Something for the weekend

Imagine a British film director. You might be picturing Alfred Hitchcock, or some scruffy composite of Alan Parker and Stephen Frears, or the kind of person who should be making costume dramas. But whoever you've come up with, they won't look like Justin Kerrigan. With his cropped blond hair, huge insect-like sunglasses, cartoon T-shirt and hangover, 25-year-old Kerrigan looks like he should be working in fashion or have something vague to do with nightclubs.

So it makes sense that although Kerrigan is a director, Human Traffic is far from the average British film. It's way too good for that. After a decade of rave culture, it's the first film to focus on the Ecstacy generation's clubbing experience. It's an honest depiction that will provoke club-savvy moviegoers to claim 'me too' after watching it. But neither is there a sense of elitism - that if you've never been to Cream or are too old to have lived through the rave era you shouldn't be watching.

Human Traffic follows five teenagers in Cardiff over one weekend - from Friday, suffering lousy part-time jobs and trying to talk their way into a club, through the clubbing experience and sprawling after-parties to crashing Ecstasy comedowns on Sunday. One is impotent, one is pathologically jealous, the cop's son sells hash, and they're all a little paranoid. It's fast, funny, believable and inventive: Kerrigan constantly switches from straight slice-of-life to scenes where the staff and customers of a fast-food joint are all bodypopping in time, or a dull Sunday lunch is rearranged with the help of a TV remote control. The characters are all old mates, giggling at well-worn in-jokes, but we're welcome along for the ride.

'It's all based closely on real people I know,' Kerrigan says. 'I wrote as honestly as I could, and what's interesting is that people seem to be able to relate to it, not only in Cardiff but around Britain. Which is a surprise.'

'The biggest compliment was from a 65-year-old man,' says the film's producer, Allan Niblo. 'He was swelled with emotion after it and said, "God! I wish I was young again!" ' Niblo isn't just the film's producer, he's also Kerrigan's mentor. Cardiff-bred Kerrigan had completed an art foundation course but decided he was more interested in film school. He applied for several courses and was rejected by all of them. He spent the next year teaching himself with a video camera and scraped enough money together to go to the International Film School of Wales. The next three years he fare-dodged from Cardiff to Newport. Niblo was his teacher, and Kerrigan became the star student. 'In his second year we managed to get his graduation film commissioned by TV and I knew from that moment I wanted to work with him on a full-length feature,' says Niblo.

Kerrigan took heed of the staple advice to young writers and stuck to what he knew. 'For something this specific you have to have lived it,' says the director. 'I started getting into proper clubs aged 14, 15. At one stage, I used to live for the clubs, be there four, five nights a week. I went out on my own. I've made a lot of my best friends going out alone.'

He also did the kind of McJobs satirised at the start of the film, including slinging burgers in Wimpy's. While the subject matter wasn't unusual for film students, it was for feature films. In the past 20 years, there have been films about youth culture (Quadrophenia and Small Faces about the 1960s, Absolute Beginners about the 1950s) but very few are contemporary. Exceptions are Hanif Kureishi's notoriously awful London Kills Me and the Irvine Welsh adaptations, The Acid House and Trainspotting. Kerrigan included a Trainspotting joke in the script as a pre-emptive strike. 'When I was writing the script, I knew it was going to get compared to Trainspotting because basically there's fuck all to compare it to. "Youth culture! Drugs! Oh, is it like Trainspotting?" It's nothing like Trainspotting. I put the joke in there, to beat people to it.'

Human Traffic wasn't going to be cheap to make. The budget finally came to £2.2 million, which may be minuscule by Hollywood blockbuster standards, but is substantial for a film by a first-time British director. It's a larger budget than Trainspotting's, for instance, and that was made off the back of the successful Shallow Grave. 'We don't have the same infrastructure as the American indie scene, which is thriving,' says Niblo. 'Human Traffic had all this support. We had actors, we had American interest, and yet nobody would back it.'

Kerrigan had won film stock and lab time with his graduation film, but that was it. 'We went the usual route and every single person rejected the script, wouldn't touch a first time director,' Niblo says. 'People thought it was too controversial,' says Kerrigan. 'A lot of people liked it, but felt their hands were tied because people take drugs and no one dies, or robs or stabs or kills anyone at the end. So that was morally wrong.'

Niblo thinks the problem was more to do with form than content. 'People rejected the script because it was too original. The first thing everyone said was "What's the structure? We don't understand this." People wanted a different film, "You can have it, but take out all the drug bits and just have a love story!" '

Executive producer Renata Aly assembled the money from venture capital and by selling the television rights, by-passing film companies. Even so, financially, it was a struggle to make. There were no big stars to pay - the most famous people in the film are retired drug smuggler Howard Marks and Andrew 'Egg from This Life' Lincoln - but the club scenes pushed up the costs. It was important not to have the oddly empty dancefloors that feature so often in Hollywood films. And without a strict structure to work to, they found themselves with a sprawling film. 'The first cut was two hours 50 minutes,' Niblo admits. 'We knew we had to lose an hour. We took 56 weeks to edit it. We only booked 16. We couldn't afford that.' Kerrigan was worried. 'This time last year we were convinced we had a turkey on our hands. Everyone was getting paranoid and depressed.'

But the film had a cast who got on with each other and who believed in the script. Talking to them, the one thing they all come back to is that the script is 'bang on'. 'It's no great acting feat for me. It's like that, it really is,' says John Simm, the main star of the ensemble piece. Simm's character (Jip) introduces everybody else and it is his battle to overcome impotence that is the closest the film gets to a conventional storyline. Simm is tabloid notorious already as the star of Jimmy McGovern's The Lakes, famous enough not to be able to go to the gents at parties without being bothered by journalists.

While Kerrigan never seems to censor himself while he talks, all the actors are careful to point out that their clubbing days are over. 'It's galaxies away from my life,' says actress Lorraine Pilkington. 'I'm very clean living. I haven't touched a drop since 1 January. But there was a time when I used to club a lot.'

Nicola Reynolds, the Welsh member of the quintet, thought that acting 'wasted' was the biggest challenge. 'You're thinking, "Am I looking like a complete twat?" When you're really out of it, you don't care what anybody thinks.' Not that the cast is shying away from the film. Danny Dyer - a motormouthed Cockney who comes close to stealing the film from Simm - is ready to come out fighting if a tabloid backlash comes. 'A lot of people ain't going to like it. If they want to do live debate programmes on it, I'm prepared to go on. This film shows the way it is, every weekend. If people don't like it, bollocks to 'em. It'll only be good for the film.' 'It's every parent's nightmare!' Kerrigan jokes. 'It's educational!' Aly counters. 'If the film's controversial,' Kerrigan says, 'that means that life's controversial.'

In fact, the film is so amiable it seems unlikely anyone will object. If it makes taking drugs seem like an everyday activity, that's because for hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of people in Britain, it is. 'We're talking about a massive mainstream youth culture,' Kerrigan says. 'It's the biggest youth culture in the history of Britain. We don't have any filmic representation of it.'

And although the film treats taking drugs as natural, it doesn't ignore the downsides - commonplace problems such as paranoia, painful comedowns or just the way that drugs encourage people to be very boring.

Tabloid scares or not, Justin Kerrigan can't wait to find out if his film is going to be the hit everyone predicts. Not for fame and fortune. But because he could really do with the time off. 'It's been full on for almost three years. If I could take the rest of the year off, I would. But I've got to get a bit of work. I can't afford a holiday.'

¥ Human Traffic opens 4 June.