An Actor Takes On a Non-Acting Job

It’s rare for the British film industry to welcome a debutante writer-director with an assured talent and a distinctive, fluid visual style.

It’s even more notable when such a person emerges from the ranks of British actors who make a handsome living in Hollywood by playing over-the-top psychopathic villains with English accents in big-budget but formulaic action-adventure films.

Gary Oldman, then, has caused a stir in his native Britain. His first film, “Nil by Mouth,” set in Deptford, a deprived area of southeast London where he grew up, is a grueling account of a dysfunctional working-class family beset by alcoholism, drug addiction, petty crime and domestic violence all within its own ranks. At last year’s Cannes Film Festival “Nil by Mouth,” which opens Friday, won lavish praise and one of its cast, Kathy Burke, was voted best actress for portraying a battered wife. The British were surprised: No one had imagined Oldman capable of such work.

It’s understandable. Until “Nil by Mouth,” Oldman was regarded as a hugely gifted actor, remembered as self-destructive punk rocker Sid Vicious in “Sid and Nancy” and gay playwright Joe Orton in “Prick Up Your Ears.” But more recently he has also become infamous as a perennial underachiever on film, and in person as a hell-raising alcoholic. A man, then, who seemed to be wasting his talent.

“Nil by Mouth” has done much to redress this view, and there are few signs of dissipation about Oldman these days. He strides briskly into a London hotel room and offers a firm handshake. Clear-eyed, pencil-thin and alert, he has a spring in his step, more than a trace of Deptford in his accent, and a vigorous candor in his conversation.

He is guarded about just one topic: the length of time he has been alcohol-free. “I’ve been in recovery, umm, a while,” he says vaguely. But given that one underlying theme of “Nil by Mouth” is the recurrent nature of addictive behavior, one sees why he might feel wary of triumphantly claiming to have licked a destructive habit.

The head of the unfortunate family in his film is a violent, profane, alcoholic drug-pusher (Ray Winstone) who belittles and brutalizes his wife (Burke) and her junkie son (Charlie Creed-Miles). To call the story harrowing viewing is an understatement; yet in writing it, Oldman drew on his own experience.

His own father, if not violent, was alcoholic; he left the family when Oldman was 7, leaving them destitute. And Oldman in his turn became drawn to the heavy-drinking pub culture of south London.

“I was pushed into that pub at 14, 15, and it was: play darts, tell dirty jokes, enter that whole world,” he recalls. “You’re supposed to stand at the bar and be a bloke. You don’t cry or show emotions.” He adds that this bottled-up inarticulateness (to which the film’s title alludes) is often expressed in violent, drunken rage.

This left its mark on him: “It’s extraordinary how you can fit into the shoes of the past,” he says. “You look at your life and your father’s, and think, that happened to us both, and that, and that--and I’m repeating it. I’m like a blueprint. I’m turning into, or have become, my dad.”

Certainly his past is checkered. He has been married to two actresses, Lesley Manville (they have a son) and Uma Thurman; he was once engaged to Isabella Rosellini, and is now wed to American model Donya Fiorentino, who bore him a son in the fall. He admits, laughing mirthlessly, that he was in his share of abusive relationships.

“You don’t have to throw a punch,” he says, looking somber. “I remember a dreadful, ugly argument in a restaurant in Dallas which ended with me tipping a glass of water over someone’s head. Then in a fit of drunken madness, I thumped my hand down on to a wine glass, broke it and needed stitches in my hand. But that water hurt [the other person] a lot more than my hand hurt.” He sighs. “It was such a terrible thing to do to someone.”

One can see that Oldman’s past might be a rich seam from which to mine a screenplay about the damage alcoholics wreak on those around them. (“I wrote the first draft in five weeks,” he says. “I’d talked about it for ages, so when I finally sat down to write, it just poured out.”) But the real surprise of “Nil by Mouth” is the confidence of his directing and the vindication of his risky choices.

Many realist British films about working-class life (by directors like Ken Loach) have a static, detached quality; audiences can feel distanced from the characters. Even Mike Leigh uses the finely observed performances of actors to draw us closer to characters, rather than his own camera. But Oldman didn’t have social realism in mind.

“I didn’t want it to look that way, and certainly not a slick, fashionable, fast-cut film like a Tarantino or ‘Trainspotting,’ ” he says. “People have said ‘Nil by Mouth’ feels like a documentary, but with documentaries you keep the camera in one position, hold it wide and have everything happen in the frame. Which I didn’t do.

“I don’t do high shots or low angles. Everything meets you straight on, as it would in life. Some films are shot from a point of view only flies could have. I wanted the action pretty much head-on.” He acknowledges two directors, Italian realist (and father of his ex-fiancee) Roberto Rosellini and the legendary American independent John Cassavetes.

Oldman’s aim was to convey claustrophobia: “I wanted a visual sense of being trapped in these small [municipal] flats. Put a big family in a place like that and you feel you can’t escape, especially if the vibe in there is unhappy. So I shot tight and close a lot.”

But he also wanted the audience to feel like voyeurs, so he often used long lenses--even for relatively close shots. As a result the film has an edgy, bracing, intimate quality one associates with superior American TV cop dramas like “NYPD Blue” or “Homicide: Life on the Street.”

It also shares with those shows a sure feel for the rhythms of street language. Equally foul-mouthed and funny, the Deptford men tell long anecdotes in often obscure Cockney slang.

“There’s an unwritten rule which says you can’t let characters ramble on,” Oldman says. “But I thought, why not? I love listening to people talk, and I know lots of people who are more vibrant, alive and colorful than a lot of scripts I read.”

The risks did not stop there. He put $2 million of his own money into the film’s $4-million budget, and decided to go for broke: “I made this for Britain, so if it succeeds anywhere else it’s a bonus. I thought, [expletive] America, I’m not having my arm twisted by a distributor or studio telling me I had to water down the accents, hire big stars or make it more comprehensible. I was very cavalier about it.”

But as time went on, he worried. What if audiences genuinely could not understand a word? At one point he considered putting subtitles on the film, until he screened it in America: “To my surprise, they got it. It’s so visceral, even if they don’t catch all the slang, they can follow it. Films like ‘GoodFellas’ and ‘Clockers’ are set in small-knit communities and full of colloquialisms. No one suggests putting subtitles on Spike Lee films.”

As though these commercial risks were not enough, Oldman compounded them by opposing any notions of casting familiar faces. “It certainly would have helped me finance it,” he agrees. “But if I were in it, or I’d cast, say, Tim Roth, there’s a personality in the baggage you bring to the screen. As it is, people have seen this film and said, ‘I’d forgotten we were watching actors.’ I really liked the idea of the audience being voyeurs, so I went with actors who weren’t established, at least not to Americans.”

The accolades for “Nil by Mouth” prompt the question: Where does all this leave his often disappointing acting career? After early promise, he has shone only intermittently: as Dracula in Francis Ford Coppola’s film, and as an intriguingly creepy Lee Harvey Oswald in Oliver Stone’s “JFK.”

But he has also appeared in some distinctly forgettable films: “The Scarlet Letter,” as Beethoven in “Immortal Beloved.” Oldman played villains in two Luc Besson films--”Leon” and “The Fifth Element,” and also in “Air Force One.” Later this year he’ll be seen in “Lost in Space,” in which, yes, he plays another bad guy.

“Yes, I did it,” says Oldman in mock-confessional style. “I did ‘Air Force One.’ It’s conveyor-belt, multiplex, popcorn stuff, not my cup of tea. I wouldn’t go to see it.

“But I do those films so I can make another ‘Nil by Mouth.’ I want to be able to have that freedom. I have commitments, I have a family, I have to put food on the table like everyone else. I don’t exactly make $15 million a movie. So I took two years off acting to make ‘Nil by Mouth.’ And it nearly bankrupted me.”

Does this suggest a disaffection with acting? He snorts derisively: “I’ve been bored with acting for years. I did 10 years of theater [most notably at London’s Royal Court]. I loved rehearsing, first night, maybe the first week. Then I wanted to move on. What’s the big deal in being anointed the Hamlet of your generation, or waiting for [theater critics] to come along and say, ‘OK, he can hang in the hall of fame’?

“All I’ve done with films is to take myself out of the game. I’m not chasing an Oscar anymore. I’ve turned down movies in which people have become stars or won Oscars. Because at the time I’d just finished another movie. Or I didn’t want 20 weeks filming in Poland in the winter.”

Oldman hopes his resolve will not shut off all offers of good acting roles: “There are people out there I respect and I’d work for. But even if Scorsese knocks on my door, I won’t [necessarily] drop everything to work with him. I’ll ask: Where’s it filming? Do I need a rest? How much does he pay?”

In part he’s trying to find equilibrium in both his public and private life. After nine years in New York (a city he loves), he is moving to Los Angeles, where Donya Fiorentino’s daughter from a previous relationship now lives: “I didn’t much like L.A., but I liked this woman. So it’s a set of happy compromises, a small sacrifice for all the other good stuff.”

It’s hard to escape the notion that new chapters are just beginning in all aspects of Oldman’s life. “Hmmm,” he says, pondering on this. “Well, put it like this--I’m certainly trying to break some cycles.”