'Catch me if you Can': What's the catch?

Frank Abagnale's gift for fabrication made him notorious in the Sixties. But does Steven Spielberg's glossy version of the charmer's life bring us any closer to the truth?

How would you respond if you woke up one morning to hear that Steven Spielberg was going to make a movie about your life? That he'd cast Christopher Walken and Nathalie Baye as your parents, and Leonardo DiCaprio as you? And that he didn't intend to ask your advice about any of it? Only Frank W Abagnale – a successful businessman who numbers banks and credit card companies among his clients – can answer that question.

I first posed it to him this time last year, when Abagnale's requests to see a script of the movie were still being declined. "This is the way I look at it," he said. "If I had been involved, I'd have someone like you calling me now and asking me why I didn't do something about all the inaccuracies. It's much better to say I never saw the script, I never spoke to anyone about it, I saw it just like you. What could I do about it? This way, nobody can accuse me of self-mythologising."

Why would all this attention be lavished upon an avuncular security consultant who lives in a nicely-kept ranch-style house in Tulsa, Oklahoma? Well, before Abagnale became who he is today, he was a thief, a forger, an impostor and a fraudster. At the age of 16, he ran away from home and began a five-year spree, during which he used false cheques, a plausible manner and a series of unearned uniforms to con his way through the club-class lounges and five-star hotel suites of the world. He cashed $2.5m (£1.6m) in phoney cheques in 27 countries. He posed as an airline pilot, a doctor, and the assistant attorney general.

Then justice collared him, and sent him, at the age of 21, for a long sojourn in the French, Swedish and US prison systems. The FBI – represented in the movie by Agent Tom Hanks – supplied him with a happy ending, allowing him to work for them, unpaid, cracking the kind of crime for which he had been jailed.

In the late 1970s Abagnale co-operated with a Houston Chronicle journalist, the late Stan Redding, on Catch Me If You Can, a memoir of his criminal career. Redding compiled it from four interviews with its subject, and made extensive use of dramatic license: it's one long jamboree of hair's-breadth escapes and audacious hoaxes.

Hall Bartlett, the producer of Airplane!, snapped up the movie rights – but when Bartlett died, his estate sold them on to Disney, which then ceded them to Spielberg's Dreamworks. And somewhere in the middle of this, Abagnale allowed Dreamworks' screenwriter Jeff Nathanson to interview him about aspects of his life not covered by Redding's account. DiCaprio began sniffing around the lead role, and Spielberg decided that he'd rather not delegate the job of directing the picture. And with Spielberg involved, the interview material garnered by Nathanson – in which Abagnale had discussed his attitude to his parents, his feelings about his mother's sexual infidelity, the loneliness of his life on the run – became as important a source for the film as the larky paperback from the crime section.

Talking with Abagnale on the phone last week, it soon became clear that, in the space of 12 months, his relationship with the movie had undergone a complete transformation. Next week he will arrive in London for the premiere and bask on the red carpet under the magnesium flares. So what happened?

"Two weeks prior to the filming of the movie I was giving a talk to 300 FBI agents," he explains. "And when I got there they said, 'You won't believe who's here. Tom Hanks and Leonardo DiCaprio.'" After the lecture, the actors explained that they'd come without Spielberg's knowledge, and chatted with Abagnale for 20 minutes. DiCaprio persuaded him to come and stay with him in his home in Beverly Hills, so that he might get to know him better. "He followed me around with a tape recorder and a notebook for several days, morning till night, recording everything that I said. Then, on the last day, he asked me if I'd like to see Steven Spielberg."

The pair went to the director's offices to admit that they'd been seeing each other behind his back. Fortunately, he didn't object: Spielberg had already determined the personality of the big-screen Frank Abagnale, and encountering the genuine article wasn't going to make him change his mind. He was friendly, even offering Abagnale a cameo role as the gendarme who puts on the cuffs. But he made one thing clear: Catch Me If You Can was his story now.

Until Abagnale saw the finished product – sitting alone in a screening room at Spielberg's office – he had forgotten how much he had revealed in those interviews with Jeff Nathanson. He'd expected an upbeat popcorn movie, but was instead confronted by a film that depicted his mother's betrayal of his father, examined his feelings about his parents' divorce, and offered him a surrogate parent in the shape of Hanks's bureau man. When the lights went up, he was handed a mobile phone with an eager Spielberg on the other end. But Abagnale, for once, found himself speechless.

"I don't dwell on that time, you see. I'm so different from the egotistical, self-centred person I was when I did those things. And to watch someone acting out your memories on the screen is like reliving it. Like someone taking you back and showing you what you did."

Two days after the screening, he dialled Spielberg's number, and gave him his response. "One, it's a movie about divorce and how devastating it can be for some children. Two, it's a movie about the innocence of the 1960s, when if you told somebody you were somebody they believed you – a time that we will never see again."

But it was the film's depiction of his family that affected him most deeply. Spielberg – most of whose films seem to be about children yearning for the return of their mothers, or their motherships – has amplified this part of Abagnale's story at the expense of the details of his deceptions.

"Of course it wasn't 100 per cent accurate. I have two brothers and a sister, they're not in the film. My father was never really the con-man type that the film shows him to be: he was straight as an arrow, though he did have problems with the IRS." Other deviations from the record include the poignant meetings with his dad – in real-life, after running away from home, Frank never saw his father again: the old man died while he was in prison. He never had a fiance called Brenda, either – though that hasn't stopped the flow of emails to his office enquiring about her fate. And the FBI man on his tail was called Joe Shaye, not Carl Hanratty – and whatever his name, he perfomed no Pimpernel trick of rescuing Abagnale from a French prison.

"But if you're asking me if that was my childhood, then I have to say yes. Christopher Walken and Nathalie Baye played my parents so well that I really thought I was in my living-room at Christmas. My mother couldn't have been played more correctly. She's not very happy with the film because she doesn't feel that she was portrayed in a very favourable light. But the truth is, that was my mother and those were her actions. I thought I was looking at my mother."

Abagnale – and his family – have been propelled into the public eye by one of Hollywood's current kicks: pulping the lives of relatively unknown living personalities to furnish material for pictures. The tagline "based on a true story" has never been sexier – to Academy members, who love to drool over an actor who can feign someone else's real suffering; to actors, who can feel important as they totter up to the podium to thank the real-life inspirations for their work; and to audiences, who believe that their night at the flicks has been elevated to some higher plane by the struggles of a David Helfgott (Shine), a John Forbes Nash (A Beautiful Mind), or an Erin Brockovich. Unlike the films of these lives, however, Catch Me If You Can is as cautionary as it is uplifting.

So Abagnale finds himself in the strange position of measuring shame for his criminal past against the honour of being in receipt of one of the greatest affirmations American culture can bestow – incorporation into the moral universe of Steven Spielberg. The movie version of his childhood now forms a continuum with the experiences of the abducted boy in Close Encounters, ET's little alien lost, and the prisoners of Amistad. What's interesting is that Abagnale, having had his past processed in this way, feels that Spielberg has, more or less, told the story how he remembered it. Serendipity? Or a notorious fraudster's greatest scam? Like all those bank tellers, I'll choose to take Abagnale at his word. Nobody needs to accuse him of mythologising his life. A certain Hollywood director has done that for him.

'Catch Me If You Can' is released 31 Jan