Steve Pratt talks to British director Mike Newell about the controversial issues of tackling women's education in the 1950s and the unexpected challenges of working with Julia Roberts.

SOME movie-makers might have been fazed if their leading lady introduced her boyfriend and asked if the director would take a look at his showreel. But British director Mike Newell, who made Four Weddings And A Funeral, took it in his stride when Hollywood's biggest actress Julia Roberts made just such a request.

She had approval of director, costume designer, cameraman, script "and what else I don't know", says Newell, but he never felt he was being forced to employ Daniel Moder, whom she married in 2002.

"They weren't married at the time and she introduced me to her boyfriend," he recalls. "She said, 'he's a cameraman, would you look at his reel?'. I looked and he was fine, rather good in fact. The director of photography talked to him, they ate together and saw things together, and he said that he was really quite talented and would be an asset for us.

"I never felt he was there and Julia was looking through the lens. I was delighted at the end that we had him on the film."

Moder was second unit director of photography on Mona Lisa Smile, which is set at an exclusive American college in 1953 where girls are taught that an engagement ring on the finger is better than good marks in class. The story follows how Roberts's newly-arrived art teacher tries to teach her pupils to think independently and not see getting a husband as the be all and end all. Roberts is the big name above the title but the film hinges on four younger actresses - Kirsten Dunst, Julia Stiles, Maggie Gyllenhaal and newcomer Ginnifer Goodwin as her pupils. "Julia was very aware of that," says Newell, who is set to direct the fourth Harry Potter movie.

"She was immensely generous. I remember the production manager came to me before shooting and said, 'you'll never believe what she's done. She's not a great prima donna, she's insisted she's going to have the same size and style of trailer as all the girls. It means I have to upgrade all of them'."

Screenwriting partners Lawrence Konner and Mark Rosenthal were inspired to write the film after reading an article about Hillary Rodham Clinton's years at Wellesley College in the 1960s.

They also saw a documentary - which Newell watched and found immensely moving - about a woman who'd followed her mother to the college in the Fifties and done everything her mother had asked her - had 2.4 children, married a stockbroker, had a house in the Hamptons. "Then, simply she had not been able to hold her mother's dream any longer and declared herself to be gay," says Newell.

"The whole of her life broke in pieces, and her mother's with her. Little by little, her mother began to see that the way she had dragooned her daughter had been unreasonable and she began to recover from it. Sadly, the daughter never would recover." Wellesley College was more than cooperative with the needs of the film-makers, giving them access to the school archives and allowing them to film on the Massachusetts campus.

"They welcomed us with open arms," says Newell. "Obviously, they read the script and met everybody. It was pretty clear they wanted to know what sort of people we were. They let us shoot pretty much anywhere, although we had to film out of teaching time."

There was criticism of the film from a section of the old girls' association, which said they'd always taken their education intensely seriously.

"That set the cat among the pigeons in actually quite a useful way because it made everyone take sides," he says. "This is a Hollywood movie, it's not a documentary. It's not as complicated as that college is in real life."

He's confident that the film tells it like it was. He remembers going into the archive and reading a student newspaper from 1952 which recommended only three jobs, aside from being a housewife - the education of children up to the age of 12, nursing or secretarial.

"These were women who had fought their way into this place. They were the academic racehorses of their generation and yet that's what they were expected to do," says Newell.

* Mona Lisa Smile (12A) opens in cinemas today

Published: 11/03/2004