It had 22 leads, multiple storylines – and a director who was having serious doubts. Producer Mike Kaplan relives the chaos, danger and fun of life on the set of Robert Altman’s Short Cuts

I hadn’t seen Bob Altman in three days – our longest separation since we started shooting Short Cuts. So far all the locations had been in the Los Angeles area, but this week we were going down to the Kern river, in central California. We were filming Raymond Carver’s short story So Much Water, So Close to Home, about three fishermen who discover a body.

It was the middle of summer and broiling-hot – stifling. The location was a good 40 minutes from the Red Lion Inn, where people were staying. Bob came over after dinner, and turned to me: “We have an early start. Walk me back to my room.” We began walking down what felt like a mile of maroon hotel corridors. We talked in shorthand: he was tired, but he wanted the news. Then his voice changed, without skipping a beat. “I have no idea what I’m going to shoot tomorrow,” he announced. We were at his room. He opened the door and began undressing. “I don’t know if I can pull this off; I’m exhausted.” He climbed into bed in his undershorts. I was worried; I had never heard this tone before. He pulled up the covers, then closed his eyes. “Turn off the lights as you leave.”

I had been involved with Short Cuts for years, since 1989, convinced the combination of Altman and Carver could create one of cinema’s great mosaics, one to rival Bob’s masterpiece, Nashville. I found an enthusiastic French co-producer, who had good connections, but time dragged on and the funding leads became erratic and far-fetched. When I heard one source, a former intelligence officer, had disappeared while driving with cash from Cannes to Paris, it seemed to have turned into a bad 007 plot-line.

Then Bob made The Player, which was released in 1992 and secured his second coming. He cast me as a marketing executive in the film, a role I had played for real since 1970. Somehow, Short Cuts melted into the background as I found myself in the middle of Bob’s bravura 10-minute, 25-character opening shot for The Player. I walked from Dina Merrill’s studio office with Annie Ross and Frank Barhydt (Short Cuts’ co-writer), past Fred Ward as the film-buff security chief describing Orson Welles’s legendary opening tracking shot in Touch of Evil, which Bob was acknowledging and satirising. We had to get our lines out before reaching the window where Joan Tewkesbury and Pat Resnick were pitching to production head Tim Robbins. Ironically, the take used lost my final line: “That’s what we get paid the big bucks for.”

The Player won the director’s award at Cannes, and was Oscar-nominated. More importantly, it was Bob’s biggest hit since M*A*S*H, and the studios stepped up to the plate for Short Cuts.

Bob told the financiers I had to be involved. (He didn’t have to; we never had a contract during the years I was hunting for funds, but that didn’t mean anything to Bob.) I would have some kind of producer credit and look after the marketing. In return, I asked if I could make a documentary about the film. Bob had never allowed anyone else’s camera on set, but he agreed, providing the camera was unobtrusive.

Short Cuts’ 10-week shooting schedule was divided into weekly divisions for each of the nine Carver stories and the poem that made up the movie. Each set of actors were available for just one week. A multi-coloured chart detailed how the 22 principals would be juggled between locations.

A mercurial, volatile director

Out at the river, the first day’s scenes were the most crucial for the story of the three fishermen, played by Fred Ward, Buck Henry and Huey Lewis. They discover a woman’s body in the river near their campsite, and decide to leave it there, reasoning that nothing can be done until their weekend is over; after that, they’ll alert the authorities.

Bob’s fears repeated in my head: “I have no idea what to shoot tomorrow.” These anxieties were heightened by the location. The fishermen’s campsite was hundreds of feet below a cliff where two large generator trucks, equipment vehicles and the catering bus were parked – the first two on a slant. Equipment was lowered down on winches. The entire operation was the most physically dangerous I had encountered on an Altman film.

The heat was a brutal 107 degrees, slightly cooler near the water. Allan Nicholls, the first assistant director, had left to attend his brother’s funeral. It felt chaotic. I walked towards the river – and there was Bob, ensconced atop a high director’s chair, confidently observing the action, nibbling on watermelon and pineapple from a large fruit plate held by his son, production designer Stephen Altman. Not a smidgen of anxiety on his face.

During that day, for my film-within-a-film, we recorded Bob blocking Buck and Fred starting a campfire; commanding Huey to piss into the river, his ^­ character unaware of the body below; and precisely describing to cinematographer Walt Lloyd the elongated S-shaped master shot he wanted for the body reveal. By the end of the day, Bob had devised and filmed 18 set-ups, more than any single day’s work in the previous three weeks. His control was instinctive, his creativity bubbling. Maybe the previous night had been an aberration. He certainly had a mercurial, volatile nature; but once he was on location, surrounded by his movie family, he was in his element, quickly deciding how and what to shoot.

When we saw the dailies of those scenes, there was an audible gasp at the beauty of the S-shot, as the camera curved down the bends of the river where the actors were fishing, before settling on the floating body. (Later, this master shot was intercut with the fishermen speaking. Perhaps Bob felt that in the context of the whole film, it called too much attention to itself.)

We were all looking forward to Bob choreographing actor Peter Gallagher in another scene, where he destroys his furniture with a hammer and chainsaw. At the first rehearsal, the crew were trying not to laugh as they watched the “slice and dice” action; but Bob and Peter were deadly serious – counting the moves, hearing the breaks in rhythm that would compose the sound design. They went back and forth several times: first Peter, then Bob adding a lamp to be smashed, then Peter, then Bob pacing it out from start to finish, his long fingers punctuating the action.

Dailies were a communal happening, a time at the end of a long day when everyone got together to celebrate and unwind. Bob encouraged everyone to attend, watching reactions, seeking opinions, analysing footage. There was no hierarchy. There was good food and drink. Visitors were welcomed. Ingmar Bergman, Louis Malle or Molly Haskell might be in the audience. Bob relished this time. In my documentary, he quotes Fellini telling him: “The best film is all the dailies. It’s like seeing the mistakes. You see what’s going on in people’s minds. You haven’t yet distilled those thoughts.”

It was a privilege to be allowed to film Bob at work. On set, he was consumed by the details: despite his self-deprecating statement that “80% of making a film is the casting; all I do is turn on the camera”, he was very much the active centre.

In 2007, I took my documentary, Luck, Trust & Ketchup, to the Berlin film festival. I hadn’t watched it in 10 years. Eight months earlier, in November 2006, Bob had passed away. At the end of the film, a lump rose in my throat as we watched Bob walking towards his waiting car, saying goodbyes, waving to the crew. If my film works, it’s because it illustrates something Bob’s sister once said, having watched her brother direct industrial shorts in Kansas City, their hometown: “If you wanted to see a really good film, you would film Bob making a film.”

Five years ago, Chan-wook Park thrust himself to the front rank of the new Korean cinema with his violent, ingenious thriller, Oldboy, the only recent Asian movie I know to feature a girl who reads Sylvia Plath. Much influenced by David Fincher’s Se7en, it’s the centrepiece of his Vengeance Trilogy and was awarded the Grand Prix du Jury at Cannes by a tribunal presided over by Quentin Tarantino. His new film, Thirst, is similarly bloody and violent, and also influenced by western movies, in this case the current international cycle of vampire flicks, though still very much a thing of its own.

Hyun, the hero of Thirst, is a Catholic priest who volunteers to work at his order’s missionary hospital in Africa, where he contracts the deadly EV virus and faces certain death. Due to a last-minute blood transfusion, he miraculously survives and on his return to Korea, wrapped like a mummy to conceal the lesions and pustules, he’s dubbed “the bandaged saint” by his followers.

But moving into the household of an old school friend, he reacts to the smell of blood and is soon not only in need of the red stuff to keep his EV symptoms at bay but racked by sexual desire, which he meets, Opus Dei-fashion, by whacking his erect penis with the recorder he once used to serenade the dying patients he comforted.

One thing leads to another as he literally flies around, trying to satisfy his thirst without taking life or making the wrong kind of conversion. Unfortunately, a dissatisfied wife seduces him. She becomes a vampire, but in her case not averse to adultery or murder. This is a truly bizarre movie, a tragicomedy that Graham Greene might have written in collaboration with Bram Stoker. But it’s repetitive and overstays its initial welcome.

The New Zealand-born director of The Piano talks to Peter Conrad about her forthcoming film, Bright Star, a study of John Keats’s final days

Publicising her new film Bright Star in Cannes earlier this year, Jane Campion grumbled about the “old boy network” of the Hollywood studios, lamented the lack of opportunities for female directors and declared with righteous gynocratic outrage: “After all, women did give birth to the whole world!”

When I read the remark, I crossed my legs in self-preserving alarm. Was I due to interview Gaia, Magna Mater, the antipodean incarnation of Mother Earth? Even Harvey Keitel, cast by Campion as a tattooed wild man in The Piano and a sexually predatory guru in Holy Smoke, once admitted to a certain superstitious dread when discussing her: “Jane Campion is a goddess and I’m a mere mortal. I fear being struck by lightning bolts.” Keitel later diplomatically muted his account of the weather she generates and called her “a warm breeze, at play”.

Waiting for Campion in a London hotel suite, I listened for rumblings of thunder next door, where the divinity was being photographed. I needn’t have worried. She breezed in playfully, just as in Keitel’s description, and grimaced about the ordeal of having to be scrutinised by someone else’s camera: “I always come out looking like an albino gorilla.”

In person, Campion is neither gorilla nor goddess. The breeze derives from her quirky humour and the mercurial play of expression on her face; her greying hair and her black clothes suggest severity, but the woman herself is a riot of frank, flushed emotion. “I found myself sobbing,” she said about reading John Keats’s letters to Hampstead seamstress Fanny Brawne, on which Bright Star is based. A minute later, Campion was suppressing a scream as she remembered the delays on the film’s set as wardrobe assistants fiddled with the Regency bows and hooked bodices worn by her cast: “It was like being in casualty; there was always another fashion emergency being wheeled in. I yelled, ‘Just use Velcro!’” She then let loose a peal of hilarity that Keitel might have called Olympian. “Oh, I love a tantrum,” she admitted.

Women give birth to the whole world; this particular woman has given birth to a small, idiosyncratic world of her own in a series of films that are darkened by psychological anguish and irradiated by poetic wonder. Campion’s heroines are adventurers whose self-discovery sets them at odds with conventional reality. Sweetie is about a fat fantasist who comically terrorises her suburban Sydney family, An Angel at My Table about the painful growing-up of eccentric New Zealand writer Janet Frame.

In The Piano, a colonial wife in 19th-century New Zealand preserves her autonomy by speaking only through the music she plays, while The Portrait of a Lady shows an American heiress being captured and destroyed by old, corrupt Europe. In Holy Smoke, a young woman who finds enlightenment in an Indian cult is vindictively de-programmed, normalised by force; the heroine of In the Cut escapes from tame normality into a world of unbridled, dangerous eroticism.

Bright Star, nominally about Keats, is an addition to her portraits of ladies, women and girls. Its centre is Fanny Brawne, regarded by many Keats biographers as a minx who trifled with the dying poet but seen by Campion as one of the 19th century’s unsung female martyrs, able to express herself only through her needlework. “She had to be content,” Campion said, “with a life made up of very small things. Back then, women just waited for men and sewed or mended while they were doing so. I got myself into the mentality by learning to embroider pillow slips.”

The film’s triumph is to make Fanny’s demurely stoical routine more moving than the agony of the tubercular Keats, played with raw sensitivity by Ben Whishaw; its study of thoughts that go unvoiced and desires that are never satisfied made me understand what Keats meant when he said that he believed in “the holiness of the heart’s affections”.

The domestic interiors of Bright Star are monastic cells for the women imprisoned in them. Outside, the light-suffused landscapes seem to pulse. “I was thinking of Monet’s haystacks,” said Campion. “They’re just lumps, but they have the sun inside them, they vibrate. Images like that can’t help but be moving; they’re pictures of life and you can feel it palpitating!”

Campion is the most emotionally generous of film-makers. The opening shot of An Angel at My Table is her primal scene and it coaxes each of us to disinter our earliest memories. The camera looks up at a looming shadow, an indistinct form with the sun behind it. The shape rocks to and fro, then leans down; it extends arms that might belong to a seraph compassionately embracing the world. Lying on grass as pristinely green as that in Eden, a baby stares at this figure that bends down from the sky. A maternal voice says: “Come on, darling, come on!”

Next we see the baby’s feet, tottering with brave independence through the grass. This is how Campion operates – protecting, encouraging, then retiring into invisibility to watch her dependents take their first steps. Hence her skill at directing children. Anna Paquin won an Oscar for her astonishing performance as Holly Hunter’s manipulative daughter in The Piano; Edie Martin, with no experience of acting, is even more touching and truthful as Fanny’s wide-eyed young sister, Toots, in Bright Star.

“She was wonderful,” said Campion, “but because she was such a baby she got frightened, she’d say she had tummy aches. I calmed her down by showing her how to create a bubble for herself. It’s easy; you stretch out your arms and that excludes all the people who are making you nervous. My job was just to help her to relax and be herself. I told her to forget about the camera, then I left her alone.”

Directing Abbie Cornish as Fanny, Campion played the mother who resigns herself to an offspring’s newfound freedom and cuts the cord. “Abbie bonded with Fanny straight away and if I disagreed about something she’d insist she knew better. So I just said, ‘OK, the character’s yours.’ I suppose some men would be allowing in the way I am, but Abbie told me she’d never had this kind of empathetic connection with a male director. For me, being a director is about watching, not about telling people what to do. Or maybe it’s like being a mirror; if they didn’t have me to look at, they wouldn’t be able to put the make-up on.”

A documentary on the DVD of The Portrait of a Lady shows how Campion patiently mothers her cast. Nicole Kidman, distressed during a scene of marital strife with the scary John Malkovich, is soothed in a whispered confabulation, with Campion drying her tears. After being drenched by an artificial storm, Barbara Hershey is towelled dry by her solicitous director. When the raddled, querulous Shelley Winters seems to forget what film she’s in, Campion is as patient and tactful as if she were taking care of an elderly relative with dementia. “Performers are so vulnerable. They’re frightened of humiliation, sure their work will be crap. I try to make an environment where it’s warm, where it’s OK to fail – a kind of home, I suppose.”

Campion’s 14-year-old daughter, Alice, serves as her household muse, a touchstone of veracity like the ingenuous, trusting Toots; she was almost an unofficial consultant on Bright Star. “Keats didn’t keep Fanny’s letters, so when I was writing the script I wondered how I’d be able to get her voice. Whenever I was unsure, I thought, ‘How would Alice react?’ She has the same kind of personality, always flying off, fantastic emotional ups and downs, yet very tender and kind under it all. I’ll show you, we should get her in here.” She strode into the adjoining room to collar Alice, who accompanies her everywhere, a pretext probably, since I suspect Campion was missing her daughter after a separation of 15 minutes.

Following some mumbled negotiations, she returned alone, shrugged helplessly and recited the lament of parents everywhere: “Alice can’t come, she says she’s busy. Actually, she’s on the phone!”

With more seasoned performers, Campion adopted the shorthand of suburban housewives who swap recipes over the back fence. Kerry Fox, so heart-wrenching as the bewildered adolescent in An Angel at My Table, has graduated after two decades to the status of wise matriarch and plays Fanny’s mother. “I’ve known Kerry so long that I can just dial her up. It’s like baking a cake: I’ll say, ‘That needs to go on the back burner for 45 minutes at 300 degrees’ and the result is always perfect.”

The culinary metaphor is revealing. Along with the usual battalion of gaffers, grips, best boys, propsmen, crowd marshals, trainee runners and suppliers of artificial snow, the credits of Bright Star list a home economist, the gloriously named Katharine Tidy, who ensured that the pots and pans in the Regency kitchens were authentic. “I’m a slow cooker,” Campion added, sustaining the analogy. “I took four years off after In the Cut because I wanted to see who I’d be without work. I even tried being a hermit in the wilderness in New Zealand. I stayed in a warden’s hut two-and-a-half hours off the Routeburn Track through the fjords on the South Island. It was early winter, so there was no electricity or running water. I lasted about five days!”

Preparing to direct The Piano, Campion rehearsed unbossy, non-belligerent behaviour with the second-unit director, Colin Englert, Alice’s father, to whom she was then married. Over the years, she has found ways of communicating that rely more on sympathy and semaphore than on analytical dissection. “What Keats wrote about negative capability was very helpful – it explained the way I work, staying in the mystery, not intellectualising. That’s how it was with Ben Whishaw; we didn’t talk, we kept the head out of it. I used a kind of sign language to show him what I wanted. It doesn’t always come across. I once had an actor say to me, ‘Jane, can you please use verbs?’ That night I wrote down a list of verbs that might come in handy on the set when I needed to explain myself! It can be frustrating, but I’m not a verbal person.”

Was that, I wondered, a disqualification for making a film about a poet? Campion laughed or, rather, guffawed in her boisterous, self-mocking way. “Well, Janet Frame’s a writer, though in my film you only see her writing in the last minute! And Meg Ryan’s character in In the Cut is a creative writing teacher. But that stumped me: I thought, ‘I just don’t know anything about this.’ On the way to work, she reads the poems pasted up above the seats on the New York subway and I realised I didn’t understand poetry either. So just to create a diversion and a delay, I picked up a biography of Keats. That’s where I found the answer; he said he wanted a life of sensations, not thoughts, and I understood that I was trying to photograph sensations.

“That came back to me when I was writing Bright Star at this holiday batch I have in Australia.” (A batch, let me explain, is the local equivalent of an English country cottage, named after the unwived bachelors who used to live in such outback huts.) “I took my flask of coffee out to the paddock and I was reading Keats’s poems when a horse sidled up and very quietly stuck its nose in the bag I had beside me, to see if there was anything worth eating. It was so delicate, it took such care not to disturb me or damage the bag. I just froze as this enormous, strong creature nuzzled me and tried to work out what I was doing and whether I had anything to give it. Well, you can see that I’m still a country girl!”

It was a truly Keatsian moment, like the passages in his letters or poems when he watches an owl or a hare and speculates about their feelings and the consciousnesses inside their fragile heads. The cast of Bright Star includes a cat, so alert and slyly intelligent that I wondered whether it had an agent, and Whishaw’s Keats is equally feline. “When I saw him,” Campion said, “I thought, ‘Oh you’re beautiful, like a cat.’ He had the wrong colouring for Keats, he’s not blond, but I couldn’t alter that. You wouldn’t dye a cat’s fur!”

The epiphany with the horse clarified the challenge Campion faced. She had, she told me, “to make that tenderness visible on film – but how?” Action is the hormonal fuel of films made for and by men: we watch Matt Damon running, Jason Statham driving cars, Tom Cruise jumping out of planes. The kinetic art of cinema delights in making machines speed, collide, crash and burn. Campion, for all her grounding in physical sensation, has more abstract concerns. She asks questions like those with which Keitel confronts Kate Winslet in Holy Smoke: “Why do people believe in God? Why do they believe they’re in love?”

Tantalised by such speculations, she often eliminates action altogether. An Angel at My Table skips Janet Frame’s suicide attempt, In the Cut elides the climax when the heroine kills the cop who menaces her, and Bright Star leaves out Keats’s death, making Fanny’s response to the news the emotional climax of its story.

Campion is interested in images, not events, and at her finest she composes a pantheistic poetry that is made of light. The drowning of Holly Hunter’s piano is the best-known example, though Bright Star contains an equally delirious image of a butterfly farm in a hot, closed room. In the Cut begins with a petal shower in a Manhattan spring, miming the defloration that is the film’s subject. “That just happened. The wind picked up and we were quick enough to film the blossom falling. We couldn’t credit our luck.”

There’s a similar but gentler moment in Bright Star, when a fluttering curtain suggests the respiration of nature, briefly agitating the closeted, corseted Brawne house. “I was desperate for that to happen, but I refused to use a wind machine. And the air outside was so still. We got sick of waiting and shot it anyway – and then, just at the right moment, the curtain quivered. I seem to be good with winds, even though I wouldn’t pretend to be directing them.”

I remembered Keitel’s description of Campion as a friskily spontaneous breeze. “I’m someone who loves to play,” she said. “I make films so I can have fun with the characters.” At the very least, she is a breath of fresh air, reinventing an art staled by commercial cynicism. The wind she stirs up is also a manifestation of the creative spirit, which in less grudgingly democratic days was known as genius and in even remoter times was attributed to God, or perhaps to a goddess. During our conversation, she described herself as “a visual person”. But New Zealanders are modest to a fault and I’d prefer to call Campion a visionary. On the set of Bright Star, she told Whishaw that for her poetry means “openness to the divine”; her films open us all to that possibility that such a realm might exist.

London film festival

The cherubically pretty Zoe Kazan – 26-year-old granddaughter of Elia Kazan – has already been seen in Sam Mendes’s Revolutionary Road, playing the fatale-innocent secretary with whom Leonardo DiCaprio has his sordid fling. Now she has her first leading role in this downbeat American indie drama from writer-director Bradley Rust Gray. Not quite mumblecore, it’s more murmurcore, sighcore and snapping-shut-the-mobile-phone-core, and characterised by lo-fi acting from characters filmed in intimate closeup or else in a type of surveillance long-shot, chatting on the streets or in coffee shops, often partly obscured by traffic or passers-by.

Kazan plays Ivy, a student back in the city for spring break, and sharing a ride home with her childhood friend Al (Mark Rendall), a sweet, shy guy who very clearly has feelings for her. Ivy, however, is in the midst of a tricky relationship with an absent college boyfriend, and her loneliness has an extra, poignant dimension. Ivy is an epileptic, a condition which has implanted wariness in her emotional life. She cannot even take a bath without her mom being in the house in case anything happens. A scene in a doctor’s surgery informs us that drinking isn’t good for Ivy’s condition, and neither is emotional stress. So things don’t look good when Ivy has a couple of beers at a party, and Al starts confessing to her how he feels.

The way things pan out is not too much of a surprise, but it’s a gentle, watchable movie, the more involving for being reticent and withdrawn. With a more powerfully written role, Zoe Kazan could be a contender.

At National Film Theatre, London, tonight. Box office: 020-7928 3232.

Five years ago, Chan-wook Park thrust himself to the front rank of the new Korean cinema with his violent, ingenious thriller, Oldboy, the only recent Asian movie I know to feature a girl who reads Sylvia Plath. Much influenced by David Fincher’s Se7en, it’s the centrepiece of his Vengeance Trilogy and was awarded the Grand Prix du Jury at Cannes by a tribunal presided over by Quentin Tarantino. His new film, Thirst, is similarly bloody and violent, and also influenced by western movies, in this case the current international cycle of vampire flicks, though still very much a thing of its own.

Hyun, the hero of Thirst, is a Catholic priest who volunteers to work at his order’s missionary hospital in Africa, where he contracts the deadly EV virus and faces certain death. Due to a last-minute blood transfusion, he miraculously survives and on his return to Korea, wrapped like a mummy to conceal the lesions and pustules, he’s dubbed “the bandaged saint” by his followers.

But moving into the household of an old school friend, he reacts to the smell of blood and is soon not only in need of the red stuff to keep his EV symptoms at bay but racked by sexual desire, which he meets, Opus Dei-fashion, by whacking his erect penis with the recorder he once used to serenade the dying patients he comforted.

One thing leads to another as he literally flies around, trying to satisfy his thirst without taking life or making the wrong kind of conversion. Unfortunately, a dissatisfied wife seduces him. She becomes a vampire, but in her case not averse to adultery or murder. This is a truly bizarre movie, a tragicomedy that Graham Greene might have written in collaboration with Bram Stoker. But it’s repetitive and overstays its initial welcome.

Slumdog Millionaire brought the harsh realities of India’s underclass into the multiplexes. But Indian cinema just got a whole lot grittier with Sudhir Mishra’s Ride the Wave Johnny

The impact of Slumdog Millionaire has percolated through Indian cinema and a grittier genre is emerging taking a more direct look at the country and its inequalities. Sudhir Mishra’s Ride the Wave Johnny, is an intimate look at Mumbai, connecting the dots between the dirt-poor pavement dwellers, the gangsters, police, media players and business people to give a sense of the vast interconnectedness of this sprawling mega-city.

Mumbai, as ever, looks astonishing on the big screen. Its teeming ocean-side immensity has the potential to replace New York as the globalised world’s iconic cityscape. The sharp contrasts of ultramodern skyscrapers, minarets and crumbling colonial-era architecture gives each shot of Mumbai a unique human resonance, every face in a window, every stain on a stairwell, redolent of human drama. And Mishra’s Dogma-style hand-held camera work gives the film an organic quality, capturing the natural light and shade of the city, its raw colours and infinite textures.

The plot has many interesting points – too many, unfortunately. There are several storylines that have the potential to be films in their own right, but none of these are told in sufficient depth; instead the film skims across a range of narratives that range from being poignant and powerful to downright absurd.

The Johnny of the movie is a coffee-boy who also delivers cocaine for his gangster boss, Chutta, while nursing dreams of escaping to Dubai (a perennial fantasy of poor Indians who have no idea of the exploitation that awaits them). Having seen his parents murdered in his rural village, he eeks out a living in the big city under the wing of Chutta’s lover, an obese Muslim transvestite. Johnny is played by Sikander Agarwal, a poor kid from Bihar who made his way to Calcutta, where he was “discovered” by a German director on his first day in the city. “I had never acted in films, I was without work, I agreed,” he says of his experience. “The film got over, the German crew went back to their country and I went back to my struggle to survive,” With his unique life story, Aggarwal brings to his character an authenticity most of the other actors rarely match.

Johnny’s tale is interwoven with a moving love triangle involving a corrupt policeman, Chiple, his beautiful younger wife, Divya, and her young lover, Parvez. Johnny helps Parvez break into a safe house Chiple uses for whoring and stashing the proceeds of his bent activities, which include assassinating local businessmen. The emotional intensity between the three of them is the most compelling thing in the movie. Kay Kay Menon is excellent as the demonic policeman who, despite his crimes and casual cruelties, is still deeply in love with his wife. But like everything good in this movie, this story is diluted as Mishra forays into other areas.

The tale of a model, Preeti, and her relationship with her coke-head advertising executive boyfriend, Vishal, is merely tedious. The combination of models, cocaine and advertising ceased to be interesting everywhere else in the world in the 1980s, but Mishra shoehorns this story into the movie as a glib account of India’s rapid modernisation. Their tale segues into a completely bizarre subplot, involving a mysterious crime boss, who acts as Preeti’s fairy Godfather, becoming obsessed after seeing her on TV.

The film has many Bollywood flaws. It’s far too overlong, and the sexual dynamics are stunted by Indian sensibilities. While foul language is spewed freely to bring an earthy feel to the movie, kissing remains taboo. Thus impassioned lovers find themselves locked in weird, sexless cuddles. One particularly amusing scene involves the sight of Preeti appearing to climax, fully-clothed, half falling out of a car window while sitting on Parvez’s lap, while he looks like he’s taking a snooze. If depictions of sex are going to be as ridiculous as this in Indian cinema, it’s better that film-makers leave them out altogether.

This movie doesn’t have the energy of Slumdog Millionaire, nor does it have its deep concern with India’s poor. Johnny’s tale is a constant foil to other people’s stories rather than the main event. But the film is evidence that Indian film-makers are mining the streets for stories rather than repeating the same middle-class Bollywood cliches. By no means a masterpiece, it is a sign of much better things to come.

The director of Antichrist is to go from gyno-horror to a ‘psychological drama-cum-disaster movie’ for his next project

For those who worried that the outraged response to Antichrist might have put Lars von Trier off making movies for a time, their fears can now be put to rest. The Danish director last week announced his return to the fray with Planet Melancholia, which comes billed as a “psychological drama-cum-disaster movie”.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, the English-language production will shoot on locations in Germany and Sweden next summer and is budgeted at around €5m (£4.6m).

Producer Peter Aalbaek Jensen was vague on the script details, but claimed that Planet Melancholia would provide a mix of spectacular cinematic imagery with Dogme-style handheld camerawork. For good measure, he added that it would be “romantic, in a Lord Byron sort of way”.

Von Trier scandalised the Cannes film festival earlier this year with his latest film Antichrist, which featured a scene in which the heroine hacks at her own genitals with a pair of rusty scissors. His other work includes Dogville, in which Nicole Kidman’s character is subjected to a gang rape, and the death-row musical Dancer in the Dark, starring Björk.

Last week he restricted his comments on the new film to a terse, four-word statement: “No more happy endings!”

The relationship between taxi drivers and their fares has long fascinated film-makers, not least the gifted Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, and this movie by an American of Iranian descent has much in common stylistically and thematically with Kiarostami’s Palme d’Or winner The Taste of Cherries. Performed by a non-professional cast and set in Ramin Bahrani’s native Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Goodbye Solo centres on the relationship between Solo, a youngish taxi-driver from Senegal, married to a Mexican woman, and William, a white, blue-collar septuagenarian, who wants the cabbie to drive him to a sacred spot in the Blue Mountains where, it’s clear, he intends to commit suicide.

The cheerful Solo, who sees in America the rich promise of life, befriends the sad, lonely William who’s given up on the American Dream and devotes himself to deflecting him from this self-destructive mission. Over a period of several days, Bahrani subtly probes this uneasy friendship and the implications of each man’s decision.

William is played by Red West, a former stuntman and bodyguard to Elvis Presley, and he has a striking resemblance to the former stuntman and charismatic character actor Richard Farnsworth who committed suicide in the year 2000 at the age of 79 when he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. He’s wholly convincing, as is the Senegal-born Soulémane Sy Savané, and the final sequence up in the mountains is particularly affecting.

Written and directed by a British film-maker now resident in Hungary, this rural tragedy begins with a housewife being banished from her village when her husband discovers that he’s not the father of their nine-year-old son. Taking the boy with her in the family horse and cart, she journeys through the Carpathians on a Virgin Spring-style revenge trip. The time is more or less the present, but it could as easily be the Middle Ages, and the most striking aspect of a slow, self-consciously poetic film is the complex soundtrack with its electronic music, murmuring voices and heightened natural sounds of wind, water, thunder and rustling vegetation.

Ramin Bahrani is a director who is finding a style of American cinema that is different from both Hollywood commerce and indie-Sundance drear: his new movie is an instantly gripping, funny, quietly persuasive drama that held me from the first frames.

Souleymane Sy Savane gives a superbly likeable performance as Solo, a Senegalese taxi driver in North Carolina. One day, he picks up a morose old white guy called William, played by Red West, who offers Solo $1,000 to take him to a remote and dangerous beauty spot on a certain date. The exuberant and compassionate Solo suspects that William wishes to make away with himself, and so tries to involve himself in his life, even insisting that William coach him for his upcoming Airline Flight Attendant exam.

Perhaps inspired by Kiarostami’s 1997 classic Taste Of Cherry, the movie is nonetheless entirely distinctive: about friendship and perhaps also about the impossibility of ever really knowing another person.