You know, Viggo is a very well-rounded artist - he’s not just an actor. As it’s well known, he paints and he does photography, writes music, and has a publishing company. So his understanding of movie-making is very broad and he has a directorial understanding of movie-making, which means that we can collaborate really well because he’s not only worried about his character. He can make suggestions about all kinds of things in the script and it’s never an ego thing. If he comes up with an idea that I think is ridiculous I’ll say, “Viggo, that’s ridiculous. I don’t want to do it.” And it’s not like, “Oh, you’ve insulted me, and now I’m going to sulk now.”

I think a lot of directors don’t want to let actors into their turf. You know, “just worry about your character - don’t worry about other stuff.” And with some justification, depending on the actor, really. But very soon I realized with Viggo that he’s just a terrific collaborator. So that’s part of the deal with us.

BG: You’re very well-rounded, too – you’re directing an opera for the first time?

DC: Yes, I’ll be directing an opera of The Fly, which will come out in Paris, the Theatre du Chatelet, in July 2008. Howard Shore, who’s composed the music for most of my music, is really the guy who’s behind that venture. I really see opera as a composer’s medium and I think film is a director’s medium. So I’m really playing third fiddle here to Howard, who composed the music, and David Henry Hwang, who wrote M Butterfly, has written the libretto.

I think I’m the third banana. When you think of it, great operas are about the music and the emotion and so on, and you might have a good or bad production directed by a good or bad director but if the music isn’t great the opera won’t endure. So what I’m basically saying is if I screw it up it won’t kill everybody. I’m not sure what’s going to happen really, but I’m having fun with it anyway.

BG: It’s also your second film centered on the mob.

DC: Yes, that’s just by happenstance. As I say, it would be nice if you could pick and choose every movie and say, “Ah, I think in the arc of my career it would be good to do musical comedy now.” But in fact it’s so rare that you get a project that you love that has the people involved with it that you trust and a distributor that you have confidence in, that you can get the actors you want and so on, that when that comes along, you grab it.

It’s not as if I thought, now I must do another one of these. Some people get very schematic in the way they think about what they do creatively, but really it’s absolutely an accident that I’ve done two mob movies in a row, not a calculation.

BG: You’re not fascinated by crime families?

DC: No, no, I’ve sort of invented by own criminal organizations, I suppose, in the past. Obviously crime is interesting because it immediately means conflict and drama, as George Bernard Shaw said, “Conflict is the essence of drama,” so if you have criminals you immediately have that.

I don’t think of myself as being obsessed about anything, really. I’m not an obsessive person.

BG: You do foreground the idea of families and communities, within the Russian mafia and outside of it.

DC: The way that Steve and I had structured his script, it really worked well on all different levels - Naomi Watts’s character and her family intersecting with a criminal family and the interconnections. It was very lovely, you know.

I can tell you that the first draft of Steve’s script didn’t have much about tattoos in it at all. It alluded to the fact that these guys had some tattoos and that was pretty much it. It was only when we were actually making the movie…Viggo was the one, doing his meticulous research that he always does, who came across Russian Criminal Tattoos, a fantastic book about the whole subculture of tattooing in Russian prisons. And that really triggered off rewrites. I said to Steve Knight, “When I send you this book it’s really going to blow your mind and you’re really going to want to work on the script and make tattooing a central metaphor of this movie.” It wasn’t there in his original draft, and I still thought it was a good script.

BG: The nude fight scene also really stands out in Eastern Promises.

DC: That was in the script. But of course, in the script, it didn’t say he was nude or not nude. A screenwriter can get away with murder - literally. You can do things in very broad strokes because there's going to be a crew of 150 people who will then do the research and do the detailing and design the steam bath and figure out how it looks and whether there are tiles and what color they are. You don’t have to write that because if you did, it would be 800 pages and you'd be Tolstoy.

So the script just sort of says, he's left there for a moment, the two Chechens come in, and they pull out their knives. It doesn't say what kind of knives. It doesn’t mention nudity or not, towel or no towel, towel stays around him or towel doesn’t. Camera sees genitals or doesn't. We have to create that, and in terms of nakedness, it's about vulnerability, not about sex.

It's only occurred to me recently in the past few days, that this is our shower scene from Psycho. You're never more vulnerable than when you're naked, you're wet, and then there are guys with knives who don’t like you. It's about the will to survive, and then it's about betrayal, as well.

BG: The focus on tattooing and the physicality of being a mobster really ties into the body-orientation of your other films.

DC: Yes, well, I think acting is about bodies. Actors have their bodies to work with and that’s it - that’s their instrument. So to me, all movie-making is very physical. You can’t photograph an abstract concept - you have to photograph things. And you have to photograph people who are physical objects. So I think of movie-making as very sculptural and physical. It’s not an abstract thing at all. All this is very natural for me.

BG: So what do you think of the latest wave of ultraviolent horror films?

DC: I haven’t seen them. I don’t know, but I do know there’s been a wave of snuff films on the Internet that mostly come from Muslim extremists, and I think that’s pretty interesting itself because there used to be lots of discussion about snuff films but no one ever could really show you one because they really didn’t exist except in the imagination. But now they are everywhere, and they masquerade as religious or political things, but to me, they’re just vicious - very inhuman snuff films. Whether that’s influenced an emergence of a sort of feature film version of that, as a catharsis or something - maybe there’s something to that. But I’m in the dark here because I haven’t seen Hostel or Saw.

BG: You’re not interested in the horror genre anymore?

DC: It’s of…minor interest to me only. I don’t mean to demean them. They might be great or they might be interesting or they might be provocative or they might be horrible. But I see movies that I feel like I need to see to feed me.

I don’t feel that I must see everything, because first of all that’s impossible, and secondly I don’t feel that because I made horror films in the past and not so long ago, that I must see every horror film and know everything about the genre particularly. I’m not obsessed with the genre - nor have I turned my back on it. If I had a project that was wonderful and it was a horror film, I wouldn’t hesitate.