Writer/director Neil Jordan’s 13th film, The Good Thief, began when the Dublin-born filmmaker was asked to remake Jean-Pierre Melville’s Bob le flambeur, a small, stylish, noir-influenced French film from 1955 that’s gained a following over the years and is often cited as a precursor to the French New Wave. Now, Jordan is hardly the remake type. His films are personal and distinctive, from the scruffy humanity of his romantic crime dramas Mona Lisa and The Crying Game to the sumptuous goth of Interview with a Vampire. He knew he couldn’t remake a film about style, he says, and he wasn’t interested in a action-paced heist movie. " I looked at the original movie again. And I found that this guy Bob was compulsive. It became about a character using the idea of a heist to get himself back to health. He’d deal in amoral means to achieve, in a strange way, a moral conclusion. He’s an oddly moral man, even though the film begins with him shooting dope into his arm in a club toilet. Then it became an interesting film to me. "

Nick Nolte’s Bob Montagnet is based loosely on Melville’s scruffy antihero. Nolte heads an international cast that includes Ralph Fiennes in a small but memorable role as a ruthless art dealer and Americans Mike and Mark Polish, creators of Twin Falls, Idaho. The eclectic line-up suits the cosmopolitan flavor of the film, which is set in the seedy underworld of Nice, the Italian Riviera, and Monte Carlo — a center of drugs and booze and gambling that’s become a refuge for ragged expatriate Bob. " I was attracted to the idea of a disengaged expatriate, a kind of William Burroughs in Tangiers, that seems to have vanished from films. It’s a character gone from American life, really. "

Jordan cast Nolte after seeing the actor on stage in San Francisco in The Late Henry Moss. " He was so exposed. I thought, ‘This guy is as close to this character as I’ll ever get. I would not have to change a line.’ He’s a great American actor who deserves more leading-man roles. When actors start to play their age, they get all the roles they should have gotten. Like Michael Caine. The minute we were allowed to see the bursts in his face, he got all these interesting roles, didn’t he? "

Despite Nolte’s recent arrest and admitted drug problems, Jordan says that during filming of The Good Thief the actor was the consummate professional. " He knew all about the recovery stuff, which was helpful. He knew about needles, but that’s because he’s kind of a health nut; he gives himself B-12 shots every day. "

The heist at the center of The Good Thief has less in common with Steven Soderbergh’s slick, star-studded remake of Ocean’s 11 — with which it shares similar twists and turns of plot — than with Rififi, the dark caper film directed by Jules Dassin, a Hollywood director who fled the blacklist and found work in France during the 1950s. Jordan says he studied Rififi, which is noted for its fluid camera work, as well as John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle, which also served as a model for Bob le flambeur.

This director has never been attracted to the whiz and bang of special effects or to the kind of star power that can send a modest film’s budget spiraling into the stratosphere. Still, he knows when he can make a film for $30 million, as he did with The Good Thief, and when he cannot. He latest script, which is about Lucretia Borgia, needs a $70 million budget, he says. " I could get $40 million, but I can’t do it for that. Only two or three people can guarantee that kind of money: Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks, maybe Julia Roberts. I still hope to make it if I can raise the money. "

In the meantime, Jordan, who still lives in Dublin ( " It suits me " ), has spent the last two years making smaller films in Ireland: The Actors, with Michael Caine, and The Intermission, with Colin Farrell. He’s also completed his fourth novel. " If you rely on the film industry to satisfy you creatively, you’ll quickly be disappointed. It’s important to me to express myself freely. Writing prose is hard; it’s a much more internal process than filmmaking. It is not a performance art. "

The Good Thief is the kind of film that Jordan wanted to make from the time he was a young writer in Dublin. " I’m not interested in event films that are made, really, by the effects person and not the director. What’s missing is the feeling, isn’t it? That’s what made me want to make movies, because you don’t get that intensity of emotion anywhere else. "

The Good Thief opens next Friday, April 11, at theaters to be announced.

BY LOREN KING