Oldman Stretches Out in London

Gary Oldman is prowling through some of London’s seedier districts these days, but the actor isn’t preparing for his next role. In fact, he says he’s giving up acting--at least for the time being.

Instead, the chameleon-like thespian, who has donned so many guises for his film roles that few people would recognize him in person, will soon direct a movie in London that he wrote and will co-finance. He’s tentatively titled the project “Smoke” (although that’s likely to change, since director Wayne Wang’s “Smoke” is due out June 9).

“I had reached a point where I was beginning to feel that acting was very disruptive to my personal life,” Oldman says from London. “When you make a commitment to a project, you’re separated from your family and friends anywhere from 10 to 16 weeks at a time. That is the downside you pay for this career.”

Over the past three years, Oldman has worked almost constantly, starring in “Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” “Romeo’s Bleeding,” “True Romance,” “The Professional,” “Immortal Beloved,” “Murder in the First” and the upcoming Cinergi/Buena Vista dramatic adaptation of “The Scarlet Letter,” in which he stars with Demi Moore, Robert Duvall and John Plowright. Along the way he met and became engaged to Isabella Rosselini.

“I feel like I’ve played every emotion there is,” says the soft-spoken Oldman. “And right now I’m a little disenchanted with the industry.”

In part it was that disenchantment that prompted him to spend three months in front of a computer, writing “Smoke,” named after the 19th-Century slang term for London (which at the time sat under a cloud of smoke from the coal factories).

“[Charles] Dickens referred to it, I think, when he’d use the expression ‘pea-souper,’ ” Oldman says. “Then the word became a slang for any kind of industrial urban area.”

Oldman’s script is a modern-day slice-of-life story, semi-autobiographical, about a group of London blue-collar people. He says it will have little resemblance to the England pictured in Merchant Ivory films (“Howards End,” “The Remains of the Day”) with rolling green meadows and Tudor estates.

“It’s an idea that’s been knocking around in my head for five or six years,” he says. “But always if there’s territory you don’t really know, or undiscovered land you haven’t conquered, you become good at telling yourself you can’t go there.”

Yet Oldman says years of working with writers such as Alan Bennett and Christopher Hampton, not to mention such writer-directors as Francis Ford Coppola and Oliver Stone, have helped him form his own opinions about material.

In writing “Smoke,” the actor says, he has attempted to split away from traditional, linear storytelling structure. “I wanted to break away from that kind of storytelling. Who wrote the rules that all stories had to be told that way anyway?”

He also ignored one of Hollywood’s time-held traditions when he decided to put up his own money to partially finance the film. He expects to film it for less than 2 million, or about $3 million. He says the film will also be financed by a few private investors.

“In doing this, I’m trying to make the creative journey as pure as possible,” he says. “You can liken it to that of a painter. Only he or she can decide when it’s time to put down the brush. And no one in that process comes along and tells that artist to put more blue in it, or add some flowers in that corner.”

Keeping that same integrity in the film medium is extremely difficult, he says. “The film industry is money-driven, it always has been. Ultimately that makes it more difficult to be a creative person.”

Over the past several weeks Oldman has approached people within the industry to show them the script. He says he is quietly assembling a crew of designers and camera people who will work on the film. He’s currently scouting locations in London and is casting.

He has no plans to appear in the film. Shooting will begin in October. The film will be produced under the banner of his own company, SE8 (taken from the postal code of the London district where he was raised), which he founded with his manager, Douglas Urbanski.

“I’ve tried to write this film with an enormous amount of honesty,” he adds. “So I don’t want anyone to tell me that I can’t do this or that. I don’t want to hear that I can’t have the actors speak in London slang because no one will understand them. If American audiences can’t understand them, then I’ll put subtitles on.”

As for his career as an actor, Oldman says he has no plans to return to it.

“I am tired of acting,” he admits. “I’ve now reached a point where I feel that everything I do doesn’t always have to be geared around Hollywood, or chasing that part for that Oscar . . . or whatever all of that means.”*