The new Al Capone: studying how to make a great gangster film, shot by shot



Tom Hardy has been studying the great gangsters for his next film role

Tom Hardy has been down in the vaults at Warner Bros, watching the studio’s classic gangster movies to get some Al Capone ‘into the bloodstream’.

Hardy told me he will play the Depression-era Chicago crime tsar sometime next year and well into 2014, once he has completed work on a series of movies including the lead role in the new Mad Max, which begins shooting in Namibia this April with Charlize Theron and Nicholas Hoult.

‘I’ve been working with Warner Bros, watching their gangster films — the ones with James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart and Edward G. Robinson,’ he told me, citing The Petrified Forest with Bogart, The Public Enemy with Cagney, and Little Caesar with Robinson.



‘It’s interesting to get them, and a bit of Capone, into the bloodstream.

‘You look at pugnacious James Cagney in The Public Enemy and see how this guy rises up to become a kingpin in Chicago,’ Hardy said when we chatted during a reception at the British Film Institute.

How to make great films? Get some classic screen gangsters like Humphrey Bogart, left and James Cagney, right

The actor added that he’d watched a wide range of Warner Bros ‘social issue’ films, as they were called.



He’d also watched The Roaring Twenties, which starred Cagney and Bogart, and many other pictures that encompassed the Depression/Prohibition era when studios, particularly Warner Bros ripped stories right out of newspaper headlines and turned them into films that are still watchable today.

‘The idea isn’t to remake those films but to get a flavour of them as we explore Capone’s career as a racketeer.

Little Caesar, starring Edward G. Robinson has been a particular influence says Hardy

‘The idea at the moment is of doing a trilogy of films, but nothing is set. Everyone is just talking and exploring,’ said Hardy, whose career has rocked in everything from Matthew Vaughn’s Layer Cake to Nicolas Winding Refn’s Bronson and Chris Nolan’s Inception.

He’s also mega-hot in the under-rated Gavin O’Connor family fight drama Warrior. And he was part of last year’s classiest ensemble in Tomas Alfredson’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (which deserves recognition from Oscar and Bafta voters).

I can’t wait to see him alongside Christian Bale and Gary Oldman (so brilliant as Smiley in TTSS) in the new Batman film, The Dark Knight Rises. (Hardy plays the Caped Crusader’s arch enemy, Bane.)

The Capone project is called Cicero. David Yates, who directed four of the later Harry Potter movies, has been re-working Walon Green’s original screenplay.

After Hardy has shot the Mad Max picture he wants to work with his father, Chips Hardy, on a theatre project in London, which he will fund.

‘I’d like to hire a theatre for a week and give the tickets away,’ the actor told me.

Downton's Countess keeps it in the family



A touch of class: Elizabeth McGovern from Downton Abbey

Elizabeth McGovern and Colin Firth are bringing a touch of upmarket class to a special screening of My Week With Marilyn.



Ms McGovern (right), who plays Cora, Countess of Grantham, in Downton Abbey is joining Firth, who won an Oscar for his portrait of George VI in The King’s Speech, in hosting a showing of My Week With Marilyn in Central London on Monday.



The movie, which has garnered Oscar and Bafta awards heat for Michelle Williams’s splendid study of Monroe and Kenneth Branagh’s clever portrait of Laurence Olivier, is actually directed by McGovern’s husband, Simon Curtis.



What’s more, Firth lives close to the couple in Chiswick, West London. And they’ve all worked together. McGovern and Firth did the play Three Days Of Rain at the Donmar Warehouse, while Curtis produced Firth and Penelope Wilton in Karel Reisz’s BBC version of Terence Rattigan’s play The Deep Blue Sea.



The Curtises are off to Hollywood next Wednesday for the Golden Globes and the Bafta LA Tea Party.



‘Elizabeth and I are both fiftysomethings and it’s fun to be doing the awards together,’ said Curtis, who is beyond chuffed by his wife’s success.



The Bafta long list is released today and My Week With Marilyn is going to figure on the nomination list.

Will it be a Best Picture Oscar contender as well? Harvey Weinstein would like it to be, so maybe it will! But we’ll see.



Watch out for...



Benedict: In demand

Benedict Cumberbatch, who will have to beam his way from London to Los Angeles, and then on to Wellington, New Zealand — and back to LA again — when he stars as the number one villain in Star Trek 2.

Cumberbatch will travel to LA next week after attending the War Horse royal gala on Sunday. The movie is turning into a big hit for Steven Spielberg and is bound to be Oscar nominated.

By the way, I understand it was Spielberg who recommended Cumberbatch to his colleague JJ Abrams, who will direct Star Trek 2. Cumberbatch, one of the best actors of his generation, has been given special dispensation to shoot Star Trek 2 while he’s contracted to the Hobbit film, which is shooting in NZ.



He will travel backwards and forwards over the next few months, working for a few days at a time on each project.



Trevor Nunn, who is overseeing the production of Owen Sheers’s new play The Two Worlds Of Charlie F., which is being directed by Stephen Rayne. The drama is being put on by the Bravo 22 Company, whose patrons include Nunn, General Sir David Richards and Ray Winstone in association with the Theatre Royal Haymarket’s Masterclass, which guides young people in the theatre arts.

The Two Worlds Of Charlie F. will be performed by wounded and sick servicemen and women. Arnold Crook, who runs the Theatre Royal, called the play ‘an extraordinarily uplifting piece of drama’. It will have two performances on Sunday, January 22 at the Theatre Royal. Call the box office on 020 7930 8800 or go to www.bravo22company.com

The entire run of One Man, Two Guvnors at the Adelphi Theatre is sold out for its limited season till February 25.

The only tickets available are for a selected number of seats that go on sale on the day.

