I don't think I've ever seen Gary Oldman look relaxed on screen, but sitting in a Knightsbridge hotel this week he seems very pleased with his lot, despite the fact that he's talking about how he waved goodbye to $2 million on his directorial debut, Nil By Mouth. "No, I probably won't get it back, but I don't really mind - it's my voice and my vision, so I'm quite happy to take a loss on it. Creative freedom has a price tag. The Americans didn't want to know this material - they just saw a lot of `f***s' and `c***s'. So you go off and you make this dark, lowbudget movie, and you have to say that you're making it for yourself."
From Sid Vicious to Count Dracula by way of Lee Harvey Oswald, Oldman has played some of the most potent anti-heroes of the 20th century. His career path, from bright young thing at the Royal Court through some of the best British films of the 1980s to stock Hollywood villain, is a familiar and slightly depressing one for a British actor. The working class boy from south London has achieved wealth and fame, but recent performances in The Fifth Element and Air Force One seemed more generic and less inspired than, say, his lunatic portrayal of a home-boy drug dealer in Tony Scott's True Romance.
But just as he seemed to be heading towards self-parody, filed in the casting lists under "psychopath", Oldman has reinvented himself as a director, and a very good one, too.
Nil By Mouth, Oldman's compelling and savage portrait of a semi-criminal south London family torn apart by drink, drugs and violence, was enthusiastically received at this year's Cannes Film Festival, winning the Best Actress award for Kathy Burke's portrayal of the abused wife, Valerie.
Oldman isn't giving up the day job in Hollywood, though. "To be very honest with you, these lucrative villains subsidise the more personal stuff. Air Force One's not a movie I'd particularly want to go and see myself, it's just not my cup of tea. But I'm lucky that I have this lucrative second career. I'm getting older, I'm nearly 40 and I've got responsibilities and a family (he has a son by his first marriage, and his new wife, Donya Fiorentino, is about to give birth). I've got to put food on the table and pay the mortgage like everybody else. If I want to take time away from the marketplace as an actor, and take two years out of my life to go off and do something like this that I feel very passionate about, I have to go and do a movie like Air Force One that buys me freedom, as cynical as that sounds."
In the course of his "lucrative second career", Oldman has worked with some of the world's most successful and technically proficient directors, and seems to have picked up some tricks along the way. The sheer virtuosity and confidence of Nil By Mouth, shot in grainy 16-millimetre in long, hand-held takes, is astonishing in a debut film. "Without blowing my own trumpet, my editor told me that it wasn't like working with a first-time director. I guess I've picked it up by some kind of osmosis. I know what I don't like, and I had very specific ideas of how I wanted to shoot it. I wanted a dark quality, I didn't want it to be glossy. I wanted it to look the way I see the world."
During production, Oldman ran a rough 10-minute excerpt for Stephen Frears, who had directed him 10 years before in the role of Joe Orton in Prick Up Your Ears. "Stephen said `It's nothing like what I expected. It's sort of like Scorsese, isn't it? It doesn't look British.' "
But while Nil By Mouth is "cinematic" in a way that one doesn't expect from this kind of subject matter, he accepts that the film also shows the influence of the previous generation of British film-makers, many of whom he worked with as a young rising star in the 1980s.
"This movie does follow in certain traditions. Without people like Alan Clarke, Mike Leigh and Ken Loach, there couldn't be a film like Nil By Mouth, but then without Rossellini, Pasolini and Cassavetes, there couldn't be a Ken Loach. I guess what I wanted was the feeling that one is a voyeur looking through the keyhole, but also to have that sense of claustrophobia. You're on the sofa in the room with these people, being suffocated by them."
I suggest that one of the things that makes Nil By Mouth so impressive is its refusal to take the easy option of sentimentalising the pain of its characters. "Yeah, I was the sentimentality police. If anyone started to get selfpitying or sentimental, I'd knock it down."
The name that recurs most often in our conversation is that of the late, great Alan Clarke, the brilliant television director whose unflinching, sometimes brutal portraits of life on the margins of British society in the 1970s and '80s are the most obvious forebears of the tough new strain of British cinema currently emerging. Clarke directed Oldman as the ringleader of a gang of football hooligans in his 1989 TV drama The Firm, which seems to offer the closest points of comparison to Nil By Mouth.
But Oldman cites another Clarke film, El- ephant, as a particular inspiration. Filmed in relentlessly long takes, Elephant depicts 18 sectarian murders in Northern Ireland without comment, and with virtually no dialogue. "That was such a brilliant idea. The reason it was called Elephant was because Clarkey went to Northern Ireland and asked what it was like living with the Troubles. Someone said it's like living with an elephant in your living room. In my film you're stuck in a room with all that negative energy. There's no communication going on. People pick up on the wife-beating and the physical violence, but for me it's more that the film is emotionally, verbally and spiritually violent."
At the end of Nil By Mouth (the meaning of the title becomes clear in the film's pivotal scene), there's a moving rendition of the old song Loving That Man of Mine. The voice singing is that of Oldman's 76-year-old mother, while his sister also acts in the film (she's credited as Laila Morse, an anagram of mia sorella - my sister). What little hope there is in the culture he is depicting seems to reside in the qualities shown by the women, he agrees.
"In my experience, women are generally emotionally stronger. Coming from a pub culture, your passport to manhood is when you're pushed up to the bar at the age of 14 and you're going to fart and play darts and tell dirty jokes and drink beer. In the film, the guys in the pub are talking nonsense, and the women at home are talking common sense. The men are like these whirlwinds that set off this chaos. They keep throwing all the pieces of the jigsaw up in the air, and the women are just pragmatic, getting down and trying to stick it all back together again.
"But there's no hope at the end of this film - it's a bleak outlook. But I don't see what the answer is." He vehemently rejects criticisms voiced at Cannes of the film's "apolitical" stance. "People are political. It's in the fibre of the thing. This is as much about my feeling about the English class system as it is about anything else.
"You're walking a bit of a tightrope, because it is so bleak, and the picture I've drawn of that part of London is not going to have the local council jumping for joy. But I photographed what was there. I tried very hard not to be sentimental or to poke fun at them because they haven't got the right wallpaper. I wanted to shoot London differently. I'm always fascinated by how dramatic and strangely beautiful those landscapes are."
HE acknowledges that some parts of the film are deeply autobiographical. His own father was an alcoholic who left the family home when Oldman was six, and finally drank himself to death. Gary himself had a much-publicised struggle with his own drink problem - he's now officially a nondrinking alcoholic. "One woman said to me she quite liked my movie, but she found it too personal. Since when has `too personal' been a criticism of a work of art? It's all personal."
So is there a lot of him, then, in Raymond - the tortured, violent, abusive petty criminal who dominates Nil By Mouth? "I've never hit anyone, because I'm not violent, but that self-loathing, and that alcoholic bottom he hits, talking to the walls, I've done all that." He sees a description of alcoholics as "egomaniacs with low self-esteem" as the perfect definition.
He's wary, though, of anyone trying to draw too direct a correlation between his own experiences and the events in the film, after some bruising treatment at the hands of the British tabloids. "There's some things I've said, where maybe I should have guarded myself a little more. But the tabloid press run away and turn it all upside down, and all of a sudden I'm reading in the News of the World that my Dad beat up my Mum. My family call me up and say Dad never hit Mum and I go `I know he didn't. I never said that'."
He knows that he has to expect this kind of treatment because of what he describes sardonically as his "swanky, slightly glossy profile", but his anger is clear. "Someone else popped up, who's a stepdaughter of my father. I've never met her, but a journalist called up, saying she wants to be reunited with me, and that we had both suffered at the hands of my father. How can you be reunited with someone when you were never united with them in the first place? I met this woman once in my life, at my Dad's funeral.
"When I first started out doing this, people thought, he wants to make a movie, but he's not really known as a writer or a director. Does he know what he's doing? So you get over that hurdle. If people don't like it, I can still take it off the shelf every couple of years and show it to my friends, and say this is my voice, I did something here."
Nil By Mouth opens on October 10th