Stress, we are told, is a given in modern life. According to director Mike Newell, "everyone believes that their job is uniquely stressful. Whether you talk to an insurance salesman or a steelworker or a gardener, they all will tell you that what they do is more stressful than anything else. The idea that everyone's job is stressing them to death made me laugh."
It's a fair point, but it's interesting to hear it coming from Newell. The last time I saw him, in 1991, he was working on the Irish film Into the West. Brought in as a replacement director at the last minute, he faced a series of nightmarish problems, including a cast and locations he hadn't chosen, the loss of a leading actor in the first week with a broken collarbone, and trying to shoot an adventure movie in our dreadful late-autumn weather. My memory is of Newell doing an almost impossible job in incredibly stressful circumstances.
"Well, yes," he says. "But you see, the danger really lies in bottling it up. And I certainly don't do that. I run around shouting and waving my arms and screaming at people. I'm sure the people who worked on Into the West absolutely hated me for the way I behaved."
Newell's new film is about stress. Pushing Tin is based on a 1996 article in the New York Times , called "Something's Got to Give", about the New York Terminal Approach Radar Control (TRACON) centre, an anonymous building where air traffic for the three airports in the New York metropolitan area is directed. If you're nervous about flying, you probably shouldn't see it - and it's unlikely to turn up on in-flight entertainment schedules.
This is the most congested piece of airspace on the planet, and the controllers make split-second decisions every day which may endanger hundreds of lives. It's what Newell describes as an "alpha male" job, attracting the macho and the driven - the financial rewards are good, but the burn-out rate is high. In the script, written by Cheers creators Glen and Les Charles, John Cusack plays the top gun among the TRACON guys (and with one token exception, they are all guys), edgy, arrogant and brilliant at his job, who finds his position threatened by new arrival Billy Bob Thornton.
In a way, Newell agrees, the film is a portrait of an early mid-life crisis, with thirtysomething Cusack losing his grip on his job, his marriage and his sense of reality. It's also an exploration of dysfunctional male attitudes to work and the place it has in our lives.
Pushing Tin is an odd hybrid, a satire about work and marriage which takes on some of the trappings of a romantic comedy (the most unsuccessful parts of the story, as it happens). It's an unusual mix for a Hollywood movie, and Newell concurs when I compare it to Tin Men, Barry Levinson's film about rival salesmen in early-1960s Baltimore, with Richard Dreyfuss and Danny De Vito locked in a similar battle of self-destructive attrition.
"That was one of the things that concerned us, whether the story was too close to Tin Men, with all that stuff about professional rivalry seeping into people's marriages, and infidelity used as a weapon. But I thought that Glen and Les's screenplay rose well above that."
Although he has been making movies for two decades, you'd be hard pushed to identify a Mike Newell style. He is one of those British directors, like Stephen Frears and Michael Apted, who started out in television, and moved into film-making in the 1970s and 1980s. Like Frears, his stated commitment is to script and story rather than personal expression.
Along the way, he has done some very fine work: Dance With a Stranger, for example, with Miranda Richardson as condemned killer Ruth Ellis, was one of the best British films of the 1980s. But it was his work on Four Weddings and a Funeral which finally established him as a bankable director of Hollywood studio movies.
He confirms that he turned down the opportunity to direct that film's quasi-sequel, Notting Hill, although he's complimentary about the astuteness of the finished film. "It wasn't for me, and I told them I just didn't believe it could work, unless they got Julia Roberts in the main role. And, of course, they managed to do that in the end. But I think that people really underestimate what Hugh Grant brings to a film. He's very, very important to the success of Notting Hill."
After Four Weddings, Newell set his sights on the US. Donnie Brasco, his stylish mob movie with Al Pacino and Johnny Depp, showed him at home in one of the most American of genres. His eye for the detail of American blue-collar life is again on show in Pushing Tin (although, like more and more US-set movies, the film was actually shot in Canada). "These are guys doing an extraordinary job, but living in very ordinary circumstances," he says. "It was important to get across in the look of the film, the kinds of houses they live in, the places they drink, the place they work."
More problematic was making that work look interesting on screen: after all, there's only so much excitement to be gained out of filming a small, flickering green screen with little dots moving slowly across it. "We did cheat a bit," admits Newell. "We speeded up the rate at which the planes move across the screen, because the real speed just didn't work. I think that's a justifiable licence to take, and we also devised a simplified three-dimensional representation of what was actually happening in the flight lanes."
So, all you nervous air travellers shouldn't worry - that highly-strung traffic controller pushing your particular piece of tin through the crowded skies actually has a couple of extra seconds to decide your fate. What a relief . . .
Pushing Tin is on general release