‘Turning into a wolf was fantastic’: how we made The Company of Wolves

Neil Jordan, director

I met Angela Carter in 1982, while we were in Dublin attending a week celebrating the centenary of James Joyce’s birth. She’d written a script based on a short story of hers called The Company of Wolves, itself an adaptation of Little Red Riding Hood. It wasn’t long enough for a feature film but I proposed a kind of portmanteau structure, with a girl dreaming herself as a fairytale character and her dream grandmother telling cautionary tales. In that way, we could incorporate elements.