Irish writer and director Neil Jordan is set to make a film based on Patrick McCabe's novel, Breakfast on Pluto, in which the central character, Patrick "Kitten" Braden, is an Irish transvestite aspiring to be a supermodel in London.
The product of a liaison between a parish priest and his housekeeper, the boy is abandoned as a baby and raised by a foster mother in the small rural town. The novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1998.
At a press conference held during the 57th Cannes Film Festival yesterday evening, Jordan announced that the leading role will be played by Cillian Murphy, the young Cork actor who featured in 28 Days Later, Cold Mountain, Girl With a Pearl Earring and Intermission, and in Druid's recent touring production of The Playboy of the Western World.
This will be Jordan's second film of a McCabe novel, following his critically acclaimed treatment of The Butcher Boy, and his second dealing with a transvestite after The Crying Game, which earned Jordan the Oscar for best original screenplay in 1993.
Noting these similarities, Jordan told The Irish Times in Cannes that the tone of the new film will be "more like a fairytale".
The film has the full endorsement of McCabe, who wrote the first draft of the screenplay, Jordan said.
"Pat's draft was long and wonderful, and then I worked on further drafts, to make it more emotional. It goes through the 1970s and '80s in Ireland and Britain and follows this boy's traumatic story, although he has a great sense of fantasy to help him deal with it. It's not a camp film and it's not really about cross-dressing, but about someone trying to find an alternative to a tough, tragic world.
"This boy grows up in a small Border town and tries to escape to more glamorous places. He joins a showband, The Indians, as a squaw, and he works as a magician's assistant and as one of the Wombles of Wimbledon."
Cillian Murphy - who made a flying visit to Cannes from London where he is playing a villain, the Scarecrow, in Batman Begins - told The Irish Times: "The role in Breakfast on Pluto is to die for. The film is so strange and doesn't conform to any genre."
Asked about having to wear women's clothes, he said, "I'm looking forward to that very much, although I'll have to do something about the hairy legs."
Company of Wolves, the production company run by Jordan and his regular producer, Stephen Woolley, will make the film for Pathé Pictures.