Sex, drugs - and murder?

On Wednesday, July 2, 1969, Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones drowned in his swimming pool in the garden of his East Sussex country retreat, the former home of Winnie the Pooh author AA Milne.

He was 27, symbol of the Swinging Sixties generation who lived and played hard in the ultimate sex, drugs and rock'n'roll lifestyle.

The verdict at the inquest was misadventure under the influence of drink and drugs. Film-maker Stephen Woolley believes he was murdered. His new film, Stoned, pieces together the jigsaw of events on his last night alive to offer an explanation for his death at odds with the official one.

He tracked down new witnesses and interviewed key players, spending 11 years researching the life and times of Brian before reaching his conclusion.

The evidence presented to the inquest was circumstantial, he says, although the authorities were happy to go along with the verdict. "The police were told to let it rest because they'd got what they wanted out of this - a victim of a drugs and hedonistic lifestyle," he says.

"From the pulpit at Brian Jones's funeral, the vicar condemned his actions and behaviour, and that of certain sections of society. The message was that if you take drugs and grow your hair long and act in this way, you will be dead."

Some have called getting the film made a labour of love on Woolley's part. Obsession seems closer to the truth. The character of Brian Jones is clearly one that fascinates him.

He was a grammar school lad from Cheltenham who rejected his parents' values to concentrate on music and girls. He was a founding member of the Rolling Stones, eager to explore his enthusiasm for rhythm and blues.

Before Bowie and glam rock came along, he was blond and androgynous. He took drugs and drank too much. He could be tender and affectionate, but also mean and violent. More and more he became alienated from the Stones, absent from studio sessions and missing the band's US tours because of his drug convictions.

His final days were spent at Cotchford Farm in the company of his Swedish girlfriend Anna and a builder, Frank Thorogood, hired to carry out renovation work. Together with a nurse, Janet, they were at the house on the night he took that fatal dip in the pool.

Woolley isn't the first to suggest that Thorogood, who lost an eye fighting in the Second World War, played a role in Jones's death. The builder allegedly made a deathbed confession, admitting that he'd murdered him.

The film-maker regards the story of Brian Jones as "a parable for the times". He was 13 in 1969 and the events of Jones's death didn't really touch him. What did have a profound effect was the arrival of punk, after he left school at 17 "in dramatic circumstances" and went to live in a squat.

Seeing the Sex Pistols perform in the 100 Club in 1976 fired him up and then watching the Rolling Stones at an Earls Court gig the same year made him alter his opinion of them. He couldn't understand what it was about the Stones that had made them seem so rebellious. The answer, he came to realise, was Brian Jones with his "anything goes" lifestyle and ambiguous sexuality.

Cut to 15 years later and Woolley was producing Backbeat, a film about the fifth Beatle and the group's early days performing in clubs in Hamburg. He discovered that the Fab Four weren't any more "good boys" than the Rolling Stones were "bad boys". It was all to do with the public perception not the reality.

This is reflected in the opening black and white scene of Stoned, showing an early gig by the Stones looking nothing like the long-haired rebels that they became and are still perceived. Jones was the confident, cocky one, not Jagger in his pre-strutting days.

Woolley's film career began tearing tickets and selling ice cream at the Screen on the Green cinema in London. He later programmed and subsequently owned his own cinema, The Scala. In partnership with Nik Powell, he launched Palace Video in 1982 and its cinema distribution arm a year later.

Over the past 20 years he has produced 23 feature films and executive produced an additional 20. They include such key British movies as The Company Of Wolves, The Crying Game, Scandal, Fever Pitch, Purely Belter and Little Voice.

He's lived with the idea of a movie about Brian Jones for over a decade. "It's not unusual for a film to be in development for a while but this took a long time, primarily because we wanted to get the story right," he says. "That meant tracking down the people in the two books that said Brian was murdered and, having found these people involved, to incorporate that into the script of the film. It was a writing tour de force because we constantly found new people and information which didn't just affect one scene but everything."

He and writers Robert Wade and Neal Purvis, who wrote the Bond movies The World Is Not Enough and Die Another Day, spent much time arguing about the screenplay. "We used to meet regularly in the Malabar Indian restaurant in Notting Hill. We'd start off quite civilised and end up in a drunken brawl in the street arguing about what should and shouldn't be in the script. We kept saying that next time we'd have a proper meeting with no alcohol and no curry, but we never did," he recalls.

He bought the rights to the books, Geoffrey Guiliano's Paint It Black and Terry Rawlings' Who Killed Christopher Robin?, that contradicted the misadventure verdict and which had first alerted to him to the story.

Jones's girlfriend Anna Wohlin travelled from Sweden to London to give Woolley extensive interviews. She also wrote a book about the events.

Road manager Tom Keylock was brought on to the project as technical adviser. Police re-opened the case, allowing him access to information about people who'd come forward following the death.

He also did something police had failed to do, locate the nurse called Janet who'd been at Cotchford Farm on the night of Jones's death. "She'd walked out and off the face of the earth. They thought she was dead," he says. "I hired a private investigator, one who'd worked for Stanley Kubrick, and he got an address for her.

"I contacted her saying I'd like to talk to her. I lucked out because her daughter had seen a lot of films I'd produced and she agreed to meet me. Her information tied in with Anna's. Both coming forward supplemented everything else I'd found out. She gave me some great detail about what happened."

By this time, Woolley and the writers realised that he was the right person to direct the film in his directorial debut.

So far, Stoned has done the rounds of film festivals, including screenings in Edinburgh, Toronto, Cork, London, Birmingham and Leeds. Some of those closely involved in the story have seen it already. Anna, he reports, was moved to tears by the film. Keylock texted to say what a great performance actor Leo Gregory gives as Jones, a role that everyone from Brad Pitt to Paul Bettany was tipped to play at one point.

As for the Stones themselves, Woolley suspects that "Keith Richards will love it and Mick Jagger will hate it".

* Stoned (15) is now showing in cinemas.