Legendary filmmaker Martin Scorsese is shocked when I tell him about the brutal New Year gun murders of Birmingham teenage girls Charlene Ellis and Latisha Shakespear.
The Oscar-nominated director of such graphically violent films as Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, GoodFellas and, from today, Gangs of New York was unaware of the gangland killings that have made headline news across Britain.
"But you don't have guns in the UK," says the Italian New Yorker when I show him the Evening Mail's front page stories.
"Sorry, we do, Martin. And it would seem we've got ever-increasing numbers of illegal machine guns, too," I tell him.
"But you don't have guns like we do in America," the disbelieving 60-year-old director says, still unable to comprehend the senselessness of the slayings.
Britain's 100 or so annual gun deaths is a mere fraction of the thousands of US killings each year.
Yet the two deaths in Aston over the New Year would appear to be a real watershed. Either we get a grip of the gun culture once and for all, or we go down the American road...
The weapons Scorsese features in Gangs of New York are mostly knives and other cutting implements, but deliver one of the most brutal movies in years.
Heavy 19th century Irish immigration into New York has upset the natives so much that knives are frequently drawn in fearsome battles.
"I've been answering questions about films causing violence since 1973," he tells me.
"But films don't cause violence.
"Violence results from social situations that people find themselves in when there's no other means of letting the pressure out that is building up." Scorsese's controversial career was moulded by the violent world he himself grew up in, though you'd never guess it from his easy laugh, sober black jacket, grey open-neck shirt and glasses almost too big for his face.
Born in Queens, New York City, he was a childhood asthmatic whose bed-ridden days saw him develop a passion for story-boarding -whereby simple sketches become the template for a movie shoot.
Outside on the streets, he was a Little Italy east-sider who hated the west side.
Mean Streets showed how he felt the only people who ever had 'respect' were either the wise guys (gang leaders) or priests.
Determined to become a priest - until he made his first movie - Scorsese admits that if push had come to shove, he could not have responded with his own gun law.
Hypocrisy is at the heart of Gangs of New York. British star Jim Broadbent plays corrupt politician Boss Tweed, who seduced the newly arrived immigrants with promises of food, work and shelter in exchange for votes.
Scorsese tells me: "This all goes back to when I was a kid and learning that the Irish got to New York before the Italians.
"The set we built at the Cinecitta Studios in Rome made us feel like we were living in that time.
"We felt like we were part of the Earth and it was quite something and the sets became more and more realistic once the weather started hitting them.
"My background is all about shooting on location, which is quite a serious problem, but this was a special place to be because we owned those streets."
To capture the extraordinary violence of the era, Scorsese put veteran James Bond action director Vic Armstrong in charge of his second unit.
"I showed him Russian films by Eisenstein, like Aleksandr Nevsky, which left me feeling like I was watching a battle on the ice in 1242," he says.
"I wanted a lot of the violence to be suggestive."
Gangs of New York is released on Friday 10 January 2003
