WRITER and producer Nigel Horne raised nearly £1m to make his first feature film, The Wedding Tackle, with a cast including Adrian Dunbar, Tony Slattery, Amanda Redman and ex-EastEnders star Leslie Grantham.

Unlike most British film-makers, he didn't take a penny of Lottery money or broadcast company money to realise his ambition to break into movies. And now he's distributing the picture himself, negotiating a 50-screen nationwide release this month.

"It's a real David and Goliath situation," says Horne, 34. "My company is operating from a one-bedroom flat - a big step away from the studio system where they have whole floors of offices. We're really a one or two man band. It's quite remarkable we've got so far."

Yet seven years ago Horne was working in the family road haulage business in Co Durham after studying at Durham University. The world of movies seemed a long way away but he'd harboured a desire to act from the age of 14. "The thing was I never really had the guts to go ahead and do anything about it until I was 28," he says. "I was working in the family business but what I actually wanted to do was act. When my father retired, I went off to do an acting course."

He'd already trod the boards with the amateur Pilgrim Players in Darlington. His first role was as Canon Throbbing in the Alan Bennett comedy Habeas Corpus. "I had to bare my bottom in the first scene of the play and also sing which was a bit traumatic for the audience," he recalls.

"I did a couple of plays with them, basically to see if I liked it. I'd always thought I would but hadn't tried it out. I thought I was pretty good and went to drama school."

Moving to London and hooking up with would-be director Ravi Dvir led to an interest in writing rather than acting. A common interest in flying - Horne is a private pilot, Dvir a former Israeli fighter pilot - led to them writing a one-act play Broken Skies based around an incident that happened in the Israeli air force transferred to a RAF setting.

After that was staged at Bristol Old Vic School, Horne got the bug for developing screenplays. He worked with his father Don, who was a copyboy on The Northern Echo before doing national service, on scripts "because he'd always wanted to write".

"We wrote a detective story that turned the maverick cop scenario on its head and tried to get it made for four years with no success. I got into an executive producing role, the nitty gritty of getting money together," he explains.

"Then I wrote Broken Skies as a screenplay but couldn't get that off the ground. Eventually I decided to write something I could produce inexpensively myself.

"You can't compete with the Americans in terms of special effects. It's not an option. You have to come out with characterisations and plot that overcome those intrinsic problems. You have to come up with good characters speaking in rooms. I chose a bunch of people on a stag night."

Horne had the idea while still living in the North-East for a story about a group of friends baring their souls during the course of a pub crawl. He wrote the screenplay towards the end of 1997 and began filming a year later, having raised the budget through private investors.

"Over four or five years we'd been getting into the executive producing role. We were courting various individuals but never managed to get the money together in the right way. This film was inexpensive enough to put all the pieces in place," he says.

"Wealthy individuals, once they've put a certain amount of their money in safe investments, like to play with the money left over. Films are a glamour thing - they go to premieres and meet the actors."

Horne worked on a deferred fee which means he won't get paid unless the movie, directed by Dvir, is a financial success. The main thing, he says, is to get a foot in the door of film production and hopefully go on to make more pictures.

The Wedding Tackle, described as "a fable of modern love and immorality with a sting in the tale", follows oversexed photographer Hal (James Purefoy from Maybe Baby and Mansfield Park) and his friends on an eventful stag night. The soundtrack features British 1960s songs from the likes of Dusty Springfield, Sandie Shaw and Lulu.

Horne admits he was lucky to get the cast he did. "I think they appreciated the script and that the characters were well-drawn. There's a lot for actors to get their teeth into," he says. "We had a couple of weeks' rehearsal. Because they were a bunch of friends we wanted to create the feeling that they know each other well."

When it came to finding a distributor for the finished film, Horne opted to release it through his own company Viking Films because the deals offered by established distributors weren't satisfactory.

"The economics of doing it yourself make so much more sense. For £50,000 you can get a cracking good release in the UK so we persuaded investors to put money into the distribution," he says.

"There are certain advantages apart from the creative ones. I would like to think I know what's the best way to market the film. You have to think about that from the outset. I thought of the audience I was aiming at when I wrote the film. I deliberately wrote it for a mainstream audience because I'm not interested in just a niche market.

"We had to persuade the exhibitors who run the cinema chains to put it on. You have to show them the film and if they don't like it they won't screen it. It's been a bit touch and go but we'll be showing The Wedding Tackle on about 50 screens nationwide."

He hopes to negotiate a video release and overseas sales on the back of the release in this country. The film has already been sold to British Airways for in-flight showings.

With the imminent release of The Wedding Tackle, Horne is beginning to think of his next project Bloodstone which, although written three years ago, touches on the topical issue of how far people can go to defend themselves in their home.

It could even bring him back North. "I would quite like to make it in the North-East because I wrote it up there and it has the right feel for that area. I always felt the main character was a North-Easterner.

"But financing today means you have to look abroad to finance a respectable size budget film. Movie-making is a global industry."

l The Wedding Tackle (15) opens at Stockton Teesside Showcase cinema and UCG Boldon on August 11.