What was the first element of Ondine that fell into place for you?
Neil Jordan: The first thing was him pulling a woman out of the water in a net. That was an image. It seems cool and interesting, and you don’t know what it could be, or what it should be. I suppose it could become a horror movie from there; she could drain the blood of his children or stuff like that. I generally wanted to tell kind of a fairy tale, or a story where people compensated for the harshness of their lives in this town that time forgot, and the economy’s forgotten, with fantasy. I really wanted to tell a fairy tale set in a real landscape that was harsh and unforgiving, but beautiful at the same time. AVC: For a while, it was difficult for you to make films in Ireland, because the economic boom made it too expensive. But Ireland’s economy has fallen on harder times, and that seems to be reflected in the landscape of this story. NJ: A little bit. It’s a fishing village in the southwest of Ireland called Castletownbere. It went through a boom time in the ’60s and ’70s, I thin
