Politics & Power Quote by Neil Jordan

Neil Jordan is admitting something most directors are trained to conceal: the limits of their authority. In an industry that rewards bravado and brand-name confidence, "I'm less comfortable" sounds almost subversive. It reframes filmmaking not as technical mastery but as cultural fluency. You can learn lens choices; you can’t fake the unspoken rules of a place you didn’t grow up inside.

The line also slips a quiet critique of "American movies" as a codified language. Hollywood isn’t just geography, it’s shorthand: how people argue, flirt, threaten, mourn; what a bar looks like; what a gun implies; what constitutes a believable moral arc. Jordan, steeped in Irish history and the particular texture of Irish speech and politics, is signaling that his real subject is atmosphere and inheritance. His best films often hinge on identity as something performed under pressure. That sensibility can get blunted in America’s louder mythmaking machinery, where character is frequently streamlined into type.

The subtext is respect, but also resistance. By saying he doesn’t "know them so well", Jordan suggests American stories are not neutral, exportable templates. They’re local stories that have been globally franchised. Coming from an Irish director who has worked in and around the U.S. system, the remark reads as a defense of specificity: if your compass is tuned to another set of social cues, the danger isn’t misunderstanding plot, it’s misreading the micro-signals that make a film feel true rather than merely competent.