AG: Very much so. Sidney has a reputation for living up to his own reputation, and he most certainly did so in my case. He's an extremely devoted and passionate movie-maker, and with this he wrote it specifically for the cinema, which was a great sign. I also knew it was familiar territory for him - another of his contemporary looks at corruption and compromise in New York. So obviously I knew that this was going to be a Sidney Lumet special, and I was very flattered that he would come to me and ask me to play his protagonist.
Total Film: The character you play is extremely, sometimes even unsympathetically, idealistic. As the film progresses, though, he realises that in the real world there are limits to his kind of purist morality.
AG: Yes, Sean's a tortured, tragic hero. By the end of the film he knows that he's made certain compromises that he felt he would never make in his life - but he was put into a situation where he had to do the technically wrong thing, which he now knows can also be the morally right thing.
Total Film: Casey's father, Liam (Ian Holm), wears his moral integrity a little more lightly than his son. He's incorruptible and honest, but he doesn't lecture people the way that Sean does.
AG: Yes, but I think Sean's cut from exactly the same cloth - the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, as they say. Sean's tried to live up to the example that his father set him, but in the scene when he comes down real heavy on his dad's partner, Joey (James Gandolfini), Liam comments, “I just don't know what is right or wrong anymore, but this is what I felt.” It's so sad when a police officer has to manipulate or break the law in order to uphold it. They want to keep their oath to the citizen, but the system isn't working, it's not providing the services and the back-up they need in order to do that. Those are all classic Lumet themes, aren't they?