`Write what you know," experts advise first-time writers, but Johnny Ferguson doesn't seem to have paid them much heed. Gangster Number One, his first screenplay to make it to our screens, is a stylish, brutal fable set in the sleazy underworld of London's East End. Greed, envy and plenty of violence are the currency in this tale of a sadistic young criminal who makes it to the top of the criminal tree during the not-so-swinging 1960s. So was there something in the water in the leafy south Dublin suburb of Glenageary when Ferguson was growing up there in the 1970s? "Yeah, right . . . I just couldn't afford that football strip," the 37-year-old former advertising copywriter drily responds.
"No, seriously. Wherever you are, you can see violence," he continues. "It doesn't necessarily manifest itself in fists or knives or clubs, but you can watch a man suck the spirit out of a woman, or a woman suck the blood out of a man. You just have to keep your eyes and ears open. I had a very happy childhood and all that, but it didn't make me blind to the people who didn't. And even in Glenageary, you do spend part of your youth running away from people who want to kick the shit out of you."
Ferguson admits he had never thought of writing a gangster film, "until this thing presented itself. I was offered the gig, and I thought it was interesting. It brought together a lot of things I've always been interested in, like epic drama, where you can create a moral tale out of mayhem."
The words "British gangster film" are not calculated to set spirits soaring at the moment, after a year of depressingly inept mockney crime capers. "I was worried that we'd get lumped in with all the rest of them," says Ferguson of dismal films such as Circus and Love and Honour and Obey.
"The ones I've even managed to sit through, I've found distasteful. There's something very seedy about the glamorising of violence. I can understand why people like it - there was a time when I liked it too. But not anymore. You go through the world and you see a lot of ugly things, and you end up saying: `This is what it's like. It's not smart. It's not funny. Do you really think when someone gets blown away in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels that it's funny?' You can make an argument that it's just cartoon violence, but that's just not to my taste anymore."
It remains to be seen how it plays with audiences, but those positive reviews were right; adapted from a stageplay by Louis Mellis and David Scinto, Gangster Number One is a genuinely ambitious, intelligent exploration of male violence which takes many of its stylistic cues from such classics as Get Carter and Point Blank without ever descending into pastiche. "Those films were both in my mind," confirms Ferguson. "As was Mean Streets, that sort of urban poetry - the glamour, the glitz, the moral decay."
Told in a flashback structure by ageing gangster Malcolm McDowell, the film looks back to McDowell's days as a young tough in the late 1960s (when his character is played, in a remarkable performance, by Paul Bettany), and how he assumed leadership of his local gang through a combination of deceit and outrageous violence. Director Paul McGuigan's flamboyant, 1960s-influenced visual style is complemented by Ferguson's impressively baroque voiceover, spoken by McDowell.
"At one point, they wanted me to take some of that stuff out," recalls Ferguson. "Initially, it seemed to jar with the rest of the film, but I argued that if you wanted to get the different levels of this guy's psychosis, you needed the poetry as a counterpoint to all the bad stuff that was going on."
In its fascination with style, attitude, surfaces and the clothes worn by its sharpsuited, vicious protagonists, Gangster
Number One could be seen as part of the current British laddish fashion for a certain kind of working-class violence. "But I don't think it just plays on that," Ferguson argues. "It explores it, using all that fetishisation of style to make a point." The same thing, I suggest that many classic gangster movies have done. "Yeah, and it's great if it's done well. If it's done spectacularly badly, as we've seen recently, that's another matter."
At times, engagingly self-deprecating, Ferguson has strong opinions about writing movies. He thinks it's important to have lived a bit outside the parochial subculture of film-making, and expresses scorn for what he calls "smartypants films", made by show-off young tyros. "There are certain films which retain a resonance. Les Enfants du Paradis, La Regle du Jeu . . . You get older and you become more certain of what you like, not afraid to describe beauty in ugly settings, without going red, or even being drunk."
It seems unusual, I suggest, that as an Irish screenwriter based in Ireland, all the people he's working with are English or Scottish. He admits that he has been turned down for finance by the Irish Film Board, but seems reluctant to make very much of it. "I'm in that club. But they weren't the only people to turn me down. Just because one set of people says no doesn't mean it's a bad idea."
Equally, he has no intention of moving away from Dublin. "I'm just happier being here. I can always go to London for meetings, but I lived there for three and a half years and I don't want to do that ever again. In a way it can be counter-productive being over there, because you're easily available for all these hare-brained producers and their meetings. If they have to fly you over, they'll think twice about it, which suits me fine.
"In Dublin, ideas can get talked away, but in London it's a bit different, because ideas get rationalised away. You're talking to a producer and immediately they're into the financing difficulties or why the Americans won't go for something. It can be very constricting."
With several scripts currently in development, Ferguson acknowledges that writing is a lonely business, and that he welcomes the element of collaboration with directors or producers. Among the scripts he is currently working on are one "about a Longford boy who wants to be a bullfighter" and another which is a "sort of Scottish road movie".
"These things all tend to start out quite light, then as I write them, they become darker," he says wonderingly. "I've got to find something that's just a comedy, I really do."
Gangster Number One is on general release