They know how to use our unreflective tendency to empathise with the camera particularly when the

They know how to use our unreflective tendency to empathise with the camera, particularly when the conventions of formal address have been discarded. When a beefy security guard sticks his hand in front of the lens, there is a peculiar sort of intimacy to the affront. “Get outa moy face bwoy,” said a bad-tempered policemen to one of the protesters, but the effect of the angle was to convince you that he had been getting in yours. Marc Munden’s film The Tribe (BBC2) opened in a ruck of policemen, a jostle of black serge, confused shouting, sudden tilts and flares of light.

It was a threatening image, one which conveyed what the police might look like if you were dreadlocked and tie-dyed and chained to a mechanical digger. Not that I’m saying for a moment that I’m as good as him….”n ‘Little Odessa’ opens tomorrow and is reviewed opposite. “The worst thing you can do in the world is be hip; that’s what kills you In any discipline, it’s a marathon, not a sprint Longevity is key I mean, is Akira Kurosawa hot? No, but he’s great. I refuse to believe otherwise.”Fashionable or not, at the age of 26 (he was 24 when he made Little Odessa) Gray has some heat on him, as they like to say in Los Angeles: he has just signed a two-picture deal with Twentieth Century Fox But he remains cautious. “Those kind of movies have their place: sometimes they’re really good and a lotta times they’re bullshit. There is an anti- art vein in cinema and you have to fight it constantly.

I don’t want to sound like I’m ragging on Tarantino-style movies – but if that’s all that’s being made, it’s a problem, right? Maybe that’s all that people want to see but I don’t think so There’s an audience out there for interesting movies. He has written a disco script set in the Seventies, “a very serious movie, about permissiveness without purpose, and self-destruction and a number of things”. You may be sure that it won’t be another Saturday Night Fever.Not that he cares. One thing that’s sad about Little Odessa is that a lot of the immigrants are very well-educated: chemists, physicists, teachers of economics from the old Soviet Union. And now they’re forced to drive cabs.”No one will ever mistake Gray for a Taranteenie: his kind of film-making is severe, non-genre and rather unfashionable. Today, the whole industrialised world is going through declining expectations.