NIL BY MOUTH

Gary Oldman is one of Britain’s most talented actors, yet he’s better known for his OTT villains than for films like Prick up your Ears. His impressive directorial debut, the slice-of-life drama Nil by Mouth, returns him to his south London roots and has already won awards in both Cannes and Edinburgh.

Gary Oldman is visibly upset. We’re sitting in his mum’s kitchen, and she’s just shown him a story in a woman’s magazine claiming that her husband, Gary’s father, used to beat her. "I’ve a good mind to write to them," she says. "Printing lies like that." Comforting her, Gary tries to make light of it, but you can see he’s unhappy that once again the press has gotten hold of the wrong end of the stick.

This particular calumny first arose back in May, when Nil by Mouth, the actor’s first film as writer/director, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival; after the press conference, a couple of tabloids, pouncing on the fact that the film - which concerns alcoholism, drug abuse, petty crime and domestic violence in south east London - was not only inspired by personal experience, but dedicated to Oldman’s father, ran sensationalist stories with headlines like ‘My dad was a thug!’. "Unfortunately, it seems I didn’t make myself very clear at that conference," says Oldman, somewhat generously. "My dad never hit my mother - that side of the Ray Winstone character came from someone else I knew. All my dad did was drink, sitting all day in the pub. Mum used to call it the magnet, ‘cos he just couldn’t walk past without being pulled in!’"

Although there’s no excuse for such sloppy journalism - Oldman has always insisted that, while his father, who left his wife and family when Gary was seven, certainly had a drink problem, he was never violent - it’s perhaps understandable that anyone seeing Nil by Mouth might assume it’s autobiographical, such is the harsh, unsentimental authenticity of its depiction of working-class life. It makes Mike Leigh look like a caricaturist and Ken Loach seem a romantic idealist.

There’s little in the way of story. Raymond simply spirals violently out of control after his junkie brother-in-law Billy rips him off, drunkenly indulging in a paranoid fantasy that his wife Val is cheating on him, and beating her up despite her protestations to the contrary. It’s a tough, raw, utterly convincing portrait of a particular way of life, it’s bleaker, more brutal moments beautifully offset by Oldman’s acknowledgement that for all their

faults, his characters remain people rather than monsters, with feelings, needs and reasons, however perverse or misguided, for what they do.

Nor is it only violence, drunkenness or profane language that characterises their lives [never has a British film made such fruitful use of so many ‘fucks’, ‘cunts’ and so on]; Oldman perfectly captures the humour, sense of solidarity [particularly among the downtrodden women] and the matter-of-fact resilience that allow them to survive whatever hardships may befall them. It’s an extraordinary debut, notable not only for the sheer spontaneity of it’s direction, dialogue and naturalistic performances [it looks improvised but isn’t], but for it’s emotional integrity and power. Indeed, it’s the closest thing to a Cassavetes movie ever made in this country.

Says Oldman, "I wanted the film to really represent the culture and neighbourhood I came from, which is why I breathed a sigh of relief when it went down so well with the British people who’ve seen it. I made it for Britain; in my arrogant way, I said fuck the rest of the world, fuck America, I’m not watering down the accents. And I think it’s okay. Mum thought it was accurate, anyway. And I’d like the folks around here to see it, because it’s not just an art-movie, it’s a love-letter to them. There were two things I really didn’t want to do: to patronise or take the piss out of them, because they’re great people and I love them, or to show them sentimentally.

Fiction it may be, but Nil by Mouth succeeds precisely because Oldman knows what he’s talking about. As if to underline the fact, when he returned from America to shoot the film, he not only took on as extras people he’d grown up with [and had his mother - "she’s got a good set of lungs for 76!" - contribute a heart-rendingly fitting rendition of Loving That Man of Mine for a pub sing-a-long], but even cast his sister, who’d never acted before, in a major role as Val’s strong-willed mother , Janet. "I asked her to take the part when an actress dropped out at the last moment," he explains. "But I didn’t want there to be a backlash against her from people thinking I’d cast her out of nepotism, so we listed her in the credits as ‘Laila Morse’ - it’s an anagram of mia sorella, Italian for ‘my sister’. Fortunately my sister was terrific, and has gone on to do other parts in television."