Teaching Little Girls Not to be Afraid of Wolves
by Michael Dare
(originally published in the L.A. Weekly April 19, 1985)
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 The Company of Wolves starts out with all the surface elements of a werewolf horror film, but the longer you hold on to the idea that it's trying to tell a linear story, the longer you're doomed to frustration. You may end up hating every second of it, but if you're prepared to watch a scattered, dream-like, Freudian interpretation of an ancient fairy tale that alternately charms and offends, with sexual metaphors oozing off the screen into your lap, then, at the very least, you won't be disappointed. This is one of the strangest, most daring, and often impenetrable cinematic fairy tales ever filmed. It will dazzle your eyes as it drives you up the wall. It can't possibly make any sense until at least half an hour after you've seen it, and then its images will start resonating with wisdom and profundity. For the first 15 minutes, I loved it. For the next hour, I hated it. For the last 15 minutes, I was fascinated, till the final shot brought out a cosmic "What!?" from my throat that drove me from the theater in a frenzy. It fulfilled so few of the ordinary expectations one brings to a movie, all the time asking questions that normal films rarely touch on, that I can't think of anything to compare it to. It's the David O. Selznick production of Little Red Riding Hood as directed by Alejandro Jodorowski. Maybe Little Red Riding Hood was always about fear of sex, maybe the hood always symbolized her maidenhead and the wolf the lust in all men, but it never before took place in a forest full of phallic symbols, with monster mushrooms and giant redwoods. Production designer Anton Furst has created an impossible landscape, a shimmering make-believe forest of saturated colors where anything can happen. In one scene, our pubescent heroine Rosaleen climbs a large tree. When she reaches the top, a giant bird flies off into the sky. The tree has ejaculated, leaving behind a little nest with three eggs. Under Rosaleen's scrutiny, the eggs hatch, revealing tiny statuettes of human babies. She takes one home and shows it to her parents. The statuette cries. There's not doubt that certain fairy tales were meant to terrify as well as charm. The Company of Wolves manages to be both quaint and gruesome. It's jam-packed with little animals and teddy bears and giant doll houses, not to mention hideous man/wolf transformations. It's not so much a fairy tale as a psychedelic and timeless nightmare of a little girl trapped in a storybook. The film often works in literary rather than cinematic ways. In order to understand what was going on stylistically, I found myself pretending I was reading a short story rather than watching a movie. This makes sense as the film is based upon one short story in the book The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter, and directed by novelist Neil Jordan. Carter's book is a fascinating collection of re-told fairy tales containing enough Freudian re-evaluation to convince any parents to stop reading them to their kids. Puss in Boots, Snow White, Beauty and the Beast, and Little Red Riding Hood – all are laid waste by her sardonic and dangerous bedtime stories. Director Neil Jordan was born in Ireland and has only made one other film, Angel, which has never been released in America. His approach to filmmaking is naïve and extremely serious. He appears to have no shame. At one moment, he boldly revels in Ken Russell excess; the next, he quietly explores the gentility and passion of virgin love. In person, he's gentle, soft-spoken, and somewhat withdrawn, at least in comparison to your standard Hollywood director. He's as surprised as anyone that The Company of Wolves is such an enormous hit in England. We spoke while sunning at the Sunset Marquis. |
| WEEKLY: How did you
get started in filmmaking?
JORDAN: I've had three novels published, and I was working a little bit in theater in Ireland. I wrote one film script just to see what it would turn out like. WEEKLY: Did you prepare yourself by reading other scripts? JORDAN: No, I just thought of a story and wrote down what I saw. It was about two kids in Ireland who went around killing people. It was called Travelers, and it was made as an independent film. I was very unhappy with the result, so I decided to make my own film. I had met John Boorman – he was working on Excalibur at the time – and I wrote a script for him. WEEKLY: Did you learn a lot about directing from Boorman? JORDAN: Yes. He's got an extremely strong personality. If you want unexpected results, you have to keep yourself open, don't you? You can't be too much of a bureaucrat. It's easy to direct; it's just explaining the shot you want and getting people to do it. 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. We storyboarded and did scenes in very few takes, except for the scenes with the animals. All the effects were done in camera. WEEKLY: How did you get to make this film? It seems a tough pitch. JORDAN: I admire Angela
Carter very much. She's got the kind of mind that belongs to the '20s,
and she deals with iconoclastic things in her work. I met her at a writer's
conference in Dublin and she told me she was interested in bringing one
of the short stories in The Bloody Chamber to the screen. She had
been asked by a TV company to do a 30-minute film. I found it extremely
exciting because there were so many elements in it that related to the
basic werewolf stories.
WEEKLY: Was it your intention to make the film so Freudian? JORDAN: That was Angela's intention in the story, but it wasn't mine in the film. I've never read Freud. WEEKLY: Did you purposely make it look like a studio picture? JORDAN: I wasn't going after any look, really. I wasn't imitating any other film. WEEKLY: Did it turn out as you expected? JORDAN: Very much so, because I couldn't afford to shoot anything I didn't need. The movie is a bit more sensual than the script – I wanted the film drenched in sensuality. It's a film about storytelling, the central character being the grandmother. It's about the use of stories, and in the case of fairy tales, the main use is to teach young girls not to sex with men, isn't it? WEEKLY: That never actually occurred to me as far as Little Red Riding Hood is concerned, but I suppose you're right. What sort of influence do you think this film would have on a young girl who sees it? JORDAN: Well, I showed it to my daughter, who's nine, and she liked it. I suppose sex is a bit out of fashion in film lately. 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.
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