NEIL JORDAN, Irish director, born; an Academy award-winning Irish filmmaker and novelist. He received the Academy Award for The Crying Game. As a writer/director, Jordan has a highly idiosyncratic body of work, ranging from mainstream hits like Interview With the Vampire to commercial failures like We’re No Angels to a variety of more personal, low-budget art-house pictures.

Married to a woman, unconventional sexual relationships are a recurring theme in this Gay ally’s work, and he often finds a sympathetic side to characters audiences would traditionally consider deviant or downright horrifying.

His film The Miracle, for instance, followed two characters who struggled to resist a strong, incestuous attraction, while The Crying Game made complicated, likable characters out of an IRA terrorist and a transgender woman. Vampire, like the Anne Rice book it was based on, focused on the intense sexual relationship of two undead men who murder humans nightly (although the pair never have sex, they are clearly lovers of a sort), accompanied by an equally lusty vampire woman who is eternally trapped in the body of a little girl. While Lestat (Tom Cruise) is depicted in an attractive but villainous manner, his lover Louis (Brad Pitt) and the child vampire Claudia (Kirsten Dunst) are meant to capture the audience’s sympathy despite their predatory nature.