Guy Ritchie slumps into a well-upholstered hotel armchair and contemplates his still relatively new-found fame. Four storeys below, on London's Park Lane, gawpers, fans and paparazzi huddle in clusters. They're not there for Ritchie, though, but for the elusive Brad Pitt, who is reputedly somewhere in the building. Not that Ritchie doesn't have his own claim to celebrity at the moment - the birth of his first child, the evocatively-named Rocco Ritchie, in Los Angeles last week, has established him as Famous Dad of the Year, given that Rocco's mother is a certain Madonna Ciccone.
The 32-year-old director flew in from Los Angeles the day before (Madonna may be a London resident these days, but she didn't trust the city's hospitals to deliver young Rocco). "It's great. I'm enjoying it all," he says of the new arrival. "I've felt no drama to it whatsoever. I still feel the things any father's going to feel, and there wasn't really as much media interest as I was afraid of."
This is not a man who minds being in the spotlight, although he says he finds there's less pressure on him for his new movie, Snatch, even if it does star Brad Pitt. "Funnily enough, the pressure hasn't been as great. On Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels I travelled from arse to toe of the States selling it, which was a good exercise. But, as far as actually making the movie goes, I was more confident on this one than the last. I think a lot of film-making is about confidence."
Ritchie is not noted for his lack of confidence. The former music video director shot to fame when his first feature, the Cockney crime caper Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, which he had made for less than a million pounds, took £18 million at the UK box office alone.
After the huge success of Lock, Stock, I wonder whether he was tempted to make a big-budget movie in the US (despite the presence of Pitt who worked for minimum salary, Snatch cost only about $5 million to make). "It did occur to me to go to America," he says. "But I'm glad I resisted the temptation. I feel wiser now and more aware of the potential pitfalls in the Hollywood system . . . I'm very glad I waited and I'm now more aware of how that system works. You don't want to have too much money. You spend money, you lose power. It's as simple as that."
On the surface, Snatch sticks in similar terrain to the Mockney geezer setting of Lock, Stock. A black comedy about diamond heists, bare-knuckle boxing, Russian gangsters, Irish Travellers, Jewish conmen and a shoal of red herrings. More a sprawling collection of violent vignettes than a conventional drama, it demands a level of concentration if you're going to keep up with what's going on. "It was quite hard to write," says Ritchie. "And I kept changing it up until the last day of shooting."
He likes "mucking about" with the actors on the set, and was happy that Brad Pitt was willing to do that. "But I'll tell you who I love working with is Vinnie Jones. He's a real pleasure to work with, because he's a professional athlete. You can f--k around with him, but when you ask him to do something properly, he knows the difference between what's serious and what isn't."
As for Pitt, his character, a Traveller with a talent for bare-knuckle boxing, displays a remarkable approach to an accent of "pikies", as they're called in the film. "There's a bit of a running joke about pikies, because they just do what they want to do," says Ritchie. "They're a charismatic bunch, and they do get a bit of a kicking through the film, but in the end of the day Brad Pitt does play their hero and he wins in the end, so that's all right."
Displaying an alarming gift for telepathy, he anticipates my question about the parallels between his directing style and that of certain American film-makers.
"You know, I watched Reservoir Dogs for the first time on the plane over," he says suddenly. "I kid you not. I'd seen Pulp Fiction, which I loved, but I can't believe I'd never seen Reservoir Dogs before. I'd just caught clips of it. But I cannot recognise any parallels at all between anything he's [Tarantino] done and anything I've done."
I hadn't even asked, but now that he raises it I can't help pointing out the freeze-frame credit sequence introducing the characters in Snatch, which is not a million miles away from Tarantino's film. "Yeah, but come on! That's done totally differently," he protests.
Speaking of plagiarism and influences, a lot of critics, even those who liked Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, have blamed it for the wave of dreadful Cockney gangster films produced in Britain in the last couple of years. "I really don't know if that's fair or not," he says. "I mean, I just don't know if it was a coincidence, or if the scripts were all sitting there dormant, and then they went into production because of that."
So has he seen any of those films? "I have, yeah." Did he like any of them? He sighs. "I'm just always impressed that people actually manage to make films. I loathe people that give them a kicking."
A carefully worded answer from someone who, along with his producer, Matthew Vaughn, has never been flavour of the month among his peers in the British film industry, who accuse him of arrogance and of affecting a working-class laddish demeanour despite having attended public school.
"I don't have anything to do with the British film industry," he says. "I don't know any of them. Well, that's not strictly true. I know Alan Parker and a few of the other old boys. But I don't know. Who are the other film directors between the ages of 25 and 35? Not Danny Boyle - he's more than 40."
I mention the Irish director Damien O'Donnell, who made East is East last year. "Yeah, and fair play to him. That's a good movie."
In fact, he doesn't think there's such a thing as a British film industry. "In America, you have 270 million people, so you've got an audience there, which you don't have in Britain, with 60 million people."
I mention that Stephen Frears had said something very similar recently about relocating High Fidelity from London to Chicago. The difference with Ritchie is that he seems to delight in creating a certain kind of hyper-real but antiquated London, one full of diamond geezers in trilbies and hard men in full-length crombie coats lobbing rhyming slang at each other. You never see a McDonald's or a Tesco in Ritchie's East End, which seems to have been frozen in aspic in 1971.
"I try to nick what I reckon are the most interesting elements stylistically and culturally from the last 30 or 40 years," he says. "You can't pinpoint it in time. There's very little set dressing involved. All those places exist, and they make for a better-looking film. But who knows, I'll probably react against that and make a film with loads of McDonaldses and stuff at some stage."
Tellingly, he admits that he loved John Boorman's The General, another film which portrayed contemporary gangsters in an old-fashioned way. "I always think John Boorman should have got more credit," he says. "I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing. It's quite cool that he hasn't been recognised. All his films are so eclectic."
In fact, he says, he rather relishes the peculiarities and visual oddities of Englishness. "I quite like the fact that our Old Bill look as silly as they do. I'm so used to seeing cops in black shirts with sunglasses in American movies, and I think that's boring. There's something avant-garde about the British bobby. It's just those polyester shirts that let them down. If they only had cotton shirts . . ."
Snatch is on general release from next Friday