Film Piracy

Tackling the jolly dodgers

Not all pirates are good for the film industry — illegal downloading is costing it millions, and whizzy technology is making covert recording easier than ever. Should we be worried? Definitely

(The Sunday Times, 5/5/13, Jeff Dawson)

There are perks to being a film journalist, as friends remind me — press previews, watching movies free — but these friends are overlooking the metal detectors, the waivers, the pat-downs, the bag searches, the monumental ruck when 2,000 people stampede back into the cinema’s lobby to retrieve their confiscated mobile phones. And the security goons patrolling the aisles, monitoring you with infrared night-vision goggles, quite possibly backed up by snipers. What was once a leisurely affair has been transformed into a process akin to boarding an El Al flight.

It’s piracy that’s done it. And one glance at the stats justifies the twitchiness of the film distributors. The figures are staggering. According to the market researchers Ipsos MediaCT, in Britain in 2011, bootlegging cost the film industry £448m in lost revenues, including a £216m chunk of the box office.

“It’s a serious problem,” says Phil Clapp, chief executive of the Cinema Exhibitors’ Association (CEA), which represents British movie theatres. “The cinema industry’s revenue last year was just north of £1bn, so £220m of that is about 10 weeks’ income.” That’s about 21% of business, or 36m admissions. If piracy were legit, it would be a FTSE 100 company.

This shady trade has been somewhat mis-sold: all those cautionary trailers with barrow boys shifting knockoff discs. More than two-thirds of “film theft”, as the industry prefers to call it, is conducted online, with films BitTorrent-streamed from websites. In America, MarkMonitor, a company that operates on behalf of Time-Warner, claims visits to such sites number about 53bn a year. Fifty-three BILLION.

The entertainment industry’s bête noire, the self-styled Kim Dotcom, a German national currently holed up in New Zealand, amassed a £100m fortune through his website Megaupload. Here, Anton Vickerman, currently doing four years for fraud, was pulling in up to £60,000 a month from surfthechannel.com, run from his house in Gateshead, with a file server in Sweden and a bank account in Latvia. Such sites dress themselves up with advertising and other trappings of legitimacy, but all in the game are dependent on the same raw material: footage.

“Consistently by volume, 90% of the films that appear online or on hard copy start their life as a recording in a cinema,” Clapp asserts. “We’re in something of an arms race. While the iPhone has brought a huge number of benefits to mankind, it is able to capture a full-length film in much better quality than you’d imagine in terms of the visuals, and good enough quality in terms of the audio.”

Not so long ago, a clunky camcorder with a glowing red light was difficult to smuggle into a cinema. Nowadays, it’s open season. “We’ve had people concealing devices in socks, in drinks containers, anything they can come up with,” says Simon Brown, a former policeman who is the theatrical investigator for Fact, the Federation Against Copyright Theft. “We had somebody genuinely disabled recording from a wheelchair, having ­covered the equipment with serviettes. Some people wedge the device between the seats or put it in the cup-holder. In one of the cases that went to crown court, someone simply held his iPhone under his chin for the duration of the film. That’s how easy it is.” And when your core audience — the same generation that expects everything online to be free — regards it as a human right to have a handheld device glued to their thumbs, where on earth do you begin?

There are other sources. In 2009, a copy of X-Men Origins: Wolverine found its way from the studio’s postproduction house onto the black market, sans special effects. Elsewhere, screeners, the DVDs sent out to Bafta and Academy voters, have entered circulation; and an illicit version of JJ Abrams’s film Super 8 was taken from a review copy destined for the New York shock jock Howard Stern.

Fact is also responsible, among other things, for deterring the illegal trade in TV shows and Premier League football. “Cinemas are on the front line of this, though, because the biggest demand for pirated movies is in the ‘window’,” explains Eddy Leviten, of Fact. That’s the period in which cinemas have exclusive rights to show a film before it moves into home entertainment such as DVD, Netflix, Lovefilm, Sky Movies et al.

“I don’t think we ever believe we are going to eradicate piracy,” Clapp admits. “It’s about making it difficult.” Watermarking and encrypted coding, for example, allow footage online to be traced back to the cinema of origin. Fact has spent much time, too, educating cinema staff in how to spot illegal tapers — off-peak screenings, people sitting dead centre, sometimes with children as cover. “The professionals work in teams,” Brown says. “They use ‘seat blockers’ to create a disruption-free zone where somebody’s not going to sit in front of them. It’s very tactical. But for them to get that first copy of a new release is invaluable. We even had an incident where someone was streaming footage live to a website.” Night-vision devices have been supplied to every cinema, and leaflets on the finer points of copyright law are available when the rozzers do show up.

Getting the authorities on side is not always easy. “We are losing the battle with government to understand the importance of taking steps to tackle this,” Clapp says. Indeed, Vickerman’s con­viction came after a private prosecution brought by Fact. “These are people who are technologically sophisticated,” Leviten insists. “Always trying to avoid detection, to keep their revenue streams going, to keep getting traffic to their sites, to be optimised on search engines.”

That said, the antipiracy movement has changed tack, no longer going after “the spotty 15-year-old who points his phone and gets a screen grab”, as Clapp puts it, but focusing on the Mr Bigs. “People who, quite often, counterfeit other things. They are involved in extreme pornography and a whole range of aspects.” (Including, formerly, in Northern Ireland, para­military activity.) In 2010, Fact aided the bust of a plant in southeast London run by a Chinese organised-crime outfit that was in the process of printing 900,000 DVDs with a street value of more than £2.7m. It continues to facilitate the arrest of one person a week and has brought about five high-profile prosecutions in recent times.

It doesn’t sound a lot. “But we haven’t had a UK-sourced recording now for 21 months,” Leviten says. Not even of Skyfall, which opened here two weeks ahead of America. Bully for us, but, given the global reach of the internet, little use if other countries aren’t as scrupulous. In Russia they simply hijack the projection reels on the way to the cinema. “Central and eastern Europe are hotspots,” Clapp concedes. “Russia and Ukraine, in particular.” It’s especially tough when search engines continue to enable it all. “The Googles of this world have become so all-powerful, governments don’t want to piss them off.”

In some ways, the film business has been its own worst enemy, forever awarding itself baubles, crowing about record receipts, doing the equivalent of rocking its bling through a dimly lit sink estate. In the Vickerman case, the judge pointed out the damage done to the livelihoods of people in the nether regions of the credits — the grips, the gaffers — as well as the loss to HMRC. “The long-term and pernicious impact is on production,” Clapp says. “The reduction of money coming in has had an effect on the slate of films. They tend to be more risk-averse, so you see more sequels and prequels.”

Entertainment has been down this road before. Ten years ago, the music business went through a painful rebirth with the advent of digital. It took a 50% hit in income over a decade of file-sharing. “Music didn’t smell the coffee,” Clapp says. “It didn’t provide legal means by which people could download music.” Aside from making movies legitimately available through Netflix, iTunes and the like, studios have responded by releasing big films “day and date” — globally and simultaneously — to prevent them from being available in one territory ahead of another. More locally, it has been suggested that criminal opportunities might be diminished by a truncation of the “window” (on average 115 days here), an anachronism founded in the era when a limited number of heavy prints had to be lugged around regional fleapits, giving everyone a bite of the cherry before a film entered rental outlets such as Blockbuster. (Britain is now virtually all digital projection.) An EU commission is currently questioning the window’s sacrosanctity, but cinemas would defend it to the last. “Piracy tends to happen within 48 hours of a film being released,” Clapp says.

Part of the CEA’s strategy remains to flog the good old picturehouse itself. “We must believe we are providing a gold-standard experience — nobody watching even a legitimate download on an iPad will share that communal experience of the big screen,” says Clapp, citing the year-on-year boost in cinema attendances and an average national ticket price of £6.37.

The landscape may yet shift again. In 2015 comes the rollout of high-speed broadband in Britain, something being trialled in Kansas City. It has been universal in South Korea for years: speeds are up to 500 times those currently available, allowing an HD movie to be downloaded in seconds. It is no coincidence that South Korea is one of the most pirated movie territories on the earth. “Levels there are stratospheric, such that they only have cinemas in the big cities,” Clapp says. “Others have been rendered unviable.” As for its home-entertainment industry? It doesn’t have one any more.

The perils of piracy

Illegal film sites are not only killing the movie business, they’re murdering your computer. A recent YouGov study revealed that one in five of those who had used pirated websites had unwittingly downloaded viruses and spyware, corrupting their software.

According to Childnet International, a not-for-profit organisation set up to promote internet safety for youngsters, the infiltration of malware also poses huge risks to online security and privacy within the household. “It can be confusing for users to know whether the entertainment content they have found online is legal or not. One really helpful way of checking is to type the website’s URL into the search function on thecontentmap.com, which lists all the legal film, music and TV services in the UK.”

Further guidance for parents and carers can be found at childnet.com.

Le Tournoi, 1997

Read an interesting nostalgia piece in the Guardian yesterday about Le Tournoi, 1997. Remember it? The forerunner of the Confederations Cup? Staged in France as a rehearsal for the following year's World Cup? It featured France, Brazil, Italy and England. And, bloody hell, England won it!

Look at the youtube footage of England beating Italy 2-0 and it makes you realise just how dynamite Paul Scholes was. Interesting that when Scholes retired (the first time) a couple of years back, the leading Spanish and Italian players all came out and declared him to be the greatest English player of his generation.

How come no England national manager recognised this? I find it utterly mystifying that he was never used as the linchpin around which the England team revolved, a succession of coaches preferring the more media-assured Gerrard, Lampard and (yawn) Beckham. Sven played Scholes on the left wing. Two successful European Cup campaigns, multiple Premierships and assorted Cups for Manchester United, all with Scholes as the fulcrum. Did no one notice? Alex Ferguson was no mug. So missed was Scholes, they had to bring him back.

I also felt sorry for coach, Glenn Hoddle, dismissed for remarks in a phone interview that were never recorded or substantiated. Unpicking someone's religious beliefs all boils down to a nonsensical debate about angels dancing on a pinhead. Would the FA ban Catholic players because of their belief in Original Sin? Utter nonsense.

Look at the England squad then. Look at England now. Quite sad really. If there's a self-destruct button, be sure the FA will always push it.

Man Of Steel

A question. What is the essence of Superman? His speeding-bullet velocity, his ability to leap tall buildings at a single bound? 

No. The core joy of Superman is the Clark Kent story — that of the mild-mannered reporter who must keep his talents and identity hidden, a tad problematic with regard to his pursuit of the ballsy Lois Lane, of course, whom he can only woo through his alter-ego.

Another question. What is fundamentally wrong with the god-awful Man Of Steel? It has no Clark Kent story. Not as such. Only at the very end when — SPOILER ALERT — after having just saved humanity and had his true identity broadcast to the entire universe, Clark Kent goes and gets a job undercover at the Daily Planet (sequel, blah blah blah). UNDER HIS OWN NAME!

There are logic glitches aplenty in Man Of Steel, but that's not the problem. Too cool is it to even utter the word "Superman" — the "S" on the suit is some Krypton peace symbol — so leaden with earnestness, it has left every last shred of wit and humanity in the phone booth. Not that there are any phone booths in this miserable grey cadaver of a movie. (Lois Lane is now a Pulitzer prize-winning war reporter-cum-mystifying paramilitary airborne bomb-arming specialist.) 

Superman is the granddaddy of superheroes, the rock from which they are all hewn.  A Christian parable too (co-created, paradoxically, by Jews) — cosmic being gives up only son; boy of extraordinary gifts is raised by humble adoptive parents till it is time to become the Saviour. In this film they've stated it more explicitly, it being mentioned more than once that Clark Kent is 33. Indeed, Superman forgoes seeking truth and justice (the American way) for an (entirely incomprehensible) cataclysmic power struggle with a galactic Devil, one bent on obliterating Son of Man.

But really, who cares? I tell you now, I've had it with "re-inventions" and "re-imaginings" and "re-boots" and "re-awakenings" and "origin stories" and "creation myths" and "post modern" spins. Let's speak a truth — this movie, the entire second half of it, is nothing but a CGI explosionfest, a cartoon, a video game, yet another Hollywood spin on "blow shit up".

At the screening I went to, Man Of Steel was preceded by a trailer for Pacific Rim, a "film" about earth being attacked by space monsters and defended by giant robots. God, please no! People, I appeal to you — how many times can you sit there with your silly 3D glasses on and watch major cities being napalm-fucked by aliens? (And there's another Godzilla on the way.) Me? I cannot take it any more. ENOUGH!

I always regarded Superman (1978), starring Christopher Reeve, as an enjoyable romp. Compared to Man Of Steel it is a work of genius.

Star Trek: Into Darkness

Saw the new Star Trek flick last Friday morning in the unusual setting of a near-empty Empire Leicester Square, alongside a friendly Big Name Critic. I'm a big fan of JJ Abrams, having both met him and sung his praises, in print, on several occasions. Indeed, I boldly go-ed into the West End to see this purely for pleasure — no review, no feature.

I'm not a Trekkie in the strict sense, though the original series were an integral part of my childhood, as they were for many gentlemen of a certain vintage. I was a too-cool teen by the time Star Wars rolled around and which was why, for me, Abrams' 2009 Roddenberry re-boot proved one of the most deliriously enjoyable summer films of recent memory — a real thumb in the eye to those dreadful George Lucas exhumations. Abrams had absolutely nailed it — an enjoyable romp, reintroducing the old Enterprise gang and all pulled off with spot-on humour (and which was why, presumably, they have since hired him to revive the Star Wars saga as well).

But this?... Oh dear. This was like a man telling you the same joke twice... and on autopilot. It even has a repeat "cameo" stunt. More than that, the film makes the dreadful error of eschewing much of the first's levity for straight-out, earnest, Michael Bay-esque action, and with a hackneyed 911 subplot to give it a self-sense of import. JJ, you've forgotten the very thing that has made your stuff so entertaining: character, character, CHARACTER!

So utterly incomprehensible is the story here, something to do with Benedict Cumberbatch's stock British baddie (I understand you have to be familiar with the first round of Shatner/Trek spin-off movies), that the first words out of the mouth of said Big Name Critic, once emerging into the sunshine and pigeon-droppings, were "The franchise. He's killed it."

Maybe it was due to the empty venue, but — note to theatre owners — full-on 3D and Ted Nugent decibelage do not a pain-free experience make, either.

David Bailey

Was just researching something on photographers when I came across this piece I wrote for The Guardian in February, 1999. A very entertaining conversation (for me, anyway)...

So this fat little bloke from the East End is directing a film. Who does he think he is?

There are two apocryphal stories about David Bailey that say a lot about the celebrated snapper. The first has him on a flight to Dublin, striking up a conversation with the woman next to him. Completely oblivious as to the identity of the man beside her, the lady reveals that her husband is a photographer.

"He's what you might call the David Bailey of Ireland," she explains, before enquiring as to the nature of her travel companion's line of work. "I'm what you might call the David Bailey of England," retorts the garrulous Cockney.

The second story has Bailey, in a restaurant, noticing the coy glances of a radiant beauty across the room. On finishing his meal, he strides over to introduce himself. "Don't you remember me, Bailey?" ventures the woman. "No." "I'm your first wife."

David Bailey is almost more famous for the string of glamorous women hanging off his arm - his first and second wives, Catherine Deneuve and Marie Helvin, Jean Shrimpton and Penelope Tree - as for the era-defining photography hanging on the walls of the National Portrait Gallery. He may be in his 60th year, but in spirit he's still the bright young Cockney who helped make London swing in the sixties, bringing a breath of fresh air to the hitherto crusty world of formal studio portraiture.

"I walk down the street and people say, 'Who do you think you are - David Bailey?' " he laughs, living up to the legacy of those now famous Olympus TV commercials. "What they don't know is that you've heard it three times that day already. Every taxi driver. Good for Olympus but not good for me..."

David Bailey's credentials are without question - "Arguably the finest English photographer since Cecil Beaton," pronounced American Photographer magazine - his reputation having been built in the sixties on his stark black and white portraits of the likes of Michael Caine, Lennon and McCartney and Marianne Faithfull, his fashion work, painting, and commercials (most famously the Volkswagen ad in which Paula Hamilton ditches her engagement ring and fur coat but stops short of chucking the car keys). Now he's directing The Intruder, a supernatural thriller he describes as having "a Hitchcock old-fashioned type of thriller thing about it. And it's a bit like Noel Coward's Blythe Spirit - one of my favourite movies."

It's surprising that he has only now turned his hand to film-making when, by his own estimate, he has directed "between 400-500 commercials, shorts and documentaries - including last year's Channel 4 documentary, Models Close-Up - with a handful of Emmys, Cleos and Golden Lions to show for it. "Probably in terms of film, I've shot more than most directors," he chirps.

It's not that film offers haven't been forthcoming. His name was connected, somewhere along the production line, to A Clockwork Orange, Being There and Out Of Africa. For the last, he even spent three pre-production months in Kenya. "People don't understand," he explains. "It's not a career move. I've just as much respect for Richard Avedon as I have for Stanley Kubrick. It's not that one's better than the other. They do different things. Photography's different to movie-making, not less. In fact, movie-making's probably less artistic than photography. In photographs and painting, you've got total control..."

Bailey has chosen to make his low-budget entree away from British prying eyes in Montreal - a cost-effective, film-friendly city that churns out 80-odd films a year. "It went down to 50 degrees below one night," he shudders, in his cosy production office, fugging up the windows with expensive cigar smoke. "Believe it or not, we had fake snow." Today, thankfully, the filming is indoors and, on a soundstage rigged as a spacious loft apartment somewhere in a non-specific North American city, Bailey is walking two of his leading ladies, Nastassja Kinski and Charlotte Gainsbourg through a scene in which their characters discuss the spectral vision that seems to be haunting their building.

There's something incongruous about Bailey directing these sophisticated Continental actresses with jovial effing and blinding, and his use of the C-word (occasionally switched to "James Hunt" when decorum dictates). But no one seems to care.

"Do you like my face?" asks Kinski, concerned about the light. "Nah, it's fine," Bailey replies, before diving into a monitor, as Kinski sits down on the edge of a bed against the fairly spartan interior.

"In all modesty, it's got a Bailey look about it," Bailey explains. "It's like my stills, it has that look that's slightly off-centre and not fashionable. I've never been fashionable in spite of what people think."

Being Bailey, the look naturally entails Gainsbourg rolling on a pair of stockings (several times) but it's briskly done and soon in the bag, in accordance with the director's reputation as something of a speed merchant. "Yeah, I'm fast," he laughs. "Sometimes two clicks, but I'd rather be quick. It either works or it doesn't, because what I do, it's about emotion. I don't like to see photography in photography and I don't like to see photography in movies. I like it to be fairly subtle. Great photography is when you don't see it."

There's something endearing about Bailey. Though he has avoided the ageing love-god image of the likes of Peter Stringfellow (he's been happily married for 13 years to wife number four, Catherine - the subject of his racy coffee-table book The Lady Is A Tramp), you sense that his fascination with women is unabated. Suspicious that his image might be tarnished by recent reports that his waistline is on an outward march ("They always write about my weight, which has nothing to do with anything"), he fears the "little fat feminists" who have it in for him.

"This fat little bloke from the East End managed to sleep with all the most beautiful girls in the world, hahahahaha. Must annoy the shit out of them." But then, "I like women," he stresses. "If I was gay, I'd probably have slept with a lot of men. Like Herb Ritts. I'd be doing pictures of boys rather than girls."

His Cockney background marked him out from an early age as something of a yobby upstart. Leaving his East Ham school at 15, he worked as a tailor's assistant and a Fleet Street messenger before doing two years' National Service in the Far East. He wanted to become the new Chet Baker, until someone nicked his trumpet. Unable to find a replacement, he bought a second-hand Canon instead ("cameras were so cheap then"). The rest, as they say, is history.

"I didn't really think about it as art. It just seemed a nice thing to do. I've never really been clear what art is," he muses. Demobbed back to Blighty in 1959, he got a job with photographer John French and fell into glossy magazine work. "I couldn't believe it when Vogue gave me a contract to photograph women and get paid for it."

By the end of the decade he had a two-tone Rolls Royce, a £100,000 salary (previously unthinkable for a smudge) and had become not only a fully-paid-up member of London's hippest clique, but also its underworld. In fact it was his portrait of his pals the Krays in an East End pub that spawned the Olympus catchphrase. When a fight broke out, he was accosted by a goon demanding: "Who the fuck do you think you are - David Bailey?" ("Then Ronnie hit him," adds Bailey.)

Ironically, his best-known portraits are of men - "You can be crueller with men. I find it harder to be cruel with women. That's not chavinistic" - though he loathes lad culture: "Most disgusting thing in the world? Four smelly blokes in a car talking about football."

But those sixties connections just won't go away. If you look at the cast of his film, the link with Kinski comes from their mutual friend Roman Polanski: "Polanski introduced me to Deneuve and I think I introduced him to Sharon [Tate]". And Charlotte Gainsbourg's mother is Jane Birkin, whose first real portrait was done by Bailey.

There is another link with Birkin, of course. She appeared in Antonioni's cult 1966 film Blow Up - the surreal story of a libidinous sixties snapper, based partly on the Bailey myth. Bailey still has mixed feelings about Blow-Up, having thought he had killed off the project when spurning producer Carlo Ponti's overtures. "I thought they wanted me to direct," he says. "Then they started talking about the way I dressed. I said, 'What's that got to do with it?' They were asking me if I was interested in being in it. Then I wouldn't talk to Antonioni because he thought I was trying to shag Monica Vitti. It wasn't me, it was Terence Stamp."

Stamp was offered the part, but pulled out two weeks before shooting to be replaced by the unknown David Hemmings. But though Bailey gamely admits that Hemmings captured the attitude, and that the film revealed some obscure real-life detail ("I never understood how they knew that I'd paid £8 for that propeller"), the film did him no favours.

He tells how an old lady, coming out of a cinema, told him, "I think you're disgusting." Bailey laughs, "Hahahahahaha." The sixties, he maintains, was a horrible, superficial decade. "It was great for 2,000 people living in London, a very elitist thing, a naive kind of attitude before the accountants took over. Now the accountants have taken over and the world is dull..."

With bean-counting at the core of modern film-making, it's unlikely that Bailey will pursue movies full-time. Though he has plans for a feature about Gulf war syndrome, the immediate future sees him planning a retrospective at the Barbican in April, followed by the first of a series of five books, Archival 1, documenting his career to date.

"There are less good photographers than anything else," he declares. "You'd be hard pushed to name 20 great photographers, but you could certainly name 200 great directors. More. Photography's kind of difficult because it's so easy. Anything that's that easy to do is really difficult to excel at."

Nonetheless, he has no intention of sitting back while technological advances complicate it - something that led to the disillusionment and ultimate suicide of his good friend Terence Donovan. "It proves that I've never been fashionable because I've managed to stay around. Most of the people I started with are gone. The only one left is Helmut Newton. All the others are either dead or selling antiques somewhere. That's what failed photographers do, isn't it? Set up antique shops in Wiltshire."

Bailey, however, has no such intentions: "I hate that Puttnam thing of moving over for the young," he chuckles. "Fuck the young, I'm not finished yet."

Kelly Reilly: The Sky's The Limit

My piece from The Sunday Times, Jan 27 2013

Kelly Reilly has made her Hollywood breakthrough in Flight, opposite Denzel Washington. She tells our writer why, at 35, she’s ready for the big time

A world away: Reilly plays an American heroin addict in the aircraft drama Flight (Francesco Guidicini)

Is there a more cautionary new-year tale than the film Flight? There’s something chastening about the sight of a bloated Denzel Washington hauling bin bags full of empties, accompanied by tepid resolutions about laying off the sauce. “I had friends come to see the film last night,” says Kelly Reilly, his co-star, the morning after the British premiere. “We were in the bar afterwards — I’d put on a little drinks thing for my family — and everyone was like, ‘Should we be drinking? I feel guilty. Why am I wanting this glass of wine?’”

Ostensibly a film about a plane crash, Flight’s touchdown here seems poignant in the wake of the recent Vauxhall helicopter accident, though the film is less about an aviation disaster than human wreckage — namely the plane’s pilot, “Whip” Whitaker (Washington), world champion soak, and a heroin addict called Nicole (Reilly), his unlikely bed­fellow. Inspired by true events, Flight is based on the tragedy of Alaskan Airlines flight 261, lost with all hands off the California coast in 2000 after the plane flipped upside down following mechanical failure. Here, Washington’s cocksure captain successfully crash-lands SouthJet 227 smack in the Bible Belt between Orlando and Atlanta. So far, so heroic, so act of God — until a toxicology screen reveals that our saviour’s blood was more wine than water (well, Smirnoff) at the time.

A hit in America, Flight has garnered Oscar nods for Washington, going the full Ray Milland in Lost Weekend, and for the screenwriter John Gatins. No less impressive is Reilly, who crops up un­heralded as a Georgia druggie, just a few soggy bills ahead of her next speedball. It’s a little bit of Ken Loach realism, as one American commentator noted, parachuted into a Hollywood drama. “How lovely,” Reilly trills. “I love that. I take that as a huge compliment.”

Nicole is an unusual role for Reilly. For one, the $31m film presents the British actress with her first lead American role. “It’s like, ‘If you had any idea how many films I’ve done for a million.’” And if the trailer is to be believed, she is not in the movie at all, its marketers preferring to pitch Flight as a thriller/courtroom drama, focusing on the spectacular crash sequence at the start.

“I thought I’d been cut out,” she admits. “When I saw ‘trailer release’, I was all excited. I went on iTunes, then it was, like, ‘Oh, I’m not in it. I didn’t make it.’ But I think it’s quite a clever marketing ploy, because more people will go to see a film about a plane crash than one about an alcoholic trying to find redemption.”

An absolute delight of an interviewee, Reilly has a sweet smile, luminous blue-green eyes and hair at the honey-blonde end of the auburn spectrum. Sipping breakfast coffee at a chichi London hotel, she’s dressed in a rather unseasonal cotton frock. Then again, after marching down assorted snowblasted red carpets in strappy dresses of late, it’s all relative.

I met Reilly some years ago, before her rise as a screen actress, and little, thankfully, seems to have changed. She remains good company, chatty, quite playful. Croissants arrive accompanied by a gondola of exotic preserves. “You see, these are things that just go into your bag, aren’t they?” she says. “Or are you not a thief of jams in hotels?”

The only differences seem to be that she has since given up smoking roll-ups and undertaken a not insignificant living rearrangement by relocating to New York, or rather the Hamptons, a shift that has imbued her speech with the occasional transatlantic inflection. She got married last year to a local chap who “owns a fishing station out there”, she explains, and of whom she is rather protective. They do have access to some nice seafood, though. “Yeah,” she grins. “We eat well.”

“So I needed to work there,” she adds. “It felt almost like I had to start again. I didn’t know anybody, so I had to get an agent there and figure all that out.” Reilly loved Flight’s screenplay, she says, describing it — rather appositely, in the middle of the Lance Armstrong/Oprah face-off — as a story about “running out of lies and facing your own personal truth”.

She spent countless hours deconstructing a Georgia accent and put herself on tape for the director, Robert Zemeckis. “He really liked it and homed in on me. I’m sure those a little higher up at the studio were surprised, because they wanted to fill that part with a box-office name [Angelina Jolie had been mentioned].” Or a native? “I don’t think Bob knew I wasn’t American.”

A stamp-of-approval read-through with Washington at the Chateau Marmont hotel, in LA, was “all quite glamorous and odd. It was like, ‘I just wish I could take the mystique out of it and be in some London basement with a casting director.’ But it was clear in the room that it was a great meeting.”

Reilly isn’t the only Brit in the film. Her winsome features are offset by the smug visage of Piers Morgan, who crops up in a TV news show. She rolls her eyes. “It’s hilarious, because for a while he was taken very seriously, and I was, like, ‘No, you don’t understand who he is.’” No less amusing is the American media’s “discovery” of Reilly, the “newcomer”. She’s 35, she points out. She’s been acting for 17 years and was the youngest recipient of an Olivier award nomination, in 2003. “An old ­rising star,” she chuckles. “It’s brilliant.”

Reilly, of course, is best known here as DC Anna Travis, from three outings of the ITV cop drama Above Suspicion, and as the other half of Jude Law’s Dr Watson in Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock ­Holmes films. Aficionados will know her as a star of the stage — she made her ­professional debut at the National Theatre and is a two-time Olivier nominee (for After Miss Julie and Othello — and as a stalwart of indie films such as the Asbo slasher flick Eden Lake.

She got her television acting break in 1995, when she bagged a one-off part in Prime Suspect. On stage, she played opposite Kathleen Turner in The Graduate and Matt “Chandler” Perry in Sexual Perversity in Chicago. Then, in 2005, she featured in a triple whammy of Brit flicks — Mrs Henderson Presents, Pride & ­Prejudice and The Libertine. The attention, she admits, was discombobulating: “There were a lot of opportunities that I didn’t take. I didn’t go and do all the magazine covers, or be seen out at the parties, or take the roles that may not have been, for me, satisfying, but would have got me more exposure. I wasn’t ready for it, I wasn’t able to handle it.”

Unfortunately, Reilly couldn’t dodge the tabloid bullet. In 2008, to her dismay, she found herself cited as a romantic interloper, the reason behind Ritchie’s split from Madonna (a story for which she successfully secured retractions). “It was a complete fabrication. Honestly, I had never seen Guy Ritchie off set, and suddenly there were, I’m not joking, 100 press outside my mum and dad’s house. I was so affronted.”

She might want to assume the brace position with Flight, certainly now the American press has a new star to flog. That, she says, is where life experience comes in. “I’m much more comfortable in my own skin now, so that world doesn’t scare me as much as it did. All that circus, I can go in and out of it, and it doesn’t faze me as much.”

Reilly has several films circling, including John Michael McDonagh’s Calvary, a dark comedy starring Brendan Gleeson — “one of the best filming experiences of my life”. Longtime fans will be pleased to hear of her reunion with Romain Duris in Chinese Puzzle, the third part of Cédric Klapisch’s cult series, which began with Pot Luck (2002) and Russian Dolls (2005).

After a three-year hiatus, she’s also thrilled about a return to the stage. Recent readings include a Broadway production of Lanford ­Wilson’s Burn This. “I was thinking, ‘I forgot how much I love this.’ It was like pulling on a pair of old boots.”

Perhaps it will be a little more edifying than her last outing on the boards, turning up to accept a Hollywood Breakout Performance award. “I won it with three others — and they were all under 25. I was this old woman on the stage.” She laughs. “But I like it that something can be new and regarded as new. It’s new to me.” 

Flight opens on Friday

Chris Hemblade

I was very sorry to hear of the death of Chris Hemblade. I hadn't seen him in some years but he was the nicest of chaps, irrepressibly chipper and always fun to work with/for. I knew him best when he was the Assistant Editor at Empire, while I was doing my stint in LA as its US Editor. I remember an entertaining night out in Hollywood when the Empire gang came over and then, a few years later, a great lunch with him in New York. He was the first person I ever knew to wear a pinstriped suit jacket with jeans. One of life's good guys.