Second Chances

Double time: Jordan on the <i>Good Thief</i> set.

Double time: Jordan on the Good Thief set.

Neil Jordan on his “double everything” remake of Bob Le Flambeur.

by Cindy Fuchs

Neil Jordan hunkers down on the Four Seasons’ brocaded sofa, peering occasionally out the window to the sunny day. Best known for his dark and moody films -- Mona Lisa (1986), The Crying Game (1992), The Butcher Boy (1997) and even Interview with the Vampire (1994) -- the 53-year-old Irish-born novelist and filmmaker is possessed of a striking self-awareness and sense of humor as well as an impressive store of film history. Jordan’s The Good Thief is designated a "remake" of Jean-Pierre Melville’s Bob Le Flambeur, but it’s more like a combination deconstruction and elaboration starring the world-weary Nick Nolte as the world-weary Bob, an American thief and heroin addict self-exiled to Nice and surrounded by an assortment of international characters.

Jordan says he came to his global cast and composition via his rethinking of the original film: "I came up with the concept where it would be set in Nice, and I wrote into it all the characters you’d find there. Normally, when they remake movies, they set them in America, don’t they? I don’t think this story would work there." Besides, he laughs, "Monte Carlo is the perfect place to want to rob because it’s full of all this pretentiousness." Looking to do something "quite different" from his last film, The End of the Affair, where the "drama is internal," Jordan set out to make a film that "had to be pleasurable, had to give pleasure in ways that I’ve not had to do in films before. I find it very easy to go from, say, a lit, pleasurable environment to a very dark place. But the opposite journey, which is what this movie takes, is much more complicated."

Jordan has to write (or at least rewrite) any film he makes. "I write the script first to see if it’s even vaguely interesting, and then if the script becomes compulsive, then I can do the film." In the case of The Good Thief, he decided to "double everything" in Melville’s original. "I use the original robbery as a decoy [for the real heist], there are two collections of art, a pair of twins trying to execute the robbery that Bob is pretending to execute, and, because I had doubled everything up, there had to be two endings. I suppose it was my way of getting around the idea of doing a remake."

With his version, Jordan wanted to turn the heist movie formula inside out, making it into a character study. As the film opens, Jordan notes, Bob is adrift: "He’s a man who’s got all these problems, trying to bring himself back to life through a robbery, to get back into that state of elegance and style where he can happily wear a tuxedo again, in a position where, if luck does come his way, he can take advantage of it."

He’s also a man who sees in the beautiful girl, Anne (newcomer Nutsa Kukhianidze), a younger version of himself, not a sexual interest. Jordan observes, "He meets her, "rescues’ her, in his way, and she thinks his interest in her is sexual, and takes her clothes off. But she’s wrong. He’s there to teach her a few lessons in survival, because he knows she’s not going to change. He knows she’s not going to study nursing, that she’s going to be attracted to action and glamour." And, he adds, "He’s willing to be a father to her. The thought that there’d be any sexual contact between them would be repulsive, wouldn’t it? They do that sort of thing a lot in the movies, but I thought it would be lovely if they had this very pregnant relationship between them, with sexuality removed. As it would be for a man of that age. Or should be."

Jordan wanted to capture the way that Bob’s addiction ("It’s the idea of starting in that place, a really abject and self-destructive place") shapes his view of the world, so he and cinematographer Chris Menges used mobile framing, handheld and Steadicam shots (to which, he says, he had previously been "averse"). "We looked at a lot of Hong Kong movies for this, all that neon at night; it’s a beautiful style, the wipes and flares that neon gives you." He adds, "I wanted the camera to give the impression of the way you look at the world when you’re hung-over, all your nerve ends are shattered and movement is jagged."

With this in mind, Jordan recalls that he had a fine time working with Nolte, before and after production. "Actually," he laughs, "Nick is a very practiced liar. I was at the Toronto Film Festival and we were showing the film for the first time, and he was telling the audience of journalists that he experimented with heroin for the part. And I looked at him, with my eyes wide, and said, "You didn’t tell me that.’ And subsequently, he said he was lying."

The Good Thief opens Friday at Ritz Five.