'The Crying Game' director unveils transvestite teaser

The director Neil Jordan is to make ablack comedy about a tough young Irish transvestite, teaming up with the producer with whom he collaborated on the 1992 hit film about the IRA and cross-dressing, The Crying Game.

The director Neil Jordan is to make ablack comedy about a tough young Irish transvestite, teaming up with the producer with whom he collaborated on the 1992 hit film about the IRA and cross-dressing, The Crying Game.

Jordan and Stephen Woolley, who used a character's real sexual identity as the surprise twist at the end of The Crying Game, have cast the rising star Cillian Murphy in the lead role.

He has appeared recently in Girl In A Pearl Earring, Cold Mountain and 28 Days Later.

Announcing the project, entitled Breakfast on Pluto, at the Cannes Film Festival yesterday, Jordan said he had been working on the script for several years but had been scared of it. "It's so out there," he said.

It is based on a novel by Pat McCabe, whose earlier novel The Butcher Boy was also turned into a film by Jordan.

The novel was "really quite a savage satire'' but Jordan said he had turned it into a fairytale. It tells the story of Patrick, a boy born in an Irish border town who from an early age knows he has been born into the wrong body. He was abandoned as a baby and raised by a foster mother, but when he gets older he moves to London with a burning desire to find his mother and be reconciled with her. Murphy said it was the kind of role every actor looked for. "It's transformative,'' he said.

But Jordan insisted it would not be camp. "He's a serious woman, this guy,'' he said. "It's not particularly about cross-dressing, it's about someone who's providing himself with an alternative to a savage world.''

Shooting begins in September in Ireland and London.