With John Hurt also on board as the casino manager who sees Dan as his ticket to Vegas, production on Owning Mahowny began in Toronto on March 25, 2001, almost five years to the day after director Kwietniowski had started shooting Love and Death on Long Island (in which Hurt also starred). The delay between films can be attributed largely to Kwietniowski’s perfectionism: every scene was planned and storyboarded, with the visual impact as carefully prepared as the dialogue.

Philip Seymour Hoffman as Dan Mahowny.

The young director had also decided that, although much of the story was played out in public, he didn’t really want to make that kind of large-scale film. “I like to tell small stories quite large,” he explains, “but with Owning Mahowny it is a question of telling a large, headline news story quite small. I wanted to forget completely about motivation - no voice-over, no flashbacks. My objective was to make the banking world as intriguing as the casino world, rather than making another film about guys at a craps table. My method was to get under the skin of it and work almost obsessively with the central character.”

Crucial to this approach was the role of Mahowny’s girlfriend, Belinda who also works at the bank, and is in a position to observe him almost 24 hours a day. Hamori and the director met a number of young actresses, including Minnie Driver. “We met her in Los Angeles,” recalls Hamori. “Richard and I had agreed that we’d play our cards close to our chest. But, after a brief while, we looked at each other and knew: ‘She’s the one’. Having to leave for another meeting, I couldn’t help myself and asked Minnie if she could do a Canadian accent. Richard rolled his eyes, and Minnie knew she had the job!”

“In an odd way, she is as capable as Mahowny is: she is as good at side-stepping,” says Kwietniowski of Belinda’s character. “The way she continually adapts to the impossible situation she finds herself in makes her Mahowny’s enabler. And their romance is an entirely personal world which exists just between the two of them.”

Minnie Driver as Dan’s girlfriend, Belinda. She calls him ‘Wild Man!’

And that - the private world - is one of the keys to understanding Owning Mahowny, reckons Kwietniowski. “While the first section deals with the events, the story moves on to the psychology and the psychosis of gambling, plus how banking works, how casinos work and how money works. I realised there’s a way to tell this extraordinary story in an unextraordinary way.”

Mahowny’s first thought, when he is finally arrested, is to ask the police to call the bank and tell them he might be late for work. Inspired by real life events, Owning Mahowny is the story of an ordinary man with an extraordinary compulsion. “There is a line in the last part of the movie,” says Hamori. “When asked to rate the thrill of gambling on a scale of one to a hundred, Mahowny says, ‘A hundred’.

When asked to rate the biggest thrill outside of gambling, he says ‘20’. ‘Can you live on 20%’? he is asked. When I read those lines, I knew an actor could build an entire character on that.”