 Apologists may protest, you could not have an authentic film about shifting drugs in Britain without featuring Liverpudlians. After all during the 1990 cocaine "wars", it was a trade in which we almost cornered the market. There was, accordingly, no compromise on the choice of home-grown talent for the parts. Matthew explains: "I thought how am I going to direct someone who is not from Liverpool as though they are from Liverpool. "There are a lot of fantastic actors who come from Liverpool so I thought that I would go for the real McCoy." The one Liverpudlian, who doesn't play one in the film is of course Craig. Currently the 36-year-old, a former pupil at Woolton Primary School and Hilbre Secondary School, is riding the crest of a wave for a number of stellar performances including that of poet Ted Hughes opposite Gwyneth Paltrow's Plath in Sylvia. Nevertheless with his lazer gaze icy blue eyes and wiry muscle toned body he still looks 'hard' enough in real life to play a gangster from Liverpool - or anywhere else for the matter. He laughs at the suggestion. "Me, a hard b------? I' m not.." Talking of "hard" brings in Matthew's recollection of his only trip to Liverpool when he and Guy Ritchie - the Lock, Stock director and Madonna's husband to boot - were walking through the Pool of Life after supervising that film's soundtrack production. "We were in this cab going to Lime Street station," says Matthew who, incidentally, is married to model Claudia Schiffer, "Guy has this scar down his face and this driver says, for whatever reason, 'so you think you're hard'. And Guy who is hard, he really is - says it's none of your f------ business. And he stops and says "Right, get the fout of my f------- cab!' And we got kicked out of the cab. "And that's why we were walking." It was Ritchie who was supposed to be directing Layer Cake too - but he had to pull out leaving Vaughn, as producer who had never directed a film before, with a dilemma. "The toughest decision I had was whether to direct this film. I'd already spent some much time working it and had already fallen in love with the script. I though the guy who'd written the script JJ Connolly would be the one who wanted to direct and I thought how am I going to tell him that I'm going to direct it. But he was fine about it it - he said you've got this movie in your head and what you've got in your head is what I've written. "So he was totally happy about it." The people who weren't happy though were Columbia Tristar. Often with dollars financing a British product the call will come for it to be Americanized, nearly always to the film's artistic detriment. Thankfully, they did not insist on this - but something else, as Matthew recalls with a twinkle in his eye. "The ending that they wanted was him (Daniel) with the girl driving off into the sunset. "We got that filmed and then we secretly went off and did our own thing. | 
