I’VE COME TO a West End hotel to interview a versatile, Oscar-winning director about his movie in which a down-on-his-luck thief recruits a crack squad for a daring casino heist in a famous resort. Steven Soderbergh’s Las Vegas-set Ocean’s Eleven? No, Neil Jordan’s trip to Monte Carlo, The Good Thief. Stylistically, the two films are, well, oceans apart, and yet the links between them extend beyond their mirror-image synopses.

The Good Thief was conceived when Warner Brothers, the studio for whom Jordan had generated a $200 million worldwide gross with Interview with the Vampire and broken Irish box-office records with Michael Collins, invited him to remake Jean-Pierre Melville’s good-humoured 1956 thriller Bob le flambeur.

Jordan liked the Melville movie, took the commission and started writing a screenplay in which Bob Montagnet, an ex-pat American in Nice, sets out to rob a Monte Carlo casino, not of its cash but of its collection of Picassos, Van Goghs and Matisses.

“When I finished the script and showed it to Warners they said no,” Jordan recalls. “It was too European and too nervy for them and, I suppose, too unstarry.” The other problem was that by now Warners were developing a second heist film, none other than Ocean’s Eleven, and once you’ve seen both films it’s easy to understand why the suits chose Las Vegas.

Soderbergh gave us undiluted Hollywood gloss: George Clooney in a tux, cracking wise and winning back Julia Roberts. Jordan offers European grit and panache: Bob (Nick Nolte) starts out as a heroin addict, goes cold turkey and then enjoys a platonic romance with the beguiling Eastern European teenager (Nutsa Kukhianidze) he rescues from a brutal Nice pimp. Clooney’s crew featured Brad Pitt and Matt Damon; the hunk in Nolte’s team is an arachnophobic transsexual bodybuilder.

“Ocean’s Eleven is an American movie, in that you’re right into the premise and then it’s all about the gizmos,” Jordan says. “They present the characters, they go in and that’s it. The Good Thief is more about character, about a man who’s trying to find a reason to live again, to get off drugs — the heroin was maybe the main reason Warners said no — and to try to find some beauty.”

After Warners passed, Jordan and his regular producer Stephen Woolley found a new home for The Good Thief at the Canadian company Alliance Atlantis, and the end result is a breathless picture that invites you to sit up, rather than sit back, and enjoy. With Nolte growling his lines nineteen-to-the-dozen, a scene-stealing cameo from Emir Kusturica as a security genius, and some dazzling cinematography from Chris Menges it merits Jordan’s own assessment:

“I have never done a film that’s so much what you would call ‘entertainment’ — and I found that it’s really hard to be entertaining in such a generic type of film. My other films are quite dark and compulsive, and being dark is easy — for me, anyway.”

Since his dark and compulsive streak first materialised in his superb Ulster thriller Angel (1982), we’ve grown accustomed to Jordan’s range — comedies, thrillers, horror, historical epic, psychological dramas — and prolific output, with a new film appearing roughly every 18 months. But almost three years have passed since the release of The End of the Affair. After completing The Good Thief he found it impossible to move on to feature No 14, despite having Ewan McGregor and Anthony Hopkins lined up last year to star in an epic about the Borgias designed to be “like The Godfather in Renaissance Italy”.

The project folded when he could not raise the $60 million required. “We eventually got to the stage where my script would have had to be gutted to make it work on a really minimal amount of money. So I just had to put the idea away.”

The consolation has been his and Woolley’s commitment to their Dublin-based production outfit, Company of Wolves (named after their Angela Carter adaptation), which is behind two Dublin-set features due for release this year: Conor McPherson’s comedy The Actors, based on a Jordan story and starring Michael Caine, and Intermission, the film debut of theatre director John Crowley.

Jordan has also used the hiatus to return to prose. He was an accomplished short-story writer before turning to cinema. He says he is now about a third of the way through a novel. “I don’t think anybody could rely on film-making alone for a creative life. You are too much at the service of elements that are out of your control. At least there’s something I enjoy doing — rather than begging for money from some tax shelter fund.”

The book may soon be put aside, however, because he hopes to be back in the director’s chair later this year to shoot his Odyssey-based screenplay about Ulysses’s return to Ithaca. He expects to start off feeling rusty. “Before starting the new novel, I’d almost forgotten how to write fiction, but at the moment I’ve almost forgotten how to make movies,” he suggests. “You spend 20 years of your life making films but you only get to direct for maybe 10 consecutive six-week stretches through that entire period, so you never become entirely familiar with it. It’s not like a doctor doing surgery every day. Always, when you step behind a camera it’s like ‘Oh my God, what am I going to do here?’ ”

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