From Ballyfermot to Cannes, a Dublin novel gets a makeover as a French film

When Neville Thompson was growing up in Ballyfermot, near the roundabout, he used to play football, he said Friday, sitting outside his new-ish home in southern Spain.

“I knew a few guys who played on the football team, who were involved in crime, right?” he says, via a WhatsApp video call on what was (for him) a sun-drenched Friday afternoon.

“I remember one of them was killed in a crime incident. He was shot dead, and the papers at the time called him a scumbag and a this and a that, and the other, you know,” he says.

“And he was, to many degrees, you know, if you look at what he done, but there was another side to him, that he came up every week and played football. He trained. He had a wife – or a girlfriend, or a partner, at least – with three kids, “ he says.

That insight into the complexity – or at least duality – that people can contain fed into Thompson’s 1997 book Jackie Loves Johnser OK?, which was big in the city at the time.

“In my recollection, it was very popular in the north inner-city,” says Karl Parkinson, author of The Blocks, among other books. “A lot of people who wouldn’t normally read books were reading it.”

In the Irish Times, Lucille Redmond’s  review said the opening chapters “are beautifully written, each one a jewel-like scene of Dublin life and impoverished adolescence”.

“Jackie is a heart-rendingly loveable hero, and the boy she loves, the ambitious petty criminal Johnser, a convincingly decent poor eejit,” Redmond wrote. “The book is already an underground hit.”

And now it’s a €35.7 million film, which debuted at Cannes in May – about 26 years after the book was first published – showed in cinemas in France starting in October, and is due to be shown in Dublin at the IFI on 23 November. Meanwhile, Mercier Press has made the book available again.

So is Thompson absurdly rich now? “Listen, as I was saying to the butler, or was it the chauffeur … ”, he laughs. “No, no, not extremely rich, but, but in a very good position, thanks to it, you know, very good position.”

The book

In the 1990s in Ireland, Roddy Doyle was big, says Parkinson, author of The Blocks.

Doyle published The Commitments in 1987, The Snapper in 1990, and The Van in 1991. Films of each one followed a couple years after the book.

So maybe publishers were out looking for the next Roddy Doyle, Parkinson says. In any case, one of the authors they found at that time was Thompson.

He was picked up by Poolbeg – he mentions former editor Kate Cruise O’Brien – and they published Jackie Loves Johnser OK?

“My mother was telling everyone that they thought I was a layabout but I was now an author,” Thompson says.

The book is fiction, but after Thompson gave his mother a copy of the book, she read it, rang him up, and left three messages on his phone, as he recalls it all these years later.

“1. I am after searching every where and I can’t find all these children I am supposed to have… 2. So I don’t clean dishes do I not you ungrateful ******** and 3. Oh your father went around with his flute hanging out did he?” Thompson says.

“So I rang and explained it was fiction … and she says, ‘You know that I know that but do the neighbours?’ … and she wouldn’t talk to me for 6 months,” he says.

To wind her up a bit then, Thompson says he rang up pretending to be from the council, saying they wanted to put up a blue plaque to honour local author Neville Thompson.

“She hit the roof and said, ‘I am not having that **** name on my house.’ I said, ‘Oh it’s a corpo house we are just wondering can we use your electricity for the drill,’” he recalls.

She hung up, he says.

Waning attention

Jackie Loves Johnser OK? does not paint a very flattering picture of Ballyfermot. He says he’s okay with that though.

“I think for the working class Dublin, working class Irish, it’s important that they have voices from within, no matter what the story is,” he says.

He followed that book up with Two Birds/One Stoned (1998) and Have Ye No Homes To Go To (1999).

Thompson is mentioned several times in Michael Pierse’s 2016 book Writing Ireland’s Working Class: Dublin After O’Casey.

But his name and work haven’t had the same staying power as some other authors. After a point, he felt his work was ignored by Irish publishers, he said in an email.

“I’ve never listed him when people say, who are your influences,” says Parkinson, the author of The Blocks.

“But influence can be unconscious, even just that this person did it, so maybe I could do it too,” says Parkinson who lived in the Ballymun towers when he was small, and later in O’Devaney Gardens.

Maybe Thompson’s work didn’t get the respect it deserved, Parkinson says.

Maybe “if he were from a different background, and his books were about middle-class people” they would be better remembered.

Or maybe the reason is that people consider it “popular” fiction rather than “literary” fiction, he says.

The film

But the film rights to Jackie Loves Johnser OK? had been sold, and, without any further involvement from Thompson, the film has suddenly burst into the world, he says.

Directed by Gilles Lellouche, the film has a different name – L’Amour Ouf or Beating Hearts – and the action has been transplanted from Ballyfermot to the north-east of France.

“We never talked, we never met, until after the film was produced, was was ready to go, you know,” Thompson says.

“And his reason behind that, Gilles’s reason behind that which I could take on board was the fact that my influence would be from Ireland and he was writing from a French perspective,” Thompson says.

“And a totally different story. And actually, you see the film, the heart of it is probably the same, but I think the body is totally different,” he says.

The critics at Cannes didn’t like it much, but Thompson wasn’t there, he says.

“Not at Cannes, because it’s a ridiculous price, okay, absolutely ridiculous. You couldn’t say, ‘Look, put me up in a hotel over there, it’s just ridiculous,’” he says.

Instead, he decided to go to a planned premiere in Paris. “I thought to myself, that’s great. The first time ever on a red carpet. You know what I mean?”

He says his wife told him he’d have to buy a suit, and he said no need, he had one from when his mother had died 12 years earlier.

To fit into that, he lost four stone over four months, Thompson says. “I said, that’s great. I’m gonna put my, you know, my black suit, I’m delighted, right?”

Then he gets the official invite to the event. “This is not a red carpet event. It’s a smart casual event,” he says.

He says maybe it’s a good thing it’s taken so many years before this kind of success came his way.

“Maybe you know it all honestly, no disrespect to myself, but maybe it’s the right time, because maybe earlier I would have pissed into the wind,” he says.