By a strange quirk of movie industry organisation, I meet Guy Ritchie to discuss his new film RocknRolla all the way back in May.

The sun is beating off the London streets, portending a long fine summer, but Mr Ritchie is all spivved up in a natty grey pinstripe suit that would look just fine on one of his wideboy gangsters. ''I'm a businessman!", he could have exclaimed with justice, because we meet in his newly purchased pub, The Punchbowl, a welcoming wood-panelled hostelry in the heart of ritzy Mayfair.

But Mr and Mrs Madonna can do nothing right, it seems, and later on in the so-called summer they will face storm-in-a-teacup tabloid claims that they're charging too much for their beer. However, for the moment God is in his heaven, all is right with the world and Mr Ritchie has a new film to flog.

After the much-criticised career diversions of Swept Away (which starred the woman he insists on referring to as "the missus") and Revolver, RocknRolla seems very much a return to basics for the writer/director. It's about London gangsters -- there are heists, assaults, fights, car chases, Mr Bigs and stolen paintings. It's the kind of caper, in other words, that made Ritchie's name in the first place and a surprisingly entertaining and snappy piece of film-making it is too.

Tallish, trim, tanned and fit-looking, Ritchie lurks at the rear of his pub and seems, initially, ill at ease. Which is hardly surprising when you think about it: the critics have said harsh and hurtful things about him of late, and anyone who's married to the most famous woman in the world is bound to get a little edgy when confronted with a member of the fourth estate. The idea for RocknRolla, he tells me once we have settled ourselves, came to him on a flight back from New York.

"I'd had some ideas knocking around for a new film, and then I read this article on the plane home saying why hadn't someone made a film about how much London has changed in the last 20 years. That stuck with me and became the basis for RocknRolla." In the film, Tom Wilkinson plays Lenny Cole, a verbose and resolutely traditional London crime lord who is forced into a realisation of how much his city has changed when he locks horns with a powerful and utterly ruthless Russian oligarch. As a longtime Chelsea fan, was Ritchie having a bit of fun at the expense of that club's current owner, Roman Abramovich?

"There is a bit of an agenda there," he admits, "but I'm not against any of that. I like the idea that oligarchs came into this country and dwarfed what we thought of as serious money up to that point -- I just think it's amusing. They don't understand the old class system we all used to worry about -- it has no currency with them. And while previously when people here spoke well and used the Queen's English, it meant that they had money, that's all been completely turned on its head now. People who talk well are looked on as being rather impoverished and people are now more nervous of the barrow boy in a suit. Everything's changed."

And for the better, Ritchie reckons. "I just like things to evolve and I think that in London they're evolving in an exciting way. There's an energy running through the place these days and I like that." Apart from exploring the new, intensely multicultural London, RocknRolla investigates what its director describes as "the underworld subculture" with an even lighter and more playful touch than usual; the violence is cartoonish and mainly implied, and as Ritchie points out, "no one actually dies on screen". In fact, the film has a whimsical energy that suggests its writer/director rather enjoyed making it.

"I did," he says, "I really enjoyed it -- we played around. I enjoyed working with the actors, I enjoyed the whole process -- but then I always do. I'm very happy to just make films for 10 months of the year. You know I've never ever lost my temper on set -- I've lost my temper doing a lot of other things, in fact I actually have a rather moody temper, but never when I've been making movies."

One imagines he might have lost it once or twice when reading the critics' reactions to his last two films, the rather dire 2003 desert island yarn Swept Away and its almost as poorly received 2005 successor, the gambling thriller Revolver. "No!" he says, when I remark that they received a bit of a critical kicking. And when I ask how he coped with the barrage of negativity, he merely says "I think you just reduce your intake", which presumably means you turn off the TV and give up reading newspapers.

RocknRolla, however, may well be hailed as a return to form and is certain to receive a more cordial welcome than any Ritchie film since Snatch (2000). "There's no question there's going to be a warmer environment than my last two ventures," he says. "The last venture [Revolver] was deliberately provocative and I suppose, to a degree, Swept Away was deliberately provocative. This, on the other hand, is a popular concept, it's about jolly things and it does what it says on the tin. It's a much more accessible and easier film to enjoy." And regardless of how it, or any of his other films, are received, Ritchie is hardly likely to be easily deterred from film-making, an ambition he's cherished for almost as long as he can remember.

Despite his spivvy suit and Cockney-lite persona, Guy Stuart Ritchie is actually the product of a relatively privileged background. He was born in Hatfield, Hertfordshire on September 10, 1968, and when his parents divorced five years later, Guy and his elder sister moved with their mother to the home of her new husband, Sir Michael Leighton, a minor peer. Though they in turn divorced, his mother is still referred to as Lady Leighton.

Ritchie grew up loving films, and was particularly affected by an early viewing of Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid. "That was a very important film for me," he says. "I feel confident in saying that Butch Cassidy is a great film -- it doesn't appear to take itself too seriously, but at the same time it's a rather serious commentary on the end of the west and so on. It was my mum who pointed out the humour in it to me, and I don't think people remember how funny a film it is. I liked it cos it ticks all the boxes, it's what I want out of a film. I want to be provoked, I want to be entertained, and I want to smile."

It was this, among other films, that first made him dream of becoming a director. "By the time I was 15 all I wanted to do was make movies," he says, "but I didn't understand how that could ever be possible." It was a chance meeting with an old school mate 10 years later that finally persuaded Ritchie his dream might not be entirely impossible. "I was 25 and signing on, when I met this character -- a not very impressive character incidentally -- who was directing commercials. I went to work with him as a runner and I was inspired by his ineptitude -- I thought if this f***ing idiot can do it, anyone can. There was so much bluffing going on -- they were shooting an ad for Tippex or something, and they were all standing around talking about the symbolism. So I thought, I could do this better than that."

He remembers being "terrified" the first time he found himself in charge of a set and camera crew. "I was gutless to begin with," he says, "but I think direction is only about one thing -- building up confidence and enough belief in yourself to stick by your convictions." Confidence came and after an apprenticeship in music videos, Ritchie hit it big with his first feature film Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels, in 1998. He proved that was no fluke by following it with the acclaimed comic drama Snatch, in 2000. But by then he had become famous for another reason, having married Madonna Louise Ciccone at a Scottish castle that same year.

Ever so delicately, Day & Night enquires after 'the missus'. In the months since our meeting, rumours have proliferated that Mr Ritchie's marriage to 'Madge' is in a spot of bother -- they are leading separate lives, sleeping in separate beds, even in separate cities (Madonna is believed to have decamped to New York). Whatever about the truth of any of this, Ritchie responds to my inquiry about life in the celebrity fisheye lens with a resolutely straight bat.

"It's quite funny," he says, "I took my missus out to dinner last night and I completely forgot what that entails." Really? "Yeah -- completely forgot, and it can be a real production. But then again sometimes it's not. Sometimes people are coolly delighted about it and there's no fuss ... That's more common than not, actually, people are generally respectful, ordinary people are, anyway. It's weird to interrupt someone, it's weird and it's rude, and I'm quite surprised when people take it upon themselves to be rude."

If the taxi driver who took me back to the airport is to be believed, Mr Ritchie may not have to put up with that kind of rudeness for very much longer. n

RocknRolla is released nationwide today.

- Paul Witington