he says, wryly, "and apart from the Catholic church there were all these rural legends and myths to feast your imagination on."

As any horror-nut knows, these plasma quaffing creatures are always metaphors for something or other, be it AIDS (The Addiction), delinquency (The Lost Boys), family (Near Dark), homosexuality (Fright Night) or sex (all the others, basically). What's the subtext in Byzantium? "If it's a metaphor for anything, it's a metaphor for survival," explains Jordan. "Clara's a prostitute, and she was a prostitute in the 18th century, and she was basically abused at the hands of a whole series of men. She robs this gift from a brotherhood of vampires – women aren't meant to take this gift, they're not allowed to be turned into vampires. So if there's a parable here it's a kind of feminist one about grabbing power and keeping it."