Gary Oldman has plucked his mother out of her South London home and whisked her away to Beverly Hills.

Oldman lives in the Hollywood Hills with his wife, model Donya Fiorentino, their seven month old son Gulliver and Alfie, his son by first wife Lesley Manville.

Oldman and his mother Kay, 79, reinforced their family bond while he was filming the searing, semi - autobiographical award winning Nil By Mouth, which starred Ray Winstone and Kathy Burke.

"She has lots to occupy her, like exercise classes, and she’s joined the senior citizens’ acting group. She seems to be enjoying herself and that’s the main thing," Oldman told me.

The actor who played Dracula for Francis Ford Coppola and Joe Orton in Prick Up Your Ears for Stephen Frears, has two other films planned for his "in your face" South London Series, one of which will be based on his mother’s experience of growing up in the thirties and forties.

But, before starting work on those projects, he plans to shoot a movie about New York Cops in the sixties and seventies, along the lines of films such as Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon.

"It’ll be energised in the same way Nil By Mouth was," one of Oldman’s associates told me. "Gary’s half - way through the script. The important thing is to get the ear right, so it sounds like New York."

He hopes to continue in the directing vein rather than playing villains like he did in The Fifth Element and the forthcoming Lost In Space, a role he took so his son Alfie could watch him on screen. "He’s too young to see all the others," Oldman explained

Drawing of Gary, with his mum in the background near some palm trees. She has sunglasses on and a top with ‘I love LA’ on, giving a thumb’s up sign.

(Copyright: The Daily Mail. Typed up by Vilma)

Imagine if you could distil the essence of Gary Oldman's visceral early performances, in Meantime, Sid & Nancy and The Firm, bottle it and use it as ink with which to write a screenplay. The words would singe the page - and the result would be something like Nil By Mouth, Oldman's first film as a writer - director, and our only glimpse so far this decade of the raging vitality which once characterised his acting. Oldman was raised in the area where the picture is set - Deptford, South London - and the richness of autobiography is palpable in the watchful way his camera loiters around the tortured characters, the smoky social clubs where they spend their evenings, and the dank, soulless flats that pass as home. Joy isn't much in evidence, but there's always a scrap brewing if your up for it.

At the centre of this film is Raymond, a man who might as well have "Did you spill my pint?" tattooed on one fist and "You looking at my bird?" on the other. From the moment you see him struggling to order a round of drinks, you know he's a GBH conviction waiting to happen. He is going to explode. The question is when, not if.

Nil By Mouth doesn't glorify or relish violence, but violent acts provide the film's narrative definition. It is only through the beatings which Raymond administers, first to his brother-in-law Billy, and then to his wife Valerie, that anything you could call a plot begins to surface. Oldman doesn't reveal how long the pattern of violence has been in place in this family, but there's a ritualistic feel to the way Raymond organises his attack on Valerie, waiting until she's asleep to call her down stairs, then verbally humiliating her before his fists finish what his mouth started. The film's menace doesn't come from gratuitous violence - there isn't any - but from the claustrophobic tension evoked by a director who insists on stranding his audience slap bang in the middle of a domestic war zone.

Although the bleakness of Nil By Mouth really gnaws at you, it doesn't feel sadistic - you can see where the film has tried to depart from the clichés of kitchen -sink drama. The long, sad shots of tower blocks at dawn and ask suggest that Oldman and his director of photography have been swotting up on the Dekalog films, though Kieslowski's influence doesn't permeate the whole movie.

Oldman originally considered shooting the movie in black and white, but the bloodless, washed - out colours create a fitting mournful sense of life having drained away. Another effective choice proves to be Eric Clapton's woozy blues score, which is perfect at capturing the lethargic rhythms of the character's lives.

It may sound impossible, but Oldman has sympathy for all his characters, even Raymond who is revealed, in a piercing monologue to be unwittingly repeating his own parents mistakes. Its important that the film allows us to eavesdrop at length on his aggressive, profane but often cruelly funny braggadocio, well before we witness him turning his Rottweweiler tendencies inwards on his own family.

There is room in Oldman's heart too for Billy, the strung-out heroin addict, and his desperate mother, so eager to relieve his pain that she drives him to his dealer and watches as he shoots up in the back of the car. Billy is in oblivion: he doesn't even notice his mother’s face crumpling as she realises that she's helping her son climb into his grave.

Nil By Mouth ends bravely on an ambiguous note of reconciliation which its possible to read as a fresh beginning or a sinister calm-before-the-storm.

(Copyright: Premiere Magazine. Typed up by Vilma)