The Company of Wolves is about how society teaches young women to look at themselves, and what to be afraid of. It's about a girl learning that the world of sensuality and the unknown is not to be feared, that it's worth getting your teeth into.
It is extremely difficult to get movies that cost more than $40 million to be made these days.
It's the opposite journey from what I've usually done with films. I find it very easy to go from, say, a lit, pleasurable environment, like what you see outside there, to a very dark place. But the opposite journey, which is what this movie takes, is much more complicated.
Never make a promise - you may have to keep it.
There's no point in making a film out of a great book. The book's already great. What's the point?
My conception of it was that in a normal film you have a story with different movements that program, develop, go a little bit off the trunk, come back, and end.
It's nice to work with Hollywood because there is never any question of resources put at your disposal to make a film as long as it is the right thing to do.
The most difficult thing is the organization of people and the expression of your intentions. It's very easy to have a picture in your head and to imagine that you've told everybody about what you need.
But everyone gets burnt, don't they? Certain things are outside of your control. I suppose the only thing you can learn as a director is to not put yourself into situations where it can get outside of your control. And that's what happened.
I've also worked hard portraying an Ireland which is fast disappearing. Ireland was a very depressed and difficult place in the 1980s, and I've tried to include that in the script. I worked really hard to find the heart of the book.
In Dreams... well, I was slightly overcompensating with that. I was a bit like a director for hire, so maybe I was putting too much imagery that was familiar to me into it.
Initially with The Butcher Boy, there was this kid growing up in this strange, weird environment that I remember from when I was a kid. And Patrick's vision was so complete there.
I took two years away from making films to write a novel.
Well, Company of Wolves was about that literally, about fairy tales.
Well, if you're talking about the current climate, there's a lack of content in American film because I think people are deeply confused about their emotions, and they don't regret certain aspects of their own foreign policy.
And I think I often choose to do something because it's quite different from what I've done before.
Films have gotten leaner and leaner, cutting out all variations from the story line.
For me now, it's about what you would write and what you wouldn't write, and that's how I select what I am going to do. It can be quite nice being brought a concept by a studio for me to work on.
For me, the filmmaking has to be about the dramaturgy.
I can't do a film if I don't start with the writing.
