The movie Gary Oldman couldn’t get insured to make: “The confidence in me was zero”
With a slightly worrying knack for playing villains, Gary Oldman has risen to the top of the Hollywood ranks since he made his screen debut in 1982’s Remembrance, graduating from a modest British actor to an Oscar-winning star.
From the earliest roles in his career, including the bigoted punk in Mike Leigh’s Meantime and the Sex Pistols’ troubled bassist Sid Vicious in Sid and Nancy, Oldman demonstrated an interest in challenging characters, not shying away from themes that might scare some actors off. Naturally, when it came to making his directorial debut, the actor opted for a pretty taxing subject matter as well.
After he’d already established himself in Hollywood with a dreadlocked turn in True Romance and as the sociopathic DEA agent in Léon: The Professional, Nil By Mouth marked Oldman’s first foray behind the camera. Taking inspiration from Leigh and Alan Clarke, his film harked back to the gritty socio-realist tradition of his native Britain, explored through domestic abuse, alcoholism, and drug addiction, with Ray Winstone and Kathy Burke playing members of an incredibly dysfunctional family. It’s a beautifully executed hard watch, which the man was sceptical about actually bringing to fruition.
“It was a miracle that the movie was ever made. Another problem was that I couldn’t get bonded. I hadn’t directed, and because of my reputation, they saw me as unstable,” Oldman admitted in My First Movie: Twenty Celebrated Directors Talk About Their First Film by Stephen Lowenstein. “I’m the writer-director and producer! I’m not going to be able to take my hands off the film and let the bonding company come in and take over the picture. I mean, the confidence in me was completely zero,” he added.
Oldman experienced a period of alcoholism in the years leading up to his debut film, and this was well-documented, including a drunk-driving incident. People evidently weren’t keen to back him, although it seemed like working on Nil By Mouth was actually his saving grace, as he has been sober since its release in 1997.
To get the project off the ground, Oldman relied on Luc Besson, with whom he had worked in Léon and The Fifth Element. “But in the end, Luc put up the bond,” he explained. Undeterred, the first-time director didn’t care that people had no faith in him; he was going to make this film whether it was successful or not.
“I just said, ‘Fuck ’em.’ I had a vision. I had a passion. I knew what I wanted. I knew what I could see. I didn’t know whether it was going to be any good, but it was going to be my film. I was going to stand or fall by it. If it was no good, then it was no good because of Gary. So I was happy to have the responsibility,” he candidly put forth as the driving force behind his stubbornness.
Nil By Mouth won two Baftas and remains one of the greatest slices of British social realism to emerge since its heyday in the 1960s. It’s a shame that Oldman hasn’t directed anything since, though, because he could’ve been the next best British director. Instead, he has continued to prove his acting chops, which are just as impressive.
