Waxing Roth

Traditionally, there are two kinds of British movie star for export - the sensitive, upper-class Ruperts, Ralphs and Jeremys who look so well in Edwardian topcoats or Elizabethan ruffles, and the yobs, the Garys and Tims who are happier with a gun in their hand and a scowl on their face. Market demands have meant more snobs than yobs, but to these eyes the yobs have always had the best moves, even in a career as chequered as that of Tim Roth.

Since he first exploded onto British TV almost two decades ago, Roth's choice of movies has been always interesting, sometimes brilliant and rarely boring. Now he has directed one of the most talked-about films of the year. In this, as in many other respects, his career has some strikingly parallels with his near-contemporary fellow-Londoner, Gary Oldman. Unlike Oldman, Roth grew up in a comfortable, middle-class part of London, but his background was unconventional. His parents were both left-wing activists, his father having changed his name from Smith after the second World War. "As a journalist he was travelling to places where the English weren't welcome," says Roth. "I like to think he took a German-Jewish name as a political statement."

He has been at pains to insist that his upbringing was not as comfortable as it might appear. "I was middle-class growing up, see, but I failed all the exams to go to the posh schools and ended up at a very, very bad school in Brixton. So, I know what it's like to be bullied. I was around some people who were truly f***ing scary."

After leaving school, the young, left-wing, Sex Pistols fan studied art without much enthusiasm before concentrating on acting. He was lucky enough to do his first screen work with two of the best English directors of the 1980s, acting for Mike Leigh in the TV drama Meantime alongside Oldman, and for the inspiring Alan Clarke in Made in Britain, in which he gave a coruscating performance as a nihilistic skinhead - he still describes this as his favourite of all his movies.

"Alan was the best," says Roth. "I saw Scum 10 times. After he died, there were all these Alan Clarke actors walking around London moaning, `What are we going to do now?' "

As the slightly older Oldman became internationally known through his performances as Sid Vicious in Sid and Nancy and Joe Orton in Prick Up Your Ears, Roth's career stalled after his role as a hitman in Stephen Frears's 1984 thriller, The Hit. The polemical dramas which he excelled at were increasingly out of tune with the mood of loadsamoney Britain.

It was his performance in Peter Greenaway's The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover, followed by his reunion with Oldman in Tom Stoppard's disappointing version of his own stage play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, which brought him to the attention of Robert Altman, who cast him as Vincent Van Gogh in Vincent and Theo. Roth decided it was time to leave the England he now despised.

"I always thought that, if I played Americans and I was good enough at the accent, then with a bit of luck they'd think I was American," he says. "Then when they found out that I wasn't, I'd get cast in anything. It would be like, `get that guy in', not `get that English guy'."

In the low-budget indie drama, Jumpin' at the Boneyard, he played an unemployed, depressed Irish-American trying to save his crack-addicted brother. "Jumpin' at the Boneyard could have been set in England," he says. "We have that kind of poverty and those kinds of problems. So, to come to America to play that kind of American was important to me - not to play the English bad guy in a Die Hard movie."

ROTH was attracted to the burgeoning American independent scene. "In the States, you can make a feature film for $38,000," he said. "We could do that in Britain, but no, it's Jeremy Irons and Kenneth Branagh . . . Americans have bought lock, stock and barrel the IronsBranagh England. And it's fake, an absolute con. Merchant Ivory? Bollocks."

His second American film was for an unknown first-time director named Quentin Tarantino. As Mr Orange, the undercover policeman bleeding profusely to death for all of Reservoir Dogs, he was a central part of the most sensational movie debut of the 1990s. He went on working for Tarantino, playing a bungling armed robber in Pulp Fiction and a bellboy in the misbegotten portmanteau movie, Four Rooms.

He defends Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction against accusations of excessive violence: "I like violent movies if they're true to the experience of violence. Alan Clarke was the king of that because he made films about real people in sad situations. Did you ever see Elephant (Clarke's film about murders in Northern Ireland)? The violence is real, it's political. I love violence in movies because it affects me, it hurts me.

"People see Reservoir Dogs thinking they've seen a really violent movie, but they haven't. You see maybe only three specific acts of violence, but it's always impending. It's in the air. It's what makes Quentin a great director."

Following roles in other indie movies such as Bodies, Rest and Motion, Little Odessa and the British romantic thriller, Captives, Roth took a rare mainstream role in a studio picture, going well over the top as the dastardly foppish villain opposite Liam Neeson in the Highlands swashbuckler, Rob Roy. The performance gained him a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination.

But he was soon back to the smaller films, playing a manipulative murder suspect in the claustrophobic Liar, and starring with rapper Tupac Shakur as a heroin addict in the black comedy, Gridlock'd, before working with Cinema Paradiso director Giuseppe Tornatore on the historical epic, The Legend of the Pianist on the Ocean, due here at the end of the year.

By this stage, Roth was already planning his own directorial debut, an adaptation of Alexander Stuart's harrowing novel, The War Zone, about the impact on a family of a father's incestuous relationship with his adolescent daughter. Once again, Roth seemed to be shadowing Oldman, whose Nil by Mouth, touched on themes of family violence and abuse. The parallels seemed even more marked when Roth cast Ray Winstone - so brilliant in Nil by Mouth - to play the father.

But The War Zone is a very different kind of film. Shot in rigorously composed, carefully lit long takes by cinematographer Seamus McGarvey, it seems to seek to impose a European art cinema classicism on its bleak and disturbingly ambiguous story, with harrowing performances from Winstone, Tilda Swinton and young newcomers Lara Belmont and Freddie Cunliffe.

Talking about directing, Roth harks back again to Alan Clarke. "It's only because of him I'm sitting here. Alan was wonderful with actors - you felt clutched, held close, protected. That's the atmosphere I was trying to create on set."

For Roth, making The War Zone marks a closing of the circle, a return to the country of his birth and to the kind of film he started out to make. "I was homesick for what I think film can be," he has said. "Now that Thatcher and Major have gone, who aimed at destroying the arts, I've come back again and found that political film-making is alive and there's real change."

Tim Roth will take part in an Irish Times/ Film Institute of Ireland public interview with Michael Dwyer in the IFC next Wednesday night following a screening of The War Zone. All tickets have been allocated