1. Nil By Mouth
Half autobiography, half harrowing fiction - Gary Oldman 1997 film Nil By mouth is one of the best films he has ever been involved in, and it is the only time you will have seen him assume the role of Director. Oldman directs Kathy Burke and Ray Winstone in a tale close to his heart with a theme that stands on the doorstep of many a home in England - Domestic abuse. The name of the film is enough to make your stomach turn - The phrase is derived from what nurses write on the bottom of patients beds in hospital when they are unable to eat any food or drink water 24 hours before surgery - and the implications of such makes this film a tormenting prospect before you have even hit play. The title is also used ironically, as the film deals with drinking and drugs and people who abuse one another via a lack of communications skills. When something is actual said by characters, it is more often than not said to hurt one another. Set in the South East of London, Nil by Mouth plays out as if you are a fly on the wall, looking into a world of domestic violence and squalor, as Ray and Val (Winstone and Burke) struggle through life as alcoholics and drug addicts, taking any frustration they have as a result out on each other. The film shows a environment that Oldman witnessed when growing up in a council estate, he has gone on record in the past to clear up just how true to his own childhood it is: "Ah... "Gary Oldman's autobiographical film." Anything we do is autobiographical, whether I'm writing and making this film or playing Dracula. You invest the character that you're playing. To make it three-dimensional, you go to areas and places and into the well of your own experiences and history. So, yes, those are things that happened. I wasn't just a fly on the wall and privy to the conversations, the dialogue that took place. There are events in there that happened, that I lived and witnessed when I was growing up in that neighborhood. A lot of the locations in the movie are actual locations. Even though I wrote this in New York, 5000 miles away, I could place and visualize every location when I was writing it, and then I went back to London, most of the pubs and the bars and the clubs were still there from when I was growing up." Oldman has also attributed the catalyst for telling the story to his own battle with alcoholism, the film reflecting his early life as well as his own personal battle in his mid thirties. The film deals with co-dependency and the affect it has on family members. If you want a film that makes you feel empty inside, paints harsh truths of all aspects of rough estate life; Alcohol, domestic abuse, overcrowded family homes, drugs, coarse language - Then really look no further than this film, it is a true to life portrayal of the 'other side' to the way us Brits go about our business, a depiction our Yankee Doodle friends won't see in the likes Downton Abbey.