The director of The Drop talks about working with James Gandolfini on his last film

The Belgian director Michael R Roskam, attending the Abu Dhabi Film Festival for two screenings of his film The Drop, has seen his film attract a huge amount of attention for its two stars.

The director Michael R Roskam, left, the late actor James Gandolfini and the actor Matthias Schoenaerts filming The Drop in Brooklyn. Barry Wetcher / Twentieth Century Fox

The new movie from the Belgian director Michael R Roskam, The Drop is attracting a huge of amount of attention for two very different reasons.

On the one hand, the movie is the last screen performance by James Gandolfini, the Sopranos star who died last year. On the other, the producers have managed to release it just as the growing murmurs that Tom ­Hardy is possibly one of the greatest actors of his generation reach a crescendo.

They say all publicity is good publicity, even when it focuses on sad news such as Gandolfini’s departure, and Roskam, in town this week for two screenings of his film at the Abu Dhabi Film Festival, is unconcerned that it could be overshadowed by the looming ghost of the much-loved actor.

“Fans would have gone and watched it anyway,” he says. “It’s Gandolfini the way we love him – in a crime environment, which he’s so good at doing. It just happens to be his last film. Maybe that will give an extra incentive to go and watch it, but in my experience, when you sit down and watch, you forget about it. Tom and James both perform wonderfully and when we come back at the end and say, ‘In Loving Memory’ everybody is like ‘Ah, yeah, it’s Jimmy.’”

As for Hardy’s performance, Roskam is no doubt that the English actor is set for legendary status. “He’s a true raw talent and he’s very demanding and challenging, with himself too, and as a director you have to deal with it. And you will, because immediately you feel you have this amazing actor, and when you start to discover each others’ way of working, mutual respect develops. We both felt that and it shows in the film. He is one of the best and most talented actors of his generation and we’re gonna see some really good stuff from this guy. I love his ­performance in The Drop. Locke was fantastic too, and he will continue to deliver great ­performances.”

The movie is based on ­Dennis Lehane's short story ­Animal ­Rescue, and the author has adapted the script himself, something Lehane has traditionally refused to do with his novels.

“Dennis always described it as a failed novel. He’d tried to make it work as a novel and couldn’t, so he ended up with a short story that was like a very well-written treatment and drew the attention of a lot of people wanting to make it into a feature. He’d always refused to do it with previous things because he said: ‘I know how long my story is and you can’t take anything away.’ But this was short, so he could add things, which made it easier for him to adapt.

“It’s a great story, extremely well written and I loved the themes – these people desperately looking for innocence. It’s more than just a crime thriller. It’s a suspenseful character study at the same time and has many, many layers to it, and that complexity was very appealing to me as a director.”

The film is visually stunning too, which for Roskam made the choice of location vital.

“We wanted to really show the real Brooklyn. We used the eye of a Brooklyn painter, George Bellows, who painted a lot of beautiful expressionistic scenes of Brooklyn city life in the early 20th century and we were inspired by that to light up the city as it is today, with the gritty part on one side alongside the more aesthetic version of an older Brooklyn.”

After a long run of Arabs as bad guys, the pendulum seems to swinging back towards Eastern Europe with the film’s Chechen mafia. Roskam doesn’t want to read too much into it, though.

“Every troubled nation has a ­diaspora to it, that organises itself with its own laws and morality within a different cultural context, and that’s when crime happens. Crime is really just a differently organised society.”

• The Drop screens on Saturday, 5pm, ­Emirates Palace and is scheduled to open in UAE cinemas on November 13