INT: Okay, so we were talking about DONNIE BRASCO, and you were describing how important research was for it. Is that true of all the films? 

MN: Yeah, pretty much. It doesn’t feel right to me… A, it doesn't feel right doing a script that doesn't need research in some way or another, and that again, goes back to early life at Granada [Granada Television] I think. And it’s a sort of defining thing for choice of a script. The research for DONNIE BRASCO was, ultimately, mind-numbingly boring, which was listening to the FBI surveillance tapes that they made about the Al Pacino character, in which there are nuggets of pure…. well it's Marx Brothers lunacy. “You injected that Donnie. You injected that. I heard you inject that. You injected that.” And, “Don’t you pull the wood over my eyes.” So, you know, I remember sitting in a building, I don't think it's there any longer, up on Columbus Circle [New York City] where our offices were, trying to keep up with these blasted tapes, and it was very, very dull. But I felt very strongly that there was going to be, it was not going to be the Coppola [Francis Ford Coppola] take on the mob, that there was something else to be said. Because these guys were second besters, second raters.

MN: And, I went to, don't remember who, I think the [DONNIE BRASCO] Line Producer and said, “How do I get a connection? How do I meet these people?” And he said, “Well, um…” which is sort of silly, really, because they were already at the end of their path [mobsters]. I think that, well, I don't know how much is left nowadays. Anyway, but there was a man who was a Location Scout, and he said, my Producer man said, “You can try him.” And he wore this very expensive, sort of pompadour haircut, beautiful nails, and stuff like that, a powder blue romper suit, and he was always humming Frank Sinatra hits just under his breath. “Fly me to the moon, and doo-doo-doo-doo.” and his name was Rocco “The Butcher” Musacchia [Rocco Musacchia]. “I was a butcher, Mikey, I was a butcher.” And he was not a "made" man, but he was a friend of… was it a friend of ours or… I can't remember. He was the next in line away from a "made" man. In other words, he’d never killed anybody. And he took me--I said, “I want to see the real thing, Rocco.” And he took me on endless Friday night dinners in empty mob-run restaurants in Brooklyn, always empty. Except for one night when there was a man about his own age there. He was sort of early 60s with a very, very young woman, with everything in all the right places. And Rocco said, effusively to him, “Hi...[INAUDIBLE]” and they went through a lot of kinda, back slapping. And then as he turned away, he very loudly, he must have been heard, Rocco said, “Cocksucker.” And I expected to die between the table and the door, but something had been sorted out between them, I don't know what. It's always been completely mysterious to me, that. And then at the end of sort of the fourth week, he said, “Okay, tomorrow, we'll go and see some people.” And he took me to this little nail parlor under the BQE [Brooklyn-Queens Expressway], and there they all were. And they were drinking homemade red wine, and they were smoking cigars, and as soon as I came… you’re allowed to visit. If you are of the fraternity, you’re absolutely allowed to visit so long as you give your kind of driving license at the door, as it were. But I was not necessarily allowed, and so there was this huge frost as soon as I came in. And Rocco said, “This is Mike who’s making a film about Donnie Brasco.” They all knew Donnie Brasco. Donnie Brasco still had a contract out on him, was still in fear of his life, he said. It pleased him to turn up to every interview that I ever shared with him in a false beard and sometimes even a false nose, and a pair of weird glasses. [INT: This is was Donnie?] What? [INT: Donnie used to show up?] This was Donnie, that man who was Donnie Brasco, yes, used to show up, yeah. And I said, “Come on.” I can't remember what was his name? It wasn't Donnie Brasco, obviously, Joe-Joe Pistone. I said, “What is all this?” And he said, “There’s one thing to be frightened of, and that is that the people… I know there's a contract out on me still; they won't enforce it. They're too old, they're too tired, they’re mostly in jail, they’re looking the other way and always will. The thing to be frightened of is the 18-year-old who gets his dad’s gun, and goes into the bar, and claims my scalp on a Saturday, that I'm frightened of.” And of course, he would be absolutely right. That is exactly the sort of thing that could happen, it hasn’t yet.

INT: Did you do much research with Depp? With Johnny? [MN: Say again?] Did you do much research with Johnny Depp for it [DONNIE BRASCO]? 

MN: He went off to Quantico, to the FBI headquarters, and he learned to shoot. I was not invited to Quantico. That was okay. I wasn't particularly… I was much, much more interested in getting Al [Al Pacino] right because the show, the sort of central irony of the show is, the rule of one law against the rule of another law. When a man is dead, you don't say his name. “Say his name.” “I'm not allowed to.” “Say his name. Say his name. Say his name.” And there’s a scene, and in that scene you absolutely hear the point of view of the whole movie, which is, I'm a spoke on the wheel. I’m nothing. I am simply a functionary, and that's what I know I am. That's what I accept myself as being. And the last line is, “Quit riding the brake.” It’s a wonderful scene, and a scene that we hadn’t got when we started to shoot. We didn't get it until about 10 days before we shot it. And I knew that there was a scene--and I was driving Paul [Paul Attanasio] mad with it. He didn't want to write anymore. He said, “Oh, come on, I'm doing other stuff.” I said, “It’s not finished yet, Paul.” And he then invented this collision of the human side of the character, and the rule of the society which was a tremendous invention, and that came out of research.

MN: They [mobsters] were very entertaining [referring to research done for DONNIE BRASCO]. They were a lot of very bad boys. They took me… The only thing that they wouldn't show me was, I said, “Go on, take me on a raid. Take me on a raid. Come on, I wanna do some crime.” And they wouldn't do that. But they did take me, which produced one very interesting thing, they took me to Guy Louie, who was the head of that particular gang, crew. He said, “I want you to meet my Goombah,” meaning the man who has sponsored me to this life. So, big, big thing in his life, and we went into nether Brooklyn, and found this old man in a kind of a bar with a vine tree around the outside of it, and very, very Sicilian. And I said to Louie as we were coming away, I said, “Thanks, that was really instructive.” This old man, he was dodgery and shaky, and he had nothing to offer other than that I had gone through a doorway, and I said, “God,” I said, “I wish that so and so wouldn’t keep calling me, ‘You fucking English fag,’” which they all do. All Americans of a certain class, just I don't know whether you find the same thing, but they all call me “You fucking English fag”. I said, “It’s not as if I hadn't heard it before.” And he said, “What did he say, and why did he say it?” And he suddenly, his face grew suffused with blood. Like the edge of that net there, scarlet. And I thought, I've done this man some real harm here, and I started to backpedal away from it. But the perception of what had happened, which was that this guy was, everybody found him as annoying as I found him, and I had simply stated something that hadn't been out in the open. And as soon as it was out in the open, this man was at risk. And there’s a line in the film about “For your information, you can get killed for $200,” which was something that they all told me, and took very seriously, and this guy had, he'd gone too close to the edge. He had insulted somebody on a sacred evening when that somebody had been invited to the Goombah’s house, and he had spoiled that occasion. I don’t suppose anything ever happened. [INT: That someone was you, and you could have been responsible for him being off'ed?] Yes, that's right, which is why I started to row back, so energetically. So that’s, that was a piece of, you know, there was a lot of actual, real research that actually got on the screen in that film. [INT: Yeah, very good.]

INT: So let’s go to a position now where it was hard to research in most ways, was when HARRY POTTER [HARRY POTTER AND THE GOBLET OF FIRE] came along, came your way. What was your response to that offer? 

MN: I was invited to read the first novel. And I read it and I was in the middle of PUSHING TIN in Toronto in the winter, and I thought it had the best opening that I could almost ever remember. The kid who is made to live under the stairs, the kid of no account, the stone which the builders rejected. And I thought that was absolutely brilliant. And then I hit a patch in PUSHING TIN, which was all CG [computer generated], all the planes, all the radar displays, so on and so forth, and it drove me quite mad. And I suddenly thought, “What’s it gonna be like if I'm gonna take on these huge effects?” And I sort of slid away from under it. Very, very bad decision. But along came Chris [Chris Columbus], and did a fantastic job. Nobody remembers that before Chris what-not came along, people didn't know what a wand looked like, they didn't know what a spell looked like, they didn't know what the uniform was, they didn't know how you played that impossible bloody game. Nobody knew anything, and it was, what's his other name, Chris what? [INT: Columbus.] Columbus. It was Chris Columbus who made that film a reality, that whole story a reality. And if it hadn't been for him... And you know, then, smart young men, Alfonso [Alfonso Cuaron] came along, and I came along, and David [David Yates] came along, and we all… But it was built on what Chris did, Chris, and probably above everything else Stuart Craig.

INT: So, how did you deal with the [HARRY POTTER AND THE GOBLET OF FIRE] visual effect challenge from the beginning? 

MN: Well, I had a very clear idea of what I wanted to do. I thought I owed that to myself with such a heavy weight of this stuff. And then I'd been on the show a couple months maybe, and was doing all sorts of planning, and sketching, and that sort of stuff, and Alfonso [Alfonso Cuaron] said, “I've got 40 minutes cut, do you want to come and see it?” which is remarkably generous. And I said, “Yeah, you bet.” And went along and saw it, and he had done everything that I had planned to do, absolutely everything to the crossing of the T’s and the dotting of the I’s. And I had to look for a different way of looking at the story. And then thought, “Well, there’s one thing that nobody’s quite taken on board yet, which is a particular age of childhood, and here we are at that particular age." And so, I started to think about it as a school story, in which the literature of our country is more than amply provided with. And as soon as I did that it started to ease up, and I felt that I could take risks with characters whom I thought were wonderful characters, but how far could I go with them? Like Brendan whatchamacallit, the guy who plays Mad Eye Moody… Famous Irish actor, played the general, you know who I mean. [INT: Brendan Gleeson.] That's it, Brendan Gleeson. Together we make a satisfying whole. [INT: We should travel together everywhere.]

INT: But how was it directing the children? I mean you were the, what, the third Director in the fourth show [HARRY POTTER AND THE GOBLET OF FIRE], how was it with them? 

MN: They were weirdly, well-disciplined, inquisitive in the right sort of way, quite extraordinary, and… We did a read through and the children sat at the top of the table, and I sat opposite them, the other side of the round shape. And Dan [Daniel Radcliffe] was always had his finger on Rupert’s [Rupert Grint] script, so that Rupert could never get lost, because if Rupert could get lost he would get lost. And they were just, they were the characters. And their lives, of course, had been-I mean they'd been at it since they were 11, and I had them at 14, 15. And so, they were soaked in it by that time, and they were absolutely sweet. The films were not concerned to do, what's it like on the inside of Harry Potter’s head. You could do that a little bit, perhaps, a little bit, but they are rip-roaring yarns in some ways, and that seemed to be a very important quality that we should get, that school story, rip-roaring yarn thing. At any rate, it's something that Alfonso [Alfonso Cuaron] hadn't done, and therefore the field was open to me.

INT: You mentioned Stuart Craig, is he an important element in all of this? 

MN: Oh yes, huge. [INT: The Production Designer.] I said to him… he must have thought I was quite crazy, I said, “Have you got another in you, Stuart?” Meaning, this must be such a kind of test of your patience, and invention and whatnot. Can you bear to do another one? And he said, “Yes,” very sweetly. I don’t think he'd ever thought of not doing them all. It was going to be his great, of course. But I mean he was the man who said… it was originally planned, for budget reasons, to take place on a stage, as it did, and then in various stately homes inside the M25 [highway], in a ring road of London, lots and lots of stately homes. And it was Stuart who said, “This be damned, we're going to have a Gothic film. It's all going to be Gothic, and there's only one place that I am going to consent to believe in the Gothic, and that's Scotland. We’re going to Scotland.” And so, everybody said, “Oh, okay, Stuart.” And off they all trekked.

INT: What were the traps in doing the film [HARRY POTTER AND THE GOBLET OF FIRE]? What were the surprises about it? 

MN: For me, not very much. In the end, I enjoyed myself. [INT: Right.] I don't think that it was good for me to have not made the first one. I think that was foolish of me, and I think that that--[INT: Foolish not to have done it, or foolish…] I was foolish not to have. [INT: You think you should have done it?] Yes, I do. Why not? [INT: Why not?] But, Columbus [Chris Columbus] did a much better job than I would have done. He took it on hook, line, and sinker, marvelous job. So, there was that. I don't think that there was… [INT: It was such a big--] Well I mean look, you, me, our generation, we tap dance between is it show business or is it serious? Is it mass entertainment or is it… In Hungarian at some fleapit in… We even had in our first few months together at Granada [Granada Television], we had nicknames. You were called Antonioni [Michelangelo Antonioni]. Peter Jones was the little know but immensely admired Brazilian director, P Snow Jay, and I was called Betty E. Newell because I was going to be the all-singing, all-dancing really vulgar one. We all had those and that, of course, the joke was in what we perceived the movies to be, what we wanted the movies to be. And when we had gone to the movies in Cambridge, we had been omnivorous. But we would have hated to have missed the latest Swedish, or the latest Czech, or whatever. You know, that was where our ambitions lay. I remember you being completely wound up by Rocco and his brothers, hugely big thing for you. And we all had that duality in us, is it show business or is it serious?

INT: Do we still have it? 

MN: Well, I do. I absolutely do. Yes, probably destructively. [INT: Why do you say that?] I think I fuck about with my choices, because of, because of that. I think I've, in many ways, been a catastrophic chooser. I think I've always chosen--no, not always, that's stupid. Sometimes I have chosen very badly, but I think there is a duality in us, which says, “How clever are we?” We know we're pretty damn clever 'cause we’re scholarship boys from Cambridge, and hey… [INT: You mean, we can do both? We can be Visconti [Luchino Visconti] and we can be Blake Edwards?] No, although, god wouldn’t that be great? Oh, to do a Peter Sellers, even though it drove you mad, apparently. Who were we talking about at lunch, you said was such a nice man? A famous American Director? Oh come on, made TOOTSIE. [INT: Oh, Sydney Pollack.] Yes, who apparently saw Hoffman [Dustin Hoffman] walking across the parking lot at Warner’s [Warner Bros.], and opened the window of his cutting room, and said, “You can have the $15 million if I can have the time back.” [INT: But you think--was that a strength that we had that we had these two sides to us, that we weren’t just out and out commercial wanting to do comic films?] It probably was, it probably was, yes. Certainly, I would have missed more good things by not doing that. I would have missed the Márquez [Gabriel Garcia Márquez], even though I knew that that was probably a kind of doomed choice, but nonetheless. [INT: CHOLERA [LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA], you mean.] Sorry? [INT: The CHOLERA film.] Yes, yes.

INT: Was that [LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA] a bad choice? 

MN: It was a choice that I made with exactly this argument in my head. Looking at a book, and falling in love with the book, and obsessively reading and re-reading, and because of the questions that you are asking yourself that actually you couldn't answer. How does a man fall in love at 18 and only consummate that love 70 years later? What is that story? How do you make that story work? And I don't think that I can answer it properly, although it was immensely satisfying along the way, in all sorts of ways. And I think it was because after POTTER [HARRY POTTER AND THE GOBLET OF FIRE] I could say to the people who represented me and were going to take 10 percent of whatever POTTER made me, I could say, “I am this other thing, and I'm going to go off and do it now, and you can't do anything ‘cause I've done what you wanted me to do which was POTTER. So, nyah.” [INT: So, that's not a decision you regret?] No, no.

INT: Are there ones you have regretted that, in fact, turned out well? 

MN: I've been lucky all the way through. There’s only two that I think were not lucky. One was the film with Chuck Heston [Charlton Heston], THE AWAKENING. And I was lucky there because I met a kind of Actor that I wouldn’t have--I mean, I was really lucky because in the other film that I, perhaps slightly regret, I had Greg Peck [Gregory Peck]. And so I got a kind of, you know, in either of those I got a double whammy of the old movie star who were very different from anything that we would meet today, really, really different. [INT: I mean I worked with Lee Marvin, and he was a wonderful man.] Yeah, what did you do? [INT: He was in GORKY PARK. He was in GORKY PARK.] Oh, was he? [INT: And he was heavenly.] And a sweet man? [INT: Sweet man, yeah. We had terrible trouble on that film, and he did all he could to keep it going, to keep it, you know, solid, and to look after Bill Hurt [William Hurt], who was in a real mess.] I remember you telling me a story about Hurt and an English Actor, and you being absolutely furious with the English Actor saying, “Who do you think brought the money to this?” Which, of course, is the thing which a second-tier Actor won't think about and bloody should. [INT: Yeah, exactly. It's hard being a movie star, I've found watching them.]

INT: So after CHOLERA [LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA], you went on to PRINCE OF PERSIA [PRINCE OF PERSIA: THE SANDS OF TIME], another big one. And this time you were initiating it, you were creating the event. Was that stressful? 

MN: Oh yeah, yeah, sure. Don't think working for Jerry [Jerry Bruckheimer] is not stressful. He’s a nice man, Jerry. He doesn't like cutting his own heads off. I mean, you know, he doesn't like the job of executioner, but he’s very calm, and considered, and sensible, surprisingly so. Not in any way one of the kind of, the sort of, you know, the fat posse from New York, not like that at all. So, I've almost never regretted anything. Maybe marginally those two, but… And then somebody will bob up to you, and say, “Oh you made so and so, you know, I've always really loved that film.” And you think, “Oh, Christ!” [INT: I had hoped you’d forgotten about it.] I mean I'm the same. I mean every film is an adventure, and you're gonna get something out of everything. They can't all be successful.] Yeah, yeah, yeah. And who would have believed it, Michael? [INT: Yes, I know, you and me.] Us little lads living in a suburb in Manchester.

INT: I'm just going to change the subject a little bit, when you did FOUR WEDDINGS [FOUR WEDDINGS AND A FUNERAL], and it made a fortune, your residuals didn't do very well out of it, did you? [MN: Don't think so, no.] I mean, was that an occasion when you thought to investigate the DGA? To think what drew you to the… 

MN: Never occurred to me. I mean, there was a wonderful day where my English Agent called me into his office, and said, “Go to the board room.” And I said, “What?” And he said, “Go to the board room.” So I went to the board room, and he said, “Sit at the end of the table” And I did, and he sat at the other end of the table, and he took and envelope out of his pocket, and he went [NOISE] down the table. He said, “Open it.” And I opened it, and there was the check. [INT: The residual check?] Yeah, which was for me, at that stage, a dazzling amount of money. I bought a house. And so, something went okay. But of course, he'd phoned me, Duncan had phoned me, ‘cause he can be sloppy, and had said, “It’s okay, the clause is in the contract.” And I said, “What’s okay? What clause? What contract?” And he said, “This particular residual clause is in your FOUR WEDDINGS contract.” Now, what it actually was, I don't know. Was it, FOUR WEDDINGS was not a DGA film, and so therefore, it cannot have been on the scale of a DGA payout, and they are remarkable when they come along. You know, HARRY POTTER [HARRY POTTER AND THE GOBLET OF FIRE] was remarkable. But it was okay, and I certainly never felt persecuted.

INT: One of the big differences between you and myself is I decided to come and live here, I decided to move. Did you ever contemplate that, or what that never an option? 

MN: No, not an option for me. [INT: Why was that?] Conversation. I mean what I couldn't bear was that a chunk of one’s life would depend very strongly on what either your grosses have been that week, or so-and-so’s grosses had been that week, or what was going to happen over the weekend. And you’ve been very influential with me, always. You've been very generous to me, always. But you have also said several things that have been very useful, and one was when I first arrived here, was you saying to me before I went to a meeting at Universal [Universal Pictures], “They don't want to know what you think of MIDNIGHT EXPRESS. They are not interested to know what your opinion of MIDNIGHT EXPRESS is.” And I've never forgotten that. And I thought, “No, I guess that’s true,” so I kept my mouth shut. And there was something about, and I'm seeing it again in this TV show at the moment, that there is a kind of… oh, a sort of accepted way of behaving which simply chokes off creativity. And I was frightened of that, and I didn't want that to happen to me, and I thought that I might be able to lead a life in England where that didn't happen. And if I’d played a crooked hand of cards, I might be able to fly back and forth, because I've always enormously enjoyed America. I've always had a really, really good time here, and I've loved it. And it's been more instructive than its equivalent time in England would have been likely to be. [INT: And Bernice, your wife, did she ever want to come here, or did she…?] No. [INT: She didn’t.] No, which would have been very influential with me. Nope, not a bit.