Boxoffice-November.1999

Sneak Preview
HERE COMES
MR. JORDAN
Neil Jordan Directs an "Affair" to Remember
ii
1
wouldn't call myself a good fisherman.
I can see them out there, but I
haven't caught them."
When the phone rang, Neil Jordan had
been fishing from the grounds of his new
home, right on Bantry Bay in County
Cork, Ireland. Like the salmon he was
seeking, he sounded as though he'd have
felt happier to not be on the line, but nevertheless
discussed his upcoming movie
"The End of the Affair" with polite caution.
"What's easy is making films I relate to.
I suppose what comes less easily for me is
the public aspect of that: Selling is what I
have most difficulty with," says the 49-
year-old director, admitting that interviews
are not his favorite sport.
"The End of the Affair," written and
directed by Jordan and produced by his
longtime co-hort Stephen Woolley, opens
in December through Columbia Pictures.
The twelfth movie Jordan has directed, it is
based on a novel by Graham Greene, an
author who was also reluctant about many
things, including having his books turned
sive hate."
Jordan agrees with that,
explaining he wanted to adapt
the novel to the screen because
"I thought it was just a wonder-
Julianne Moore and Ralph Fiennes before
ful
the end
story
of the
about an extraordinary
sexual obsession trans-
"Affair.
into movies, although, ironically, he was formed into some kind of spiritual obsession."
The film stars Ralph Fiennes as
himself at one time during the 1930s a film
reviewer. (One of the few films he approved Maurice Bendrix, a novelist who falls in
of was "The Third Man," but that was
based on material he wrote directly for the
screen, and he was intimately involved in the
filmmaking process.)
by Bridget Byrne
In 1955, when Greene was
still alive, a version of "The
End of the Affair" was made,
directed by Edward Dmytryk
and starring Deborah Ken.
Van Johnson and Peter
Gushing. The Halliwell Film
Guide describes it as "Glum
sinning in Green(e)land;
over-ambitious, miscast and
poor-looking." Greene, who
had visited the set and been
appalled to see Johnson
chewing gum while filming a
love scene, dubbed it "a disaster."
Few people have
probably seen it, but Jordan,
who has, would concur, describing it simply
in his soft Irish voice as "a very poor
thing."
"Green(e)land" does not, of course,
refer to the world's largest island, but is a
term literary critics used to describe
Greene's somewhat heightened vision of
whatever part of the world he turned his
attention to as a writer, deftly getting
under the skin to expose
entrails, however seductive the
surface.
This story, which is set in
London during the Blitz of
World War II, is considered
almost autobiographical,
inspired by Greene's own love
affair with a married woman.
Greene described it as being
about "obsessive love and obses-
love with Sarah (Julianne Moore), the wife
of an acquaintance (Stephen Rea). His
paramour's Cathol-icism is the fulcrum of
the story.
Neil Jordan directs 'The End of the Affair
"I didn't want to make a literary artifact.
I don't like that. I wanted the mutual
need of these three characters to come
alive and there to be nothing bookish
about it," Jordan says.
In an interview with London's Observer
newspaper when the film was shooting in
England earlier this year, Jordan
explained, "When you read [Greene's]
stuff, it seems very cinematic because you
can touch and even smell the atmosphere
he creates. Often he has great beginnings
and has a magnificent way of setting up
templates for drama. But then the development
of them is often terribly interior as
they will tend to center more around moral
dilemmas. That's probably why he hasn't
been filmed too well."
So Jordan has made changes and additions,
including moving the death of a protagonist
from the middle to the end of the
story and placing some scenes in Brighton,
a south coast English town, which was the
focus of another highly praised Greene
novel, "Brighton Rock."
Greene's version of "The End of the
Aff"air" is confined to London, where the
Nazi bombs are dropping. The love affair
takes place mainly between houses surrounding
Clapham Common, although, as
that area is now much seedier and less
upscale than it was over 50 years ago, filming
took place around Kew Green as well
as on soundstages at Shepperton Studios.
48 BOXOFFICE