Hand-to-mouth mobsters

"PEOPLE often say - and I've thought it myself that the reason gangster movies are so perennially popular is because they're about families, but now I believe they're much more about selling one's soul and about true corruption. This one certainly is." Mike Newell, director of films as diverse as Dance With A Stranger, Into The West and Four Weddings And A Funeral, describes his new film, Donnie Brasco, as the mob equivalent of Arthur Miller's Death Of A Salesman. And "I'd never seen this side of the gangster thing before, not something that's about the very bottom of the totem pole. Nobody thinks that gangsters are poor but they very often are."

Based on the memoirs of FBI agent Joe Pistone, Donnie Brasco is the story of Pistone's life as an undercover agent who infiltrated the Brooklyn Mafia in the 1970s. Johnny Depp plays Pistone, known as Donnie Brasco to his new Mafia friends, in particular the ageing mobster Lefty Ruggiero (Al Pacino in his finest role in many years).

It's Pacino who provides the moral and dramatic focal point of the movie, and raises its most interesting moral questions, the director feels. "Here was this horrible creature, who had done these awful things, and who you see doing dreadful things during the film. He has no conventional morality at all, but he does have the capacity for love. And the man who is sent to get him, who is morally squeaky clean, has no capacity for love whatsoever.

"If you touch those two wires together, so the humanity of the gangster utterly conflicts with the loyalties of the lawman who's supposed to put him away, there's a real tragic motor at work there.

"It was also hysterically funny at times - not fallabout Hugh Grant funny, but real-life comedy, and the language was marvellous fuhgedaboudit, geddouttahere. It was only once we'd gone through all the hoops, and I was definitely directing, that I realised I didn't actually know if all this was authentic."

Presumably the fact that unlike Martin Scorsese or Francis Coppola, say Newell can't lay claim to the authenticity of personal experience would make it even more important to get the little things right? "Well, absolutely. It's thin ice for a little British boy who's known for a fluffy comedy about weddings.

"I had been re-watching Scorsese band Coppola obsessively, and I knew that Donnie Brasco wasn't a dull rehash of what they had done already, so long as it was real. So I had to do some anthropology."

Newell found his "tribe" of goodfellas in Brooklyn, spending three months in their company before going into production. "They're hugely entertaining and very bad. I liked them a lot and learned a fantastic amount.

"Coppola gives you this view of the princes and field marshals of crime, couched in this marvellous dark, sort of 19th-century opera world, and Scorsese's films are about yuppies basically. Goodfellas is a movie about coke and excess. So I spent a long time in Brooklyn seeing how that sort of low-level crime is woven into the neighbourhood. They live hand to mouth, it's famine one day, excess the next. They're like a tribe of baboons living off a patch of jungle. All the analogies I can think of are towards tribes of animals."

Now Newell can tell a mobster immediately, just by looking at him.

"There are three things that really count one is a beautiful manicure, the second is a very expensive hair-cut, because he runs the local manicure and hairdressing salons, and the other is that he'll spend a lot of time going into bakeries, and he'll never put his hand in his pocket.

"It's all penny-ante stuff, let's go see Mrs Tattaglia dawn the street, because she's got this great home-made mozzarella, all that kind of thing. It's village crime. The thing they imported from Sicily is the neighbourhood, the smallness of it all."

Visually, Donnie Brasco is one of the most convincing evocations of the 1970s yet seen, shot in widescreen in a palette of beiges and browns. "We spent a lot of time talking about the economics, which were very important to the period when it took place, because it was the moment when the bottom fell out of old-style American industry - the steel mills and the car plants were lying idle. So this is rust-belt crime. All of a sudden America lost its cheerfulness and optimism, because the world changed and what really counted was microchips.

"We went and saw the movies of the 1970s. The two that meant the most to us were Klute and The French Connection. A lot of it has to do with the colour tones. There's a lot of beige and brown, and when that stuff starts to get cheap and worn and wet, it starts to look 1970s. You realise that what was happening in the 1970s was that taste was going through this real crisis - the beige crisis.

"The other thing, of course, is all those man-made fibres, so that everything looks flat and made out of cardboard."

The script for Donnie Brasco, by Paul Attanasio (Quiz Show, Disclosure) was originally written almost 10 years ago, but the project was put on hold because of the story's similarities to Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas. Al Pacino had been attached from an early stage, and, in a telling in version of the usual procedure, Newell had to audition for the directing job. "Al asked me what I thought the film was like. So I described it as a wildlife documentary, where one of the tribe is getting older, and is starting to slide down the totem, so that any moment the rest will turn on him. That interested him, and drew him in."

At each meeting, with Pacino, Newell would add another layer to his role, an approach he believes helped the actor deliver his most subtle and restrained performance in a long time.

"By the time we got to rehearsal, he had begun to think of it as a theatre performance in which he would use lots and lots of layers, rather than a movie performance which would rely on strong but temporary effects.

"Yes, of course he has overacted in the past, and the thing I was dreading most was that I would have to say `Excuse me Al, you're overacting'. I'd once had to do that with a famous actor, who said: `What the fuck do you mean? I either act or I don't act' "(this is delivered in a Dublin accent, which narrows down the candidates considerably).

"So, since then I've always had trouble with giving that particular note. I think he's got lazy with movies, whereas he'd never get lazy with theatre. A lot of people were writing that he shouts a lot. On this film, he doesn't shout at all, so all this fabulous layered stuff could breathe."

Despite Pacino's moving performance and iconic presence, Johnny Depp more than holds his own as the undercover cop. "The most difficult thing for me was that the current crop of young thirtysomething stars all look as if they come from Sweden. They're all blonde, Brad Pitt types. Johnny looks the part, even though he has no Italian blood.

"I wanted what he did in Ed Wood, because the film's tragedy would have been empty and pompous and self-regarding without that comedy of these two living like the Odd Couple. Johnny's a great comedian, and I was anxious that it would be very funny and real.

"The one thing I wasn't sure was whether he could be this stone-hearted predator who finds to his discomfort that his heart has become warm and human and involved. That was the arc and the moral dilemma of the character, which he delivered on."

Now in his early fifties, Newell has been directing drama for film and television since the early 1960s, since he cut his teeth on the likes of Coronation Street for Granada. He has been directing feature films for more than 20 years now, but it was the huge international success of Four Weddings And A Funeral which led to the opportunity to direct a major American movie. "After Four Weddings I knew I would get one really decent chance. Because I didn't want to waste it, I had to be really careful about picking something that I could be utterly in love with.

"Of course, people are terrific at the start, and they say: `Hang out for the right matenal, like you've always done." And nine months later, they're asking: `Are you never going to work again?' Because in the end you're a money-making machine."

Newell had had a similar experience after Dance With A Stranger, his magnificent film about the Ruth Ellis murder case, which still stands as one of the finest British movies of the 1980s. "I remember then that I and my beloved wife thought, `Oh, here we go - Easy Street. And it wasn't it was absolutely terrible! People kept sending me shitty scripts about doomed love stories. I assumed I would never reach any real prominence, never have a wide choice of material."

But it must have been difficult to reconcile himself to never going to Hollywood, where many of his contemporaries have made their names? Newell was at Cambridge in the early 1960s with Stephen Frears and Michael Apted, both of who went on from British television drama to making Hollywood movies. "There are always compensations in the craft and the making, so I never minded," says Newell, then rapidly contradicts himself. "I mean, of course I minded, I was furiously jealous of Stephen and of Apted, who is my oldest and best friend. But I said to myself that it didn't matter. Now here I am finally."