Johnny B. Goode

One of the few unapologetically violent and malevolent feature films on release in a season cluttered with football-widow Kleenex chick-flicks, the brutally realistic Cockney-gangland crime caper Gangster No. 1 runs rings around your average Britflick outing, thanks in large measure to the lively script provided by Dubliner Johnny Ferguson. The film features more savage extremes of violence than anything released this year or last, and anyone of a remotely squeamish disposition would be advised to give it a very wide berth.

Scriptwriter Ferguson, an individual who doesn't seem in the least bit psychotic, explains: It s meant to just hack into those places where people don't normally go, and we wanted to make it real instead of pantomime violence, which I abhor it's vicious in the sense that that's what he was about. But strictly speaking, it's a moral tale and we wanted to give it strength. I didn't think the violence was gratuituous, it's up to the viewer, and it warns you 'this is the world you're entering'.
Part of the idea is that that darkness is in everybody, but almost everyone finds out their own way of controlling it. But just imagine if you take the darkness you had when you were sixteen, and then go forward with it and really obey it anybody's capable of becoming that type of gangster if they become twisted enough. He doesn't have a name, and that's for a very specific reason it's that he's an embodiment of something rather than an actual character. He is psychosis incarnate, and in many ways he's evil incarnate, and it just shows you how banal that evil is. At least that's the plan.'
Does Ferguson think screen violence has lost a lot of its ability to shock?
'Well, I find I think it has to be used very carefully, and yeah, of course it's accelerated in the last few years to a bizarre point where it's just lost its impact. So we wanted to get back to something far more basic that had more in common with battles back in ancient times. That's why there's such a preponderance of axes and swords and what have you.
When we were talking about this originally, we just kept going back further and further in history in drama terms, Greek tragedy, and in human terms, just the fact that we've always been a nasty bunch in one way or another. But the goodness is there and the beauty is there. We wanted to bring high drama back to the cinema it could have been just a gritty litle gangster movie, but we just felt epic tragedy was what we were looking for, and so we just pared everything back down in terms of dialogue and so on, and made the images very strong, although ambiguous in places, and just involve people in this story on many levels.'
The film has drawn comparisons with the recent Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels.
I've been fairly happy with the feedback so far, and I think anyone who lumps it in with Lock Stock was either watching another movie or was asleep. I see absolutely nothing in common with Two Smoking Barrels, that's a cartoon and I hated it. I thought it was slick and it was well done for what it was but it just annoyed the fuck out of me, it was being trite and gratuitous about stuff that isn't trite. Vinny Jones was easy to watch, and there's bits of it that you have to say 'that's strong dramatically' but if you judge it overall, it was very hollow and it made me pretty nauseous. This is a million miles from that.
The script's grasp of Cockney vernacular is unfailingly authentic.
Yeah, I lived there for three-and-a-half years and you come to the realisation, especially in the netherworld, that people just talk in this very basic way, so the actual dialogue is very basic. But I think that that kinda language, you'll find anywhere I mean, these aren't poets, and their actual concerns are very limited, so in that sense it wasn't difficult to write.
What was Ferguson's reaction on seeing the finished product?
Shock! I just thought 'oh my God', because you're so close to something that you're not sure what to think.
I can appreciate the direction and the editing and the music and the choice of clothes, I can appreciate all of those things, but it's very hard to appreciate your own writing in terms of 'did it work or not?' But at the end of it, I just stood up and said 'I can stand by that and say it was worth making', you know, I keep saying it's more of a European film than a British film, it has more in common with films of the sixties than it does now and some of the seventies as well.
You mention a lot of films that you used to watch...
Well, yeah, I mean there's obvious things like The Godfather and Donnie Brasco which I thought was quite good, and then you go back to A Bout De Souffle with Godard. There's an awful lot that went into it that wouldn't be obvious reference points, it would have more in common with some kind of combination of Goodfellas, Mean Streets, Apocalypse Now and The Godfather. You create a world and you try to make it as believable as possible because you're exploring some fairly complicated issues, like the psychology of this character how do you do that in believable terms? I think we managed to nail his psychology and not claim that this guy was shaped by his environment, which is an easy cop-out that an awful lot of films take you can get really bad people who had absolutely marvellous upbringings. He could just as easily have been set in a cut-throat business world or a business factory or whatever: he just chose this milieu to get instant recognition.'
Gangster No. 1 is on general release at selected cinemas.