Neil Patrick Jordan (born 25 February 1950) is an Irish film director, screenwriter, novelist and short-story writer.

Jordan's best-known films include the crime thrillers Mona Lisa (1986) and The Crying Game (1992), the horror dramas Interview with the Vampire (1994) and Byzantium (2012), the biopic Michael Collins (1996), the black comedy The Butcher Boy (1997), the Graham Greene adaptation The End of the Affair (1999), the transgender-themed dramedy Breakfast on Pluto (2005), and the psychological thriller Greta (2018).

The Company of Wolves, a dark and sexually-themed reimagining of the Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale based on short stories by Angela Carter, became a cult favourite.

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 arthouse pictures.

Unconventional sexual relationships are a recurring theme in Jordan's work, and he often finds a sympathetic side to characters that audiences would traditionally consider deviant or downright horrifying.

Interview with the Vampire, like the Anne Rice book it was based on, focused on the intense, intimate interpersonal 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 complex 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 partner Louis (Brad Pitt) and the child vampire Claudia (Kirsten Dunst) are meant to capture the audience's sympathy despite their predatory nature.

While his pictures are most often grounded in reality, he occasionally directs more fantastic or dreamlike films, such as The Company of Wolves, High Spirits, Interview with the Vampire and In Dreams.

He also directed Byzantium, an adaptation of the vampire play of the same name starring Saoirse Ronan, Gemma Arterton and Jonny Lee Miller.

[15][16][17] In 2009, he signed a petition in support of director Roman Polanski, calling for his release after he was arrested in Switzerland in relation to his 1977 charge for drugging and raping a 13-year-old girl.

Jordan's donation included TV and film scripts, production files, notebooks, storyboards and personal correspondence with artists and political figures.