Love of film

ACTOR Gary Love has four years serving on ITV's Soldier Soldier series to thank for becoming a director. "We were in all sorts of far-off places and spent a lot of time on our own, away from families, and I found actors would come to me and go 'listen, I've got this scene tomorrow Gary and it's a nightmare, what do you think?'," he recalls.

"Most of the stuff that was being written then was on the back of a postage stamp. I guess I've been around a long time - I've been acting since I was 12 and did a lot of theatre stuff - and you just piece the scenes together with actors and go through them.

"And I thought 'I really enjoy this', I really got it. It was then I started writing and got a short film made."

The fact that the British film industry was going through a lean time worked to his advantage, too, because it meant top movie technicians were finding work in TV on shows like Soldier Soldier.

"We had the second assistant director from all these big films, and the camera team had just come from Bond. You just go 'oh my God'. I spent more of my time watching them doing their job, I was really interested in it and that was kind of the beginning of it for me.

"To be absolutely honest, you can say what you want, if I was a successful actor I probably wouldn't have started directing. I had time on my hands to develop the directing side."

Love has now moved from directing TV series, including Waking The Dead and Murder Investigation Team, to the tough British feature film Sugarhouse starring Andy Serkis, Steven Mackintosh and Ashley Walters. With the three main characters described as a crackhead, killer and accountant, you can be certain that this will be no picnic but a hard-hitting drama of contemporary life on the street.

One thing you won't see in the film is Love himself as he doesn't mix acting and directing. He mentions Kenneth Branagh and Mel Gibson who do both. "You've got to have an amazing amount of money and time, which is something we didn't have on Sugarhouse," he says.

"I've obviously got an ego but my ego isn't to be in front of the camera. You've got to fine tune your talent, you've got to be working at it to be good at it and I'm out of practice at acting.

"I've done a lot of TV, which is all about time and getting it done. That's the reason I started directing because I was absolutely sure I could do it better than them.

"I thought they didn't care about the actors, about the subject matter. They just wanted to get the day done. But then I've worked with Trevor Nunn and people like that who are obviously geniuses. You take the good bits and get rid of the bad bits."

Sugarhouse may not have had a big budget or long shooting schedule but Love did plenty of research beforehand, including meeting drug addicts to help Ashley Walters play his character, D.

He recalls going to see, with writer Dominic Leyton, a smack addict who injected in front of him. "He was showing me where he was looking for veins, he was emaciated and his teeth had gone. Most of the time he's with me, he's saying 'I'm going to get out of this, I know it's bad'."

Part of his preparation was looking at lots of films, four or five a week including Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs. Some he watched over and over again. He looked at low budget movies too, in order to see what could be achieved with a small amount of money.

Love is already thinking about his next directing project. He's bought the rights to a novel he's hoping to film early next year. "It's low budget - though not quite as low as Sugarhouse - because again I want to do it under the radar of interference, hopefully for under a million," he says.

"I'm meeting up with people and production companies to talk about what I want to do next, but nobody has given me any money yet, or a script. I'm funding the book myself because it means I have control over it. But I have a couple of producers who want to do it, which is really exciting."

All he'll say about the book is that the main character is an undercover policeman. "He was undercover for 15 years and then in the end he couldn't remember his own name. He was diagnosed as paranoid depressive schizophrenic and lost everything. He got £12,500 for the 15 years he was undercover and a lifetime supply of valium," he says.

"I've started writing the script himself, but I'm going to work with a co-writer on it because I need to make some money on this film and need to be a little bit more commercial because I think I'm probably darker than I need to be."

* Sugarhouse (15) opens in cinemas tomorrow.