It’s not often that a film director takes his life in his own hands. But that’s what happened when Matteo Garrone shot his chilling crime saga Gomorrah, which took the Grand Jury Prize in Cannes this year. Telling five separate stories of characters at various levels in the chain of command, it’s a bleak tale of the Camorra families of Naples, a highly-connected organised crime clan that makes the Sicilian Mafia look like the Lavender Hill mob.

While directors of Hollywood gangster films have often consulted former mobsters for the sake of authenticity, there was no such possibility for Garrone on what is the sixth feature of his career, though the first to break out internationally. Gomorrah is based on the bestselling 2006 book by journalist Roberto Saviano, a man now living under round-the-clock police protection after he received veiled threats from various “godfathers” of the Camorra, whose profits are estimated to be some $233 billion per year.

It is a situation compared by the novelist Umberto Eco to the Islamic fatwa against Salman Rushdie, and Garrone has seen it first-hand. “When we started to write the screenplay, Saviano used to come to my house, where we wrote, with police in tow,” the 39-year-old director recalls. Their collaboration began almost immediately after Saviano had recklessly named a series of Camorra bosses at a public meeting conducted by the Ministry of Justice in his home in Casal di Principe, a tough suburb of Naples and “a very, very dangerous place”, according to Garrone.

Now that the film has been released on more than 400 screens in Italy, the situation for Saviano has become even worse, Garrone says. “Now he’s become a real symbol of the fight against Camorra,” he says. Given that the Camorra has its claws into everything, from the haute couture fashion industries of Milan to the rebuilding of the World Trade Centre in New York, it would seem a near-impossible fight. “It depends on how the politicians solve the problem,” the director argues. “A symbol is not enough.”

Born and based in Rome, Garrone spent six months living in Naples to understand the world of the Camorra. “If you really want to solve it you have to start from inside. You need to address problems of education, unemployment, the relations between people and institutions. Nobody trusts an institution. The Government, it’s completely absent. The people that are from the Camorra live there, so they are close to people. They talk the same language.”

Even so, was he not frightened for his own safety during the shoot? “No, no. First of all, my girlfriend is from that area,” he jokes, hinting that this offered some form of protection. They met during production and now have a son.

“He’s like a son of Gomorrah,” Garrone says. If this sounds a little blasé, Garrone argues that “most of the problems for Saviano come from what he did as a person rather than a writer. He attacked them personally. In my case, it was different”.

Certainly, fictionalising characters was always going to count in his favour. But, more importantly, so was getting the locals on his side. “They understood that the movie was not a movie against the Camorra but was a movie about the Camorra,” he stresses. “It was very important for me that they helped. They live in that situation, that war. When I was shooting the movie, I always had 40 or 50 people behind the monitor watching the film. For me, they were the first audience of the movie.”

Less interested in showing sharp-suited bosses than the clan’s beleaguered foot soldiers — characters include an ageing Mob accountant and a tailor in the employment of a Camorra-funded fashion business — Gomorrah sets out to demythologise its gangsters. Set in the rundown suburbs of Scampia and Secondigliano, in a series of dingy bars and disused buildings, it’s the very antithesis of the glamour-fuelled worlds of The Godfather and Goodfellas.

“It was very interesting to show that the reality of where and how they live is different from the movies that they like,” Garrone notes. How does he feel about these classic Hollywood gangster movies? “I like very much The Godfather. I like very much the Scorsese movies. I like very much also the Tarantino movies. But I think in reading Saviano’s book, I discovered there was the possibility to change in some way the conception of the Mafia movie. It was very interesting to go in the opposite way of that model.”

Inevitably, Hollywood has been sniffing around the possibility of a remake. “There have been offers,” the film’s producer, Domenico Procacci says. “Even before the Cannes Film Festival I had calls.” While neither he nor Garrone will confirm who is interested, the director admits that he is unconcerned about the prospect of American studios glamorising his downbeat work.

“I have done my movie so it doesn’t matter,” he says, adding that he wants to do something different for his next film. Such as what? “I don’t know yet — but something more fun.”

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