Charles Bronson, reportedly Britain's most dangerous prisoner, is the subject of a new cinema film and has been advising the film-makers from his prison cell on how he should be characterised.

A feature drama about the 55-year-old armed robber, who has been in prison for 34 years — 30 of them in solitary confinement — is among several films about criminals that are being promoted at Cannes Film Festival.

Bronson was jailed for armed robbery in 1975 but remains in prison because of his repeated violent attacks on inmates and prison staff. In 1999 he held a prison art teacher at knifepoint for 44 hours after he criticised his sketches.

His visitors now include Tom Hardy, the British actor who appeared with Tom Hanks in Steven Spielberg's epic Band of Brothers and who has been cast to play him in Bronson, and Danny Hansford, one of the film's producers. He also speaks regularly on the telephone to Nicolas Winding Refn, its writer-director.

Bronson accepts that the film will not portray him as Goldilocks, Hansford said. He describes the film as an honest portrait of a man called Mickey Peterson, who changed his name in tribute to the Hollywood star of Death Wish and who claims that violence is no longer part of his life.

The two men began working on the film four years ago. Hansford said: “Everyone told me I was insane to get involved but he was very friendly from the beginning. We get across his humour, his warmth. He is one of the funniest people I've met. Being with him is like being with Billy Connolly for two hours. I wonder, 'How the hell can this guy still be in Wakefield prison?'. His violent days are over. I totally believe it, but they're making an example out of him, like the Krays, because he's so notorious.

“His reputation is not helping him but I would have him living in my house. He talks to my mum on the phone. But he's just been given a letter that says he will never be released. I don't know how they can say that when he's never killed. He spends 23 hours a day in a cage and is next door to a cannibal, the worst of the worst.”

The film-makers explored the childhood of Bronson, delving into what made him go off the rails.

Hansford said: “I wanted to get to the bottom of him. He had a perfectly good upbringing, a strict father with a strong sense of morals — 'Look after your mum and your family'. But he got into a bad crowd when he was younger.”

Rupert Preston, a producer with Vertigo Films, which is making Bronson, dismissed the suggestion that the film would make the case for his release. “That's being done by his lawyers,” he said. He noted that Bronson had said the film should reflect that he had never killed anyone and that it should include his mother.

“His closest family supported him over the years. He was driven to violence by circumstances. He was a bad boy and he admits that,” Preston said.“He has read the script and likes it. It's an honest and true account of his life, so he's very supportive.”

The film-makers say that Bronson is not a standard gangster film and that its stylish approach merits comparison with A Clockwork Orange, the controversial film by Stanley Kubrick. Its director of photography is Larry Smith, one of Kubrick's collaborators.

Other real criminals who are being brought to the big screen include Ed Kemper, the serial killer of Santa Cruz in California, who was known as the Co-Ed killer, Jeffrey Dahmer, a mass murderer, and the Boston Strangler, who murdered 13 women in 1962.

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