"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"
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Even the phrase "slightly overcompensating" feels like a director catching himself mid-myth. Neil Jordan is talking about In Dreams as a kind of over-directed object: a film built not just from story needs, but from the reflexes of a craftsman trying to prove he can still steer the vehicle.
The key admission is "director for hire". That label carries a quiet bruising. It suggests a moment in a career where authorship gets negotiated down to competency, where style becomes something you supply on demand rather than something that organically insists. Jordan’s subtext is that he responded by turning the dial up: more images, more signatures, more visual flourish. Not because the film demanded it, but because he did. That’s what "overcompensating" really names here: the anxiety of being useful instead of essential.
"Putting too much imagery that was familiar to me" is the sharper confession. Familiar imagery is comfort food for artists; it’s also a trap. Jordan implies he defaulted to a private iconography, pulling from his own visual memory bank, which can read as self-quotation or, worse, generic "Jordan-ness" divorced from the material. The irony is that imagery is supposed to be cinema’s truth-teller, but he frames it as a kind of noise - decoration used to assert control.
Contextually, it’s a glimpse into how auteur identity can curdle under industrial pressure. The line isn’t self-flagellation so much as a professional diagnosis: when you’re hired to deliver, you sometimes deliver yourself too loudly.
The key admission is "director for hire". That label carries a quiet bruising. It suggests a moment in a career where authorship gets negotiated down to competency, where style becomes something you supply on demand rather than something that organically insists. Jordan’s subtext is that he responded by turning the dial up: more images, more signatures, more visual flourish. Not because the film demanded it, but because he did. That’s what "overcompensating" really names here: the anxiety of being useful instead of essential.
"Putting too much imagery that was familiar to me" is the sharper confession. Familiar imagery is comfort food for artists; it’s also a trap. Jordan implies he defaulted to a private iconography, pulling from his own visual memory bank, which can read as self-quotation or, worse, generic "Jordan-ness" divorced from the material. The irony is that imagery is supposed to be cinema’s truth-teller, but he frames it as a kind of noise - decoration used to assert control.
Contextually, it’s a glimpse into how auteur identity can curdle under industrial pressure. The line isn’t self-flagellation so much as a professional diagnosis: when you’re hired to deliver, you sometimes deliver yourself too loudly.
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