From Preview Online

"We were sitting at some cafe and this guy comes up to us in a black shirt and starts saying 'I am kickboxing champion of Volga Region Interior Ministry Police. I protect you'. I thought, 'This is too good to waste’"
- James Hawes, novelist/screenwriter

"I've known Jim for about five years on and off," says Thomas, "and he was kind enough to show a rough draft to me. I tried to buy it straight away."
What appealed to Thomas was what appealed to the book's legion of readers (published in paperback last year, it is still on the bestselling tables in most British book shops). It is the story of a guy called Pete (Ifans), whose life starts to unravel, partly because his business is going down the tube, partly because he and his wife are unable to have the baby they want - and because the problems in that department seem to be his. Pete's creative accountant, Deeny - played by Shakespeare in Love star Joseph Fiennes - puts him in touch with a very rich Russian called Mr Kant (Steven Berkoff). Mr Kant inexplicably - well, not so inexplicably: he turns out to have a hidden agenda - wants to sink huge amounts of money into his business. He also has a startlingly beautiful assistant called Masha (played in the film by the startlingly beautiful Tara Fitzgerald). Before long, the links between Masha and Pete are more than just 'beeznis' (the one English word Mr Kant knows). Plus the rescue plan set up by Deeny turns out to have a pretty hefty sting in its tale.

Throw into the mix a well-endowed office assistant called Charlie (played by British television bad girl Dani Behr), whose rather direct approach Pete is unable to resist; and a slightly barmy free-market guru played by Keith Allen (the corpse in Shallow Grave, the sheep-shagger in Twin Town) and you have something which movie audiences should likewise find it hard to resist. It took, however, a good year after the book's publication before the project finally came together (shooting on Rancid Aluminium, the movie, began in November 1998). One problem was Hawes' determination not to see the book vanish into development hell: that's what happened to White Merc, which was optioned by a major UK production company when it first came out in 1996 and has yet to progress even so far as script stage.

"They've had it three or four years now and it still hasn't been done," says Hawes. "So, with this one, I decided that I wanted to go independent and know who I was working with right from the start."
This turned out to be producers Michael Parker and Mark Thomas of Fiction Factory, who have a string of TV and features to their credit (Thomas was executive producer on the recent Fox Searchlight film Dreaming of Joseph Lees), but who retain the hands-on, seat-of-the-pants approach Hawes wanted to see brought to Rancid Aluminium. Also, they'd already met, which helped.

"We've known Jim for a while," says Parker. “We knew Rancid was coming out, so we thought it an opportune time to approach him. We managed to sort out a deal and a package where we could develop it and get an option on the rights at an affordable price. There were a lot of people bidding and we're very lucky to get it."

For Hawes, the clincher - after the White Merc experience - was that Parker and Thomas would allow him to write his own screenplay. "That was a crucial element in the deal for him," says Parker. "The fact that we guaranteed that was obviously very important to him. He's written novels and, as this is his first screenplay, we nurtured him through the process of writing for film." In the process, Hawes made some quite big changes - the hero's job changes from a video production company to publishing and he acquires a cocaine habit along the way - but kept the same surreal black-comedy feel of the original. "It's a very different way of making the central character attractive," says Parker. "In a novel, it's very easy: you've got 300 pages. In a film it's different. And we're very fortunate that we've got Rhys Ifans playing the part of Pete: he's a fantastic comedy actor."

Ifans, in turn, pays tribute to his other cast members. "It's a great cast," he says. "It's sort of like being in a band but everyone's the singer." And Fiennes passes the tribute on to Rancid Aluminium’s director. "Ed's like a kind of Welsh Byron, a wonderful Celtic poet," he says. "He's got great communication with actors. I think he's possibly acted before, so immediately you feel on a level with him. It's fascinating to see [the novel's] syntax lifted from the page into the camera. So you get this wonderful lyricism in Ed's view and his angle of James's script." Everyone concerned with the movie stresses its status as a one-off, a film which defies categorisation. "The thing that attracted me to the book was that you can create your own genre," says Thomas. "It's not a film noir, it's not a comedy, it's not a black thriller. It's a chance for us to make up our own genre. It's a question of trying to keep a line between the freshness of the wit and the depth of the story. What I'm pleased about is that it's coming off the page really quickly - and it's fun to do.

"I was really keen for Rhys to play Pete," he adds. "He's a complete anti-hero. I wanted a kind of loose feel to it so it wasn't, you know, 'sensible footwear'. Rhys has got his own unique style and I think I can photograph that."

"There are a lot of classical themes here," adds Fitzgerald, who sports a nifty Russian accent for the film. "One could talk about the journey into the underworld and the eternal battles men have: Age versus Youth; the Single Man versus the State. Rancid Aluminium contains all of those: that's why I don't think this is simply another trendy street film. I think it has much deeper places to go and far more layers.

"It works on two levels. James is aware of what is streetwise - of course he is. But he also has that sort of poetic side to his writing, though not in a way that is alienating: I think he's very humble within it. But these characters do say extraordinary things - they do have a theatricality to them and that makes them interesting and unusual. "Plus," she adds, "damaged."