People still often think of David Mamet as the hard man of Chicago theatre, a bar-room bruiser who'd be most at ease trading expletives with Al Pacino. These days we have to amend that view: film-maker, novelist, essayist, Mamet projects himself as the consummate man of letters, with that oddly genteel edge that Anglophile literary Americans often have. On stage at the Edinburgh film festival recently he quoted the bons mots of Mrs Patrick Campbell, praised Noel Coward and Celia Johnson as his idea of great screen acting, and confessed, "Henry James bores the bloomers off me". He even asked for a pot of tea before he went on stage.
You're not quite sure how much of this is a sardonic routine intended to defuse the old poker-den image. But, when I went to interview him at his hotel the day before and told him we'd be talking on stage too, he said, "Goody gumdrops," and shook my hand.
At first sight, you wouldn't see Mamet as a tea-drinking, Trollope-reader. He's large: he could have just lumbered out of the woods and left his axe at the cloakroom on the way to teaching an Eng Lit seminar.cu, or a reminder to pull out some pithy quotation for future use.
Mamet shouldn't be confused with his characters - the hustlers, hucksters and working stiffs of plays such as American Buffalo. But he often is, partly because in his time he's done every job under the sun - working in a truck factory, driving cabs, cleaning windows, even hoofing in Maurice Chevalier's troupe. He's considered the bard of American inarticulateness, but in person, there's hardly an um or er, only the odd contemplative pause, as the forehead furrows over huge spectacles.
Mamet has a database of literary quotations at his fingertips. At one point, he invokes the Stoics, in his slightly choked rasp of a voice: "Let your principles be few and simple, so you can quote them at a moment's notice."
His latest film as director - with his wife Rebecca Pidgeon and toney British names Nigel Hawthorne and Gemma Jones - is The Winslow Boy, Terence Rattigan's play about the Edwardian naval cadet whose family defend his honour. It's a bizarre notion: you imagine Joe Mantegna spitting out, "So, kid, the postal order, whaddid you do wid de postal order?"
Mamet's is a decorous, text-faithful adaptation, yet the pauses, overlaps and cadences emerge as quintessentially his voice ("Might we go to the park? Do you know, I was thinking, might we go to the park? Do you think?"). Mamet shrugs, and insists that the credit is Rattigan's - he just cut and paste.
So, why revive what is often considered a sturdy but dull repertory warhorse? Because it's a great play, Mamet insists. "I find it interesting that Rattigan was discounted, if not denigrated, using terms which I would have thought were terms of great praise - `craftsman', his plays were `well-made'." British people, says Mamet, ask him about the play "in the tone of voice that says, `Why are you hitting yourself on the head with a hammer?' It's different for Americans - the play's unknown over there. Rattigan's a magnificent writer, so if anyone would see anything of me in it, I'm very flattered indeed."
The Winslow Boy isn't a costume drama. It just happens to contain the odd bowler hat. "Costume drama is difficult to do. So much of it seems to be, `Good morning, because it's the Napoleonic era'. I think a genius costume drama is Barry Lyndon, because it's so straightforward. Kubrick's such a master with the camera and the actors that he doesn't have to make any further points: `Please pass the tea because I'm wearing a corset'."
The key to Mamet's version may be the motto that he uses as a monogram for the credits: Let Right Be Done - "it has a certain ring about it, has it not?" as one character remarks. Mamet, often considered a specialist in amoral types, is attached to the problem of right, in a play peopled by characters of probity. "It's a great question - the individual versus the institution, when the institution comes along and says, `We'll reward you lavishly, all you have to do is lie'. And the individual says, `No, I don't think I will'. And then the supporters of the individual say, `Are you sure it's not just vanity? Wouldn't you be better off questioning your own motives, examining your own soul?' "
Mamet's no-frills approach to screen acting and directing can come as a shock. Many find his screen work clinical: no one emotes, but operates with bemused dryness. The manner fits perfectly with The Winslow Boy.
He favours the word "uninflected" to describe the style of acting, writing, directing he prefers - but it's nothing to do with style, he says. "Human beings tend to behave very interestingly, I think, and speak in rather effective and rhythmic and poetic cadences, every place in their life - with the exception of on stage. I love to see immediate acting on stage - organic acting, acting which is not thought out, not recherche and stilted and in imitation of other actors. That's great acting, because it's human."
This downplaying of his own role, the insistence on plain, sleeves-rolled-up graft seems a little disingenuous. He seems to have little time for auteurs. His essay On Directing Film persuasively, if contentiously, debunks the film-maker as ineffable visionary: "All you have to do on the set is stay awake, follow plans, help the actors be simple, and keep your sense of humour. The film is directed in the making of the shot list."
That's all there is to it? "I try to tell the story using the camera, and using the cut," he says. But as a screenwriter, he has worked with some directors who might contest this view. He has disparaged technical devices such as the Steadicam as superficial flimflam, yet he wrote The Untouchables for Brian de Palma, the Steadicam king.
"I didn't direct those movies, I just wrote them." Wry pause. "And I think it's also possible that in a previous life I mistreated animals." Bad karma repaying him? "Exactly so," he says, and declines to be drawn further.
He has written for Neil Jordan, Sidney Lumet and Barry Levinson, among others. How much of himself does he put into his gun-for-hire work? "Everything. It's my job, when I take a job, to do it the best I can. I take a lot of pride in it."
It doesn't seem to have done him much harm, his savaging of the film industry's precious beliefs. He'll constantly disparage the business - "There aren't people in Hollywood. Just executives". His play Speed-the- Plow was about two studio executives losing their souls.
Mamet has also been savage in his attacks on method acting and its adherents. The actor's job, he says, is "to help the audience understand the play - that's what you're getting paid for. You're not getting paid to undergo an experience."
Yet his work is associated with method grandees such as Pacino, Hoffman and, most notoriously, Robert de Niro, who acted in The Untouchables allegedly wearing Al Capone's old underwear, which is a pretty extreme way to put yourself in the character's seat.
"These people to me are great, great artists," Mamet says, "and that they happen to have an affection for a certain school, of which I neither approve nor see evidence of in their work - it does nothing but increase my affection for them."
He's not interested in style in acting, he says, but in things being true. "You must never, ever, ever make anything up. If you look at the great actors, what strikes me about them is that they don't invent - what you see is a human being trying to tell the truth. I'll tell you a secret that very few actors will admit - you can't base a performance on anything. It's like you're going to base a love affair on something. People didn't act different in 1910 - the words may be different, the costumes may be different, but, at the end of the day, the individual is gonna act in the moment, act truthfully."
I ask what determines whether a particular idea will emerge as a novel, a play or a film. "I just get up and go to work," Mamet says. His first novel, The Village, appeared in 1994; the third, called Wilson, is out soon. "I think it's an epistolary novel set in the future on Mars. A scholarly work, actually, dealing with 20th-century America, a thousand years after all the computers have crashed, and any records of the civilisation have disappeared. And, so, these scholars are trying to reconstruct the migrations from the great malls to Mars - and all they have is laundry lists, shopping lists, love letters. It's the weirdest goddamn thing I ever wrote, the most fun."
The novels show Mamet using a radically different voice: far from the plays' clear-cut, urgent demotic, or the films' cool negotiations, their interior monologues are fragmented, opaque, unexpectedly close to Virginia Woolf. "I came up with a chapter of some novel, I showed my wife. I said, `I'm worried it's too on the nose.' She said, `Oh no, no, don't worry. It's impenetrable.' I said, `Oh good.' "
There's another play, A Boston Marriage, due to be performed at London's Donmar Warehouse: Mamet calls it "a Victorian bedroom farce". American writers often have a potent work ethic, but his flow is unstoppable. "What else is there to do?" he says.
Yet much of Mamet's image is built on his leisure activities, his penchant for gambling, and more recently, for deer hunting, which he does at home in Vermont. "I really don't have any leisure activities," he insists. He has missed several hunting seasons, and besides, he never shoots anything. "That's not my fault, my eyes are terrible."
Mamet is famous for giving away little about himself in interview: he'll tell you as much as you need to know, then pull back with a gag. In some essays, however, he has recounted parts of his life, notably in The Cabin, which includes memories of growing up with a stepfather prone to rage. "Well, maybe I was making it up," he says. Well, were you? I ask. "Ah ha," he says, and there's an end of it.
What Mamet has been vocal about is his Jewishness. He wasn't always thought of as a Jewish writer - only, perhaps, since his 1991 film, Homicide, about a cop rediscovering his identity. But the theme was always there, Mamet says: the central character in Glengarry Glen Ross, he points out, was a Jewish salesman. His novel, The Old Religion, is based on the true story of a Jewish factory manager wrongfully tried for murder.
Mamet has called his own Reform Jewish background "religion in a plain brown wrapper", out to hide its own nature, pass unnoticed. Is he practising these days? "Mm-hm. Sure." He goes to synagogue, observes the festivals. He returned to Judaism after a long while. When was that? "It was a Wednesday, I recall," he replies, drily. Was it for a specific reason? "I'm sure it was. But the reason escapes me. Whatever it was, I'm glad I did. I love being Jewish. It's a great thing to be, don't you think?"
The pleasures of fatherhood? "Oh, there are many, but I don't think it's appropriate to talk about them." He has four children, two daughters with his first wife, the actress Lindsay Crouse, two children with Rebecca Pidgeon. One's a daughter; the latest, aged seven months, I hadn't heard about. Another girl? "No, a boy," he says, and gives me the old comedy-is-timing pause. "But you were close."
HIS marriage to Crouse seems to be off-limits. A journalist once asked if they were still in touch, and he crisply replied, "Oh sure. You want me to give her a message?" At one point during his onstage talk, he refers to "this woman whom I was apparently married to". Read between the lines if you choose.
He met Pidgeon, who grew up in Edinburgh, when she was acting in Speed-the-Plow at the National in 1989. She has appeared in three of his films; in The Winslow Boy, the family bond is reinforced by casting Pidgeon's brother, Matthew, as her screen brother. "For centuries, theatre people were a caste of pariahs - lived, worked, fornicated, grew up and played with each other. No one else would have us. Then we became members of the middle class and we began to think we were part of some other culture. But I prefer the older model - live and work with the same people, living in their own world."
Mamet enjoys being a patriarch, imparting knowledge. For the hell of it, he recently wrote a commencement address for graduating students. "Its gist is, `I'm going to tell you several things that happen to be absolutely true. One is, any time anyone is ever talking about politics, or religion, or sex, they'll be speaking hypocritically.' I thought that was a pretty good point."
On stage in Edinburgh, he could almost be offering extracts from that address. He delivers aphorisms: "Any fool can write a symphony, but it takes a genius to write a tone poem." He quotes Picasso: "When critics get together, they talk about spatial relationships. When painters get together, they talk about turpentine." And occasionally, he'll slip in a vaudeville quip, but so drily that you wonder at first whether he's joking at all. It's a killer act, and the audience loves it. Mamet waits for the laughter to die down, then peers around the auditorium for a member of the festival staff. "I wonder," he asks, "could I please have another cup of tea?"
The Winslow Boy is coming to the Irish Film Centre next month