Fearsome North London mob boss Ray (Ray Winstone) reveals his softer side with soap star Sadie (Sadie Frost).
love, honour & obey

In Love, Honour & Obey, Dominic Anciano and Ray Burdis, who pool their combined roles of writer, producer and director to electrifying effect, have brought together a cast that celebrates the diversity and talent of the UK acting scene. Fresh from his Oscar nomination for The Talented Mr Ripley, Jude Law joins his wife Sadie Frost, along with Ray Winstone, Jonny Lee Miller, Kathy Burke, Sean Pertwee, Rhys Ifans and Denise Van Outen in a darkly comic story of what happens when a London gangster clan is abruptly confronted by young ambition, often with hilarious - and very vocal - results.

Using many of the same cast as their last feature outing, Final Cut, Anciano and Burdis have again employed their own brand of free-style directing. Within a carefully constructed narrative framework, the team encourage and provoke their cast into an exhilarating tour de force of spontaneous dialogue, challenging the actors to take control of their own characters and the situations in which they find themselves. The directing duo started out in movies in 1987, when they produced gangster film The Krays, based on the lives of the notorious East End villains Reggie and Ronnie Kray, which starred brothers Gary and Martin Kemp, previously best known for their successful international music careers in the band Spandau Ballet.

Writers/producers/ directors Dominic Anciano (left) and Ray Burdis also put in an appearance as a couple of bouncers called, approriately enough, Dom and Ray.

After several further forays into the world of movies and television, however, the duo had had enough of watching the directing and writing talent they had helped nurture in the UK head off to the States to make more and bigger films. To Anciano, there was only one solution to this problem. “We’d scrape around for years to get the money to make a film and then watch the director fly off to Hollywood, leaving us here to start again from scratch. So one day Ray said, ‘Sod this, let’s write, produce and direct our own stuff’. So we did.” This they have successfully accomplished by collaborating with the cream of British acting talent – including Kathy Burke, winner of the Best Actress Award at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival for her performance in Gary Oldman’s feature Nil by Mouth. Several of these actors also starred in Final Cut, and so enjoyed Anciano and Burdis’ unique method of working that they jumped at the opportunity of repeating the experience.