NEW OLDMAN

David Furnish

Gary Oldman's directorial debut, Nil by Mouth, is a slice of South London life that makes the heart thump with anxiety

DAVID FURNISH: Did you write and direct Nil by Mouth because you wanted to try your hand at filmmaking, or was it out of a need to tell this particular story?

GARY OLDMAN: I wanted to tell this specific story more than I wanted to throw a camera around. The film follows very much in the tradition of social realism, because I wanted to see a subject like this tackled with honesty. So often the style council gets hold of this kind of story. In my own journey [with alcoholism], having been an insider and having witnessed people destroy their lives, I, as Gary, find it very hard to laugh at that stuff. But it's not specifically a movie about that - it's about the people first.

DF: Was it a difficult film to get made?

GO: Because it's very colloquial and about a specific class and neighborhood in London, it was a hard sell. It would have been easier to get it green-lighted if I'd been in it myself, but there are no stars in it. So it was tough trying to find some idiot out there to write a check. We raised $1.9 million, but that would've meant only a twenty-day shoot and a scramble to get it done. I didn't want to work like that. I wanted to give the actors a rehearsal period and to work on the relationships between the characters, so I ended up putting a lot of my own money in to buy me the time to make the film how I envisioned it, without people in suits coming to the table saying, "It's a bit downbeat . . . it needs more jokes . . . the ending's ambiguous . . . can you make it more uplifting?" In fact this particular patient died several times on the operating table - you know, where checks hadn't come through and I couldn't pay the crew and I was putting up some art that I had for auction. We ran on sheer faith. But I feel I've battled bigger things, you know, than a film. I was certainly at my fighting weight going in.

DF: Did you write the screenplay with improvisation in mind?

GO: It was very structured. One of the two questions I like answering the most about the film is, "Did you have more than one camera?" And I say, "No, actually, we only had one." And then people ask, "Was it improvised?" And I say, "No, it wasn't." That's not necessarily a compliment to my writing, but to the performers. But the script wasn't written in tablets of stone. If something didn't feel right in an actor's mouth, I'd say, "Just say it how you want to say it. Say it how you feel it." I don't know how skilled I am as a director in terms of what I can say to actors, but I have a good bullshit detector. Sometimes I would say, "I can't breathe in this room. Can you?" And they'd go, "What's the matter?" And I'd say, "It's all this acting in here." Your own barometer is all you have to go by, and often what makes a good director is knowing when not to say something. On occasions you can find yourself on a film set where the person who is wearing the director's hat is only trying to justify his position.

What's fascinating is that when you write a script, it's almost a stream of consciousness. You have an idea that it means something, but you're not always sure what. Then when you get on the set, the actors teach you. I found they would constantly surprise me, and I'd go, "Hmm. That's interesting. It's not what I meant, but it might be fight anyway." Or it'd actually be better than what I intended, which was really exciting.

DF: Do you think your recovery from alcoholism contributed to the film?

GO: I think it played a big part in the whole process. What I learned through all that is the idea of progress not perfection. This whole journey . . . well, for one thing, without my recovery I'd be dead, so we wouldn't even be having this conversation.

DF: Was it cathartic making the film?

GO: A lot of people have asked me that, but it wasn't, really. It's ultimately a work of fiction drawn from my experiences and memories of growing up. Writing something and shooting it, you don't really have time to think about it. It wasn't until I got back to New York and I had the images coming back at me in the editing room that I started thinking, God, it's sad and dark. Do I really see the world like that?

DF: When you were growing up, did you witness or experience in your family the kind of physical violence that Ray [Ray Winstone] metes out to Val [his wife, played by Kathy Burke] in the film?

GO: That kind of violence was on the periphery of the family, because my sisters, who are a lot older than me, married boyfriends who - I wouldn't call them villains, I wouldn't call them gangsters, but they were . . .

DF: A little unsavory?

GO: That's the way I'd describe it. These were people who came from a real drinking culture, where your passport to manhood was that, at fourteen or fifteen, you go to the pub, drink beer, play darts, tell sexist, racist jokes. You've got to be homophobic - all that. You've got to be that guy at the bar. And I tried playing that character because there was peer group pressure and I wanted to fit in, but I was never comfortable. So my memories - the sensation - of that is still very much a part of me. It's shit we pack in a suitcase, isn't it? And we take it wherever we go.

DF: Were you conscious of trying to take a sociological look at that South London culture, or was it more about you purging private feelings?

GO: Very simply, when I knew that the film was going to be about this family, I knew it was about drag addiction, alcoholism, and chronic codependency: how people like Janet [Laila Morse] - who takes her son Billy [Charlie Creed-Miles] out to go and score drugs - tolerate things they know they shouldn't. She knows she should say, "No, I am not going to be an accomplice to this, I am not going to be an enabler." But what do you do with your kids when you're in that situation? These are people who need help and probably won't get it. It's different for me. I live in a different world, where I'm able to see a psychotherapist if there's a problem. But these people aren't equipped to do that. So the film's message is bleak in that regard.

DF: Where did Billy come from?

GO: Billy is partly based on someone I am quite close to, who is still bouncing around out there, and he's a little bit of me, really. Billy's almost like a ghost; he sort of drifts in and drifts out. Heroin is a very isolating drug, I think.

DF: The heroes in the film are the women characters. It's hard to find anything redeeming about the men.

GO: I was brought up by my mother and my two sisters, although they're older than me and fled the nest very young, so I was technically raised as an only child, but I was very much loved. But there the men would be in the pub talking nonsense, and the women would be at home talking common sense. Speaking very generally, I find that women are spiritually, emotionally, and often physically stronger than men.

DF: Why do you think women in a situation like Val's find it so difficult to walk away? I was sorry to see her go back to Ray.

GO: I think that's what happens. I've known women who've suffered abusive relationships like that for years and years. I know it sounds perverse, but it's absolutely rooted in love, which is why that situation with Ray and Val in the movie spirals. A lot of us would like to think we wouldn't let it go that far. But it's all tied in with cycles of abuse and the sins of the father that are visited on the son. Ray just happens to see Val having a good time with someone playing pool, and it obsesses him to the point that he says, "You're not going to abandon me, are you?"

DF: But then, because of that fear, he heats her up.

GO: I know. Toward the end of the film, I try . . . not to redeem him, but to say maybe the reason people get like this is, as Ray puts it, he never got a kiss and a cuddle from his dad.

DF: You've said in past interviews that your father wasn't there for you, emotionally, when you were young. That message comes oat poignantly in the speech Ray makes about going to visit his dad in the hospital and getting no words of affection - hence "nil by mouth." But you dedicated the film to your father. Is that a way of saying you loved him?

GO: Yeah. There's some of my father in the father that Ray talks about, although not in Ray himself. I never told my father I loved him before he died, and I have a lot of issues about that. They're all swimming around in my head, in my heart, unresolved, and in a way it felt fitting to dedicate the film to him. Also, I had not become successful during his lifetime, so he never saw any of the things I've achieved. So I just thought, Well, this is for you.

DF: What was your visual objective?

GO: The film is scruffily real. I wanted you to feel that you were sitting in the same room with these people and that you can't breathe, so I went for these very big close-ups, which, at first, Ron [Fortunato, the cinematographer] took some convincing about. When I said I wanted to shoot a lot of it on the zoom, the response was, "What, like Hawaii Five-O, like Columbo?" At times it was frustrating, but I guess what I was trying to get was a sense of claustrophobia and, at the same time, a sense of voyeurism, so that the audience would be like a fly on the wall.

DF: One of the most arresting parts of the film is the jump-cut sequence of Ray breaking down. What were you trying to achieve with that?

GO: He's having what you would call a real alcoholic bottom, and I wanted to capture that schizophrenic frenzy - where one minute you're in tears, and a split-second later you're feeling shame and remorse, and then you're laughing - by fracturing the scene. It's hard to explain to someone who's never experienced it. I know some people find it hard to feel anything for Ray, but I've been there so I have a kinder view of him in that particular scene. I had a screening in London and invited some people from a rehabilitation center I know, and the lobby was just full of all these people pacing up and down, smoking, through most of the film. And they went, "Oh, man, I can't take that, it's too . . . it's fucking with me head."

DF: Yes. It's a hard film to escape from because of the way you hold everybody so close with the camera.

GO: Well, it is a little unbearable at times, and so is life.

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