In NBM, Gary Oldman touches base with the a past darkened by violence and alcoholism. But the film signals a brighter future for the British actor/ director.

"Gary Oldman: Madman or genius?", asked the cover page of Premier movie magazine a few years ago. At that time, "Madman" seemed the more appropriate title for the tearaway and alcoholic Britsh actor who, despite "thinking he had Lester Piggot in his jockey shorts", was making it reasonably big in Hollywood. Now Oldman, though still living in Los Angeles - and with an American accent to hand if he wants to convince fans he isn't British at all - has certain claims to be considered, if not a genius, at least more widely talented than we might have thought.

This is because he has at last kicked the booze and married Donya Fiorentino, whom he met in rehab. It's also because, against most people's expectations, he's directed his first film, Nil By Mouth, which won Kathy Burke teh Best Actress award at Cannes last year, and should by rights have won Ray Winstone the Best Actor award, too. It is an entirely British project in style and content, set in the working-class area of south London where Oldman grew up. And it's a coruscating study of the damage that drink can do to a whole family. Winstone's paterfamilias abuses his wife (Burke) and makes life miserable for himself and everybody after his junkie brother-in-law steals from him. Totally paranoid, he believes his wife is having an affair. The film is an extraordinarily intense study of that kind of urban just-this-side-of-the-law existence that Oldman experienced as a teenager, but which most Hollywood stars, given similar beginnings, would probably have been incapable of remembering with such accuracy - or of wishing to see on film.

That its artistic success meant a lot to Oldman was evident at Cannes when, hearing The Guardian's first admiring review of teh film, he is said to have shed tears. But don't bank on that. The Mail reporter, who also liked the film, said the actor cried on his shoulder - which Oldman says is "utter balls". One thing is certain, the film clearly means a lot to Oldman, and much more than the rather silly villains he has, of late, played in such films as The Fifth Element and Air Force One. Those films though, paid for NBM, which cost about $4.5 million, much of that stemming from his own pocket. The film, it's title echoing the notice beside the bed of the insensate drunk at the centre of the story, ends as a kind of tribute to Oldman's father. Oldman senior left Gary's mother at the age of six and drank - like his son - eventually dying of alcoholism. It isn't true, as the tabloids said to Oldman's disgust, that NBM entirely mirrors his father's life or that he was really so violent towards his wife. But there is no question that the feeling of redemption at the end of this very tough film, littered with swear words, has something to do with father and son. As Oldman puts it: "I realised i was repeating a lot of the behaviour of my dad, and what i've tried to do in my owm life is to break that cycle. I drank for 25 years over my father, but in the end you have to resolve that or go under. You have to find some way to forgive. Wherever you are Dad, here it is on the screen. I forgive you." He says that whatever he has used for the story. he's used with disrection and respect; that certain things that happened in real life (though not between his mother and father) were far worse than anything he put in the film. "You remember where the wife gets beaten up? That was taken from an event that actually happened in my family. Only, in reality, the man hit the woman with a steel-capped boot and tried to drown her. Some things were so horrendous i couldn't possibly put them in."

Winstone, he says, plays only a part of his father, with a bit of Oldman himself thrown in, plus a slice of a mate he knew in school and an ex brother-in-law, too. It was risky business, but his family has seen the film and he thinks "they were very moved by its honesty". He says he set out to make a sort of love letter, something from the heart. The last thing he wanted to do was patronise or disgrace them. "They don't fel sorry for themselves. That is what is is chamion about my family. We had some tough times. When my dad left, we didn't have two half-pennies to rub together. So Mum went out and worked two jobs. And she wasn't the only heroic woman in the family.They don't do so well on self-esteem; these amazing women. But they ought to, because there's an extraordniary stoicism and resilience about them. That has its bad side as it keeps them coming back for more, no matter what. But they never ever give up, and that's good."

At the end of the film, in a pub sing-song led by Edna Dore, there's an emotional rendering of Lovin' Dat Man Of Mine, from the film Showboat. The voice is that of Oldman's 76 year old mother, whom be bought over to New York for the recording. He also cast his sister, at that time, had never acted before - she's listed as Laila Morse, which is an anagram for mia sorella (my sister). Burke sums up her performance: "When she got over her nervousness at the start, i had to pull all the stops out to equal her. She knew exactly what it was all about." No doubt about it, NBM is an intense personal affair, made the more so by Oldman's taking people off the streets of his old neighbourhood to be in the film.

Despite the fact that he has made big money in the states, Oldman insists he made the film for these people and resisted any attempt to water down either the accents or the language. "Fuck America and the rest. They'll have to lump it. I've done enough for a general audience. This is for one particular one." Oldman has done a lot for a general audience, and he shows signs of getting a bit sick of it. Particularly because the audience, or the people who want to attract it, want him to do roughly the same thing again and agian, he believes. He says he knows that he hasn't got Andy Garcia's face or a gym-toned body, but he doesn't see why he should play villains all the time. "Honestly, i am beginning to get tired of me."

"Me" wasn't always Dracula and suchlike. After enrolling at the Rose Bruford College of Speech and Drama (where he's now an honorary fellow and rather prouder of that than any other accolades), he made his name at the Royal Court in plays such as Serious money and Women Beware Women. Then he broke into film, through television with Alan Clarke's The Firm, and Mike Leigh's Meantime, and with Alex Cox's Sid and Nancy, Stephen Frear's Prick Up Your Ears, and NickRoeg's Track 29 - five widely differing parts that proved him much more than just a colourful character actor able to do a lot of accents. There weren't too many British films about at that time, and there were people like Daniel Day-Lewis and Tim Roth competing for the few decent parts. "Daniel had the right accent too which most people thought was well beyond me."

So Hollywood seemed the obvious place to go, both for the money, since he was skint at the time, and for "the opportunity to get regular practise." Once on the other side of the Atlantic, he landed the part of a lawyer in Crminal Law, who discovers his client is a murderer and rapist. He played the role of a violent gangster in State Of Grace, and portrayed Lee Harvey Oswald in JFK. Then, Coppola beckoned with Bram Stoker's Dracula and that seemed to set the sort of pattern for the rest of his American career. True Romance followed, a film in which he played a foul-mouthed and drug dealing pimp. "When I read the script, I laughed my leg off," he says, "I loved the whole cocktail of it. I thought it would lubricate my tool. But it hardly made me into a leading man." Shortly after he arrived in L.A. from New York for Dracula, Oldman ended up one night wrapped around a lamp-post in his car (minus a driving licence) and then handcuffed in a police car. It was the start of an affair with the tabloids back home that, he maintains, lad to so many half truths and "downright lies" about himself; and the bitterness clung on. Broken relationships with Uma Thurman and isabella Rosellini kept him in the gossip writers' headlines and the drinking did the rest. "OK" he says, "I was an idiot. But I wasn't the kind of idiot they said i was. I did a lot of stupid things. When you're drunk and you think you can pull any bird in the room and they'll just love the idea of it. You also think you can say anything you like to anybody without them taking offence. Actually, you need the sauce to fill whatever hole that's there in yourself. And believe it or not, I was always a bit shy and retiring, really. Honest. But a lot of the time, i wasn't partying. I was drinking alone, which is worse, it's often solitary and desperate. I got to the point where I was sick and tired of being sick and tired. I talked on the phone when it wasn't plugged in, and i was getting out of bed, crawling across the floor on my hands and knees, vomiting on the shower and blaming it on the shampoo. You name it, i've probably been there and back again."

He went into treatment and, because he was a celebrity, couldn't do it anonymously. So he chose to come clean about it all. There was no announcement of nervous exhaustion. Instead he chose to say: "I have this illness, I suffer from this disease and I need all the help I can get." He remembers that on the wall at the Alcoholics Anonymous meetings he went to, were the words: "Would you do to another person what you do to yourself?" And he thought, "I wouldn't do it to an enemy." Recovery, he now say, really meant being nice to himself. And what kept him going was the rather American thought that most people are a lot sicker than they think they are, and that most need therapy. NBM was a kind of therapy by itself, though he is adament that he coulf never had made it if he'd been set on drinking. He says it was the hardest thing he ever did. But still he wasn't falling asleep at night. "I was so tired, I was going into a coma. I've never worked so hard in my life. And at the end i felt as if i'd never want to go through it again." Oldman says he wants to make more films since he is ever so slightly bored with acting. But maybe if Woody Allen called.....apparently he did once and the timetable just wasn't going to work out. Just his luck. Even so, he's quite grateful that acting has given him so much - such as the funds to acquire a valuable collection of paintings, and the capability of looking after his children (a son by his first marriage to Lesley Manville and a new baby with Fiorentino) in ways that he as a child, hadn't known himself. Celebrity doesn't interest him much, he says. In fact, he claims, it frightens him. "I once had dinner with Brad Pitt at the Ivy in London and when we came out of the restaurant we were surrounded by hordes of photographers waiting for him, not me. We had to drive off like the clappers with them chasing us. And they were chasing us right through the red lights. It was like the Grand Prix, going through the centre of London. I couldn't believe it. "For me, it's generally OK here. People just say 'Oh yes, it's him. So bloody what.' It's Ok in New York too, because people are too busy going about their business to care. But in Los Angeles, you can't walk the streets or go into a shop or restaurant without a crowd forming. I can't imagine what someone like Tom Cruise suffers all the time, everywhere he goes. It's got to do things to your head, and they can't be very nice things either."

(Copyright: The Age Magazine)

Found and typed up by a member of The Vampyre's Kiss mailing list. Thank you!

Gary Oldman: Yes, it seems like finally Iīve got to play other parts again. At last, I was a little lazy with my movie selection and my featuring.

WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?

I didnīt feel this fire anymore, this excitement. And at the shooting - to be honest - I didnīt do a great toil. I reached, what people wanted me to do, with the smallest expense.

IN THE TV-SERIES, SMITH`S RATHER A FUNNY FIGURE, A BAD CLOWN.

Thatīs how I wanted to play him, overdone, with wild grimaces. But the director checked me and me play him with more earnest. So I had to delay my coming-out as a comedian once more.

WHATīS YOURE OPINION ON THE MOVIEīS IDEA, THE COLONIZATION OF THE UNIVERSE?

I think the ideaīs attractive, but I had to choice, I think, I wouldnīt travel to outer space. Iīm quite comfortable here.

Typed up by: Chiara aka Stan