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Jordan's Brave Take


Published Tuesday, March 10, 2009, 4:13 PM
Updated Thursday, July 23, 2009, 6:11 PM

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In The Brave One, Neil Jordan's shocking and decidedly controversial new film, Jodie Foster gives a riveting performance as a woman driven almost mad by grief and the desire for revenge. CAHIR O'DOHERTY talks to the Oscar winning Irish director about the script, his star and why he very nearly refused to direct it.

NEIL Jordan won't talk to the press about his new film until they have seen it. Ten minutes into the critics screening at Warner Brothers in New York on Monday, it's easy to understand why he made that call. The Brave One, starring Jodie Foster, is an immensely shocking and sophisticated new film about violence and how it destroys all it touches.

But the film is also about grief. Maddening, overwhelming grief and the desire for revenge - the kind of obsessive desire that puts you off your food and keeps you from sleeping, the kind that can take over a life and often end it.

There are clear thematic parallels between the issues explored in this film and the war convulsing the nation, but neither the script nor the direction belabors them. Instead we witness the deceptively simple story of what happens to one young woman who's near perfect life is upended by a random brutal assault.

"I was attracted to the script because of the character and the transformation she went through," Jordan told the Irish Voice on Tuesday.

"Quite simply I was interested in the idea of this civilized, sophisticated liberal woman who finds this monster insider her, really. It was a fascinating theme, it was quite grown up and I liked the sense of danger that she kept putting herself into. The way she kept challenging her moral perspective with these horrible, bloody killings she kept doing."

Some critics have scoffed at the sense of menace that fills the dark grimy New York streets throughout the film, saying they belongs to another era, the 1970s, not 2007. But that may be to willfully miss the point. The city is a character in the drama, and its menace reflects what can happen as much as what does happen.

"I shot the film like a horror film really. I mean it's obviously set in a much more threatening New York, there are all these references to safety and the attack happens in Central Park," Jordan says.

"But it's a different city now. But we approached the city as if there was a sense of dread lurking beneath all of the shining exteriors that you see here, that kind of thing. The elegant buildings and the civic safety that you get now, but there being something underneath that's waiting to explode you know?

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