The Making Of The Crying Game
How Irish writer-director Neil Jordan wove a string of controversial issues into a surprise box-office hit.
Soho, London, 1991, and Neil Jordan is looking for a man. The acclaimed Irish writer/director has been touring the districts gay bars for some time now. Tonight, however, he's found who he's been searching for. Waiting to be served in one neon-drenched joint, Jordan strikes up a conversation with an attractive but unassuming young guy dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. The man's name is Jaye Davidson and Jordan has a proposition for him; would he liked to appear in a movie? Just one condition - Davidson will have to wear a dress.
It might have made The Crying Game infamous but the twist at the heart of Jordan's romantic terrorist thriller was but one of many elements that made it a controversial film and, consequently, an unattractive proposition for producers. As Davidson said about first reading the script, "I thought everyone would hate the subjects - the IRA, racism, gay sex..."
Set at the height of the Troubles, Jordan’s film centres around IRA foot soldier Fergus (Stephen Rea) and his relationship with Jody, the captured British squaddie (Forrest Whitaker) he's ordered to watch over, and Dil (Davidson), Jody's beautiful wife.
In the director's opinion, it was the picture's politics that made it problematic. As he explains, "I’d made a film about the IRA and everyone - in Britain, at least - hated me for it."
The Crying Game may have been turned down by every major studio, but that didn't prevent the public from embracing the curate's egg of a movie. Which, even in retrospect, is surprising. But then the story behind The Crying Game's success is every bit as compelling as the one spun in Jordan's film.
The Crying Game had been on Neil Jordan's mind for as long as he'd been a filmmaker. As he puts it, "I wrote the first draft after shooting my debut, Angel, in 1982." At that point, the script, entitled The Soldier's Wife, told the more straightforward story of an IRA man who falls in love with a serviceman's widow. Feeling the plot lacked a certain something. Jordan allowed it to breathe for a while - 10 years to be precise.
By then, had enjoyed both huge success (with the Bob Hoskins gangland drama Mona Lisa) and massive failure (shooting laugh-free comedy remake We're No Angels with Robert De Niro). Driven out of Hollywood, Jordan was welcomed back to the UK-based Palace Pictures - with whom he'd made The Company Of Wolves and Mona Lisa - by studio heads Stephen Woolley and Nik Powell. The pair had plenty of love for the writer/director but little in the way of money. Nevertheless, they scraped together enough to make The Miracle with Jordan, which in turn made The Soldier's Wife a viable option.
What made it more viable still was an idea that came to Jordan while promoting The Miracle in Germany. "We were drinking in Berlin when Neil suggested making Dil a he rather than a she," recalls Stephen Woolley. "I thought it was fantastic, the best thing I could have imagined."
Keen to pitch the film at the forthcoming Cannes Film Festival, Woolley sent Jordan off to bash out a new script. Having carried the story about in his head for a decade, it took him just 10 days to rewrite The Soldier's Wife.
Only it wasn't called that anymore. Jordan's friend Stanley Kubrick had convinced him that a new title might be wise. Remembers Jordan, "Stanley explained to me that the public tended to shy away from films with military or religious names." Kubrick also believed that the the central role was uncastable. The man who'd have to fall in love with Dill, Stephen Rea, also foresaw problems. "If the guy wasn't a convincing woman, my character would look stupid. Everyone would say, 'That's one sick Paddy.'"
Before meeting Davidson, Jordan auditioned a number of transvestites and transsexuals. He ever considered casting Mona Lisa's female lead Cathy Tyson and having her wear a prosthesis. But, as a bloke who was regularly mistaken for a woman, Jaye Davidson really was the only man for the part.
There were still problems, though. For one thing, Davidson wasn't a transvestite. "The only time he wore a dress before making the picture was after he got the role," says Jordan. For another, Jaye wasn't too thrilled with the idea of starring in a movie. In the end, it took a guarantee that he wouldn't have to do any promotional work to secure Davidson's signature.
Finding the right Dil might have been hard, but it was peanuts compared with finding someone to bankroll The Crying Game. "We took the film everywhere," Jordan wearily recalls. "At one stage, Nik Powell went to [financiers] Ciby 2000 and explained that The Crying Game deals with the IRA, and this French guy says, 'That's a big no-no.' Nik says, 'No, hang on - this IRA guy kidnaps this soldier,' and the French guy replies, 'That's another big no-no.' So Nik says, 'No, hang on - he gets obsessed with the soldier's wife and the wife turns out to be a man,' and the guys says, 'That's a really big no-no!'"
In the end, it took money from a Japanese firm to enable The Crying Game to go before the cameras in the November of 1991. However, within two weeks of the start date, cinematographer Frederick Elmes (Blue Velvet) quit the production citing creative differences with Jordan. "That was a terrible thing," the director sighs. "Other than losing your lead, losing your DP is probably the worst thing that can happen."
And it wasn't even like Jordan's monetary problems were over, what with Palace's perilous financial situation. "It must have looked like a romantic way to make a movie, but it was crushing," says the Irishman. "Making a film, you have enough on your plate not to have to worry about things like making sure the bills are paid and the crew receive their fees." This latter point threatened to capsize the production almost before it began and was only resolved after Jordan threatened to walk off the picture.
But if shooting a movie with no money was, in the director's opinion, "about as much fun as making a film in Zagreb", it wasn't all tears on set. For one thing, Jaye Davidson's performance was a revelation. "I knew Jaye could sail through it if he just had to be beautiful," Jordan explains. "But I worried about whether he could move an audience. Then we did the scene where Fergus gets his hair cut, and Jaye began to act with this pain in his voice. It was extraordinary."
Alas, Davidson wasn't the only one with pain in his voice. Forrest Whitaker's cock-er-nee accent made Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins sound like Ray Winstone. "It came in for some criticism, didn't it?" laughs the actor. "My favourite review was the guy who said my accent wandered from Tottenham to Timbuktu."
Jordan, though, wasn't worried about Whitaker's broken brogue. "When I cast Forest, it wasn't because I wanted a star or I thought he'd give the best London accent in film history. Forest's a loveable man, and you had to love Jody. If you didn't, you wouldn't have the conflict of sympathies that's at the film's heart."
While Jordan was capturing high drama on celluloid, a farce was taking place behind the scenes as Palace's money woes worsened by the day. "Things got so bad that Stephen [Woolley] went down to the backers and threatened to set himself on fire in the foyer," recalls Nik Powell. Choosing against self-immolation, Woolley instead decided to use his imagination. "I started to pay for incidental items on my credit cards," he explains. "And when the cards maxed out, I went down to the [Palace-owned] Scala Cinema and took money from the tills. They were desperate measures but then they were desperate times."
With great difficulty, The Crying Game was eventually completed. And while Palace entered bankruptcy, Neil Jordan personally took on the task of marketing his movie in the UK: "I wrote to every critic in Britain, pleading with them not to mention the twist," he says. "And they didn't. They just set about the movie with a cudgel." It also didn't help matters that the release of The Crying Game coincided with the IRA's decision to resume hostilities. It was no great surprise then that the film died a quiet death at the UK box office.
In America, however, things were vastly different. A little-known indie outfit called Miramax had agreed to distribute the film Stateside. Having declined the opportunity to participate in funding The Crying Game, Miramax chiefs Bob and Harvey Weinstein now concluded it was, in Bob's opinion, "One of the greatest films ever made." As such, hey felt it deserved one of the greatest marketing campaigns, one which actively encouraged people, as Jordan had requested, not to reveal the twist...
"We fought for good cinema," Harvey Weinstein would later explain. "We were selling what had been considered unsaleable films. Innovative marketing techniques just seemed to be a natural way of busting these movies out. With The Crying Game, the idea was, 'Can we develop something like, Keep the secret...?' And to give you an idea of how successful that was, in France and England the movie was owned by other people, and they didn't use it, and the movie was not successful. The marketing concepts that were used in Pulp Fiction and other movies grew out of The Crying Game. The fact that you could shock, wake up, and grab attention for a movie became a cornerstone for the company."
Jordan's feature went on to gross $65 million at the US box office and the Weinsteins made their fortune. The following year Disney bought Miramax for $60 million and the company had sealed its rep as a home for edgy crowd-pleasers.
Yet, despite the fact that everyone was stunned by that twist, Neil Jordan remains amazed that audiences weren't quicker to realise Dil wasn't what (se)he seemed. "It's pretty well signposted. A lot of the names are androgynous - Jody, Jude, even Dil. The way Jody flirts with Fergus, going on about his smile and his eyes ,was also a bit of a clue that this wasn't your everyday squaddie. Still, not to worry. It just made the moment when the camera pans down all the more powerful and confrontational.
So, in the end, it was the twist - the very thing the backers thought would turn audiences' stomachs - that turned The Crying Game into a hit. Yes, the film bankrupted one company (Palace) but it made another (Miramax) and secured Stephen Woolley and Nik Powell places as key British producers. Neil Jordan, meanwhile, followed up his $3 million Brit flick with a $50 million adaptation of Anne Rice's Interview With The Vampire, with Tom Cruise as his lead.
While it's understandable that it should be a point of interest, it's wrong to focus entirely upon The Crying Game's shock reveal. As the San Francisco Chronicle's Joe Carroll remarked at the height of the hoopla, it would still have been an effective thriller even without the skirt-dropping revelation. Exactly how good became apparent when the movie received six Oscar nominations. After all Jordan, Woolley, Powell and Co. had gone through, it was amazing that they had a finished film at the end of it all, let alone Academy recognition.
That said, even during its finest hour, the good ship Crying Game refused to sail smoothly. "The Academy Awards are great," sighs Neil Jordan, "but they're so long. After an hour or so, I left the auditorium for some refreshment. Nobody told me the running order had changed at the last minute. So at the moment they're announcing that I've won for Best Original Screenplay, I'm stood at the bar waiting for my drink."
He allows himself a light laugh. "Still, there are worst places to be than a bar.”