Goodness: it's Guinness

ANTHONY WALLER, the commercials director who makes his feature film debut with Mute Witness (reviewed above), was so keen to make it, and so optimistic that he would, that he shot the first footage for the film way back in 1985. At the time Waller was directing pop promos and editing cinema trailers in Hamburg when he had a chance encounter with Alec Guinness.

"I asked him if he would be prepared to play a small but significant role in my project," Waller recalls. "He said that he had commitments for the next year and a half - so I suggested we shoot the next morning, before his return flight to London. He agreed! He did it out of the goodness of his heart, but he wanted his lines before going to bed. I had to do that and get the crew, the gear and a 1938 Rolls Royce organised overnight - and be finished by 11.

Eight and a half years later, when Mute Witness finally went into production, Anthony Waller was in Moscow, shooting footage of a double of the Guinness character, to be intercut with the Hamburg footage. The original script of the movie was set in Chicago, but Moscow became a more affordable option and Waller found it easy to adapt the story to a Russian setting. "Moscow today, with its gang power structures, is often compared to Chicago in the 1930s," he says.

Born in Beirut in 1959 and educated in Britain Waller was, at 19 the youngest student ever admitted to the National Film School in Britain. Having made a number of short films, he resumed his studies at the Munich Film and TV School. Since 1986 he has produced, directed and edited more than 100 commercials through his own Hamburg based company, Cobblestone Productions, winning several prizes along the way.

In developing his ideas for Mute Witness, Waller says he was playing with the styles and perceptions of the thriller/horror genre and turning conventions on their head: "I grew used to people not getting the idea of the picture in script form - the humour didn't come across," he says. "European investors thought it was too American and the Americans said they wouldn't trust European crews. I was doing quite well in commercials, so I decided I would earn enough to pay for it myself."

IN the end, through his own company and with the support of a Russian investor, Waller raised the budget of $2.2 million. "He is amused by the irony that the finished film was picked up for US release by Sony Picture Classics, a division of Columbia Pictures. "Columbia had this script for three years and it got some of the worst readers' reports ever - on every count it was rated `poor'."

Following the success of Mute Witness, Waller says he is bombarded by offers. "I've always taken Ridley Scott as my ideal," he says. Like him, I want to keep my finger in the advertising pie, taking some of the cherries that become available while concentrating on making feature films.

His next movie will be the tentatively titled An American Werewolf In Paris, a sequel he has concocted to John Landis's witty 1981 horror comedy, An American Werewolf In London. "Remember how the wolf gets shot as the nurse, played by Jenny Agutter, watches? Well, my film takes place 20 years later and the premise is what would have happened if she had gotten pregnant by him. She has a daughter, so it will be a female werewolf, and an unsuspecting American in Paris falls in love with her."