Parenting & Family Quote by Neil Jordan

Jordan’s refusal to dress up the origin story is its own kind of manifesto: not inspiration, not agenda, just “I saw” and I wrote. Coming from a director associated with politically charged Irish material, the line plays like a preemptive strike against the expectation that every Irish story must arrive with a thesis about history, sectarianism, or national trauma. He insists on a filmmaker’s eye over a spokesperson’s burden.

The phrase “two kids in Ireland who went around killing people” is blunt to the point of provocation. “Kids” drags innocence into contact with atrocity; it shrinks violence to something almost casual, roaming, youthful, contagious. That tonal dissonance is the subtext: Ireland isn’t a museum of grievances or a poetic landscape of suffering; it’s a place where brutality can be banal, even narrative-friendly, and that banality is exactly what makes it unsettling.

“I wrote down what I saw” also implies a certain moral posture: witness rather than judge. Jordan isn’t claiming neutrality so much as he’s claiming authority of observation, the artist’s right to render without providing comfort. It’s a dodge of responsibility and a form of responsibility at once, because the camera (or the page) is still choosing what to show.

Then he tags it: “made as an independent film.” That’s not trivia; it’s context and permission. Independence signals fewer filters, less deference to institutions, less pressure to sanitize Irish violence into either prestige tragedy or tidy allegory. The intent reads clear: let the story be feral, and let the audience wrestle with it without the usual cultural handrails.