Daily Inspiration Quote by Neil Jordan

Jordan’s offhand “literally” is doing defensive work. He’s naming The Company of Wolves as “about fairy tales” to narrow the frame before anyone widens it into the usual adult-readings dragnet: sex, repression, gender panic, the male gaze, all that. Coming from a director, it’s also a subtle assertion of authorship. Critics can build entire architectures on a film, but Jordan is staking out a simple origin story: the project’s DNA is folkloric, not theoretical.

The subtext is that fairy tales are already a charged medium, even when you swear you’re treating them “literally.” Wolves, grandmothers, red cloaks, and forests don’t arrive as neutral props; they come preloaded with centuries of moral instruction and erotic threat. So the line reads less like a denial than a reminder: the film’s provocations are not imported from modern anxieties, they’re embedded in the source material. Jordan is essentially saying, Don’t blame me for the symbolism - blame the genre.

Context matters here because The Company of Wolves (1984) lands in a moment when European art cinema is happily chewing on myth, horror, and psychosexual transformation, and when Angela Carter’s revisionist fairy-tale sensibility (which the film draws from) was challenging the sanitized “children’s story” version of folklore. Jordan’s insistence on “fairy tales” is a sly truth: the oldest stories are the ones that know exactly where the dark is.