The Crying Game

Neil Jordan's The Crying Game won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay at the 65th Academy Awards in 1993, with five additional nominations — Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Stephen Rea), Best Supporting Actor (Jaye Davidson) and Best Film Editing. Jordan would later win his second writing Oscar fourteen years later for The End of the Affair; The Crying Game was the film that established him as a major international writer-director.

The film was financed by Channel 4 (Film4) and Palace Pictures for £2 million and almost did not reach American cinemas — Miramax acquired it in mid-1992 after a quiet European release and built one of the most calculated marketing campaigns of the year around the film's central twist, with Harvey Weinstein personally instructing critics not to reveal the plot. The strategy resulted in a $62 million U.S. theatrical gross — over thirty times the production budget — and is now studied in film-marketing courses as a textbook example of word-of-mouth campaign management.

The cast is led by Stephen Rea, Forest Whitaker, Miranda Richardson, Adrian Dunbar and the breakthrough performance of Jaye Davidson — who had no previous acting experience and was cast after a chance encounter at a London party with one of the production's casting consultants. Davidson appeared in only one further feature (Stargate, 1994) and has not worked in film since. Boy George's cover of the title song reached the top twenty in the UK chart and the soundtrack album was a significant commercial success.