Once upon a time in the east

The Warrior, Asif Kapadia's début film, may be a tale of redemption akin to a Western set in the hills of northern India, but 'it's a British film', he tells Donald Clarke

Elegantly scything the air with a sword, a lone figure stands next to a gaunt tree in the desert. This resonant opening image establishes the tone for Asif Kapadia's début feature film, The Warrior - an exquisitely-shot tale of violence and redemption set among the sand dunes and mountain peaks of northern India. Yet, astonishingly, the writer-director conceived the film in a flat in north London and was 23-years-old before he first set foot in India.

Kapadia explains: "I would finish a draft of the script and then go to India and hook up with my Indian assistant director. We'd hire a car and head off looking for locations and actors. I would take millions of photographs, take them back and then rewrite. Because otherwise - sitting in Kentish Town - I would just write clichés."

The result has been praised throughout the world and has won him many awards, including the British Film Institute's Sutherland Trophy.

Telling the story of a mediaeval mercenary whose attempts to abandon the life of violence lead to the death of his son, the film's breathtaking vistas and unhurried storytelling have proved intoxicating.

But where is it from? Has the Hackney-born Kapadia made an Indian film? Surely it can't be called a British picture?

"Oh, I do think it's a British film," he says. "Though it's not a typical British movie. It's set in India, most of the cast are Indians, but it's not a typical Indian movie either. If it had done badly, nobody would have wanted it. But when it won awards at the London Film Festival, it got on the front page of the Times of India.

"But it is financed by FilmFour and British Screen. And most of the heads of department were people I'd studied with at The Royal College of Art. I'm a British-Asian writer-director. The cameraman is half Nigerian. The editor is Swedish. The costume designer is Danish. But we all live in London. That's what makes it a uniquely modern British movie." (Poignantly, at the very moment we were discussing FilmFour's contribution, the company was announcing its extinction.)

Born in 1973, Kapadia seems even younger. The informal glottal stops that season his frantic monologues are not what one would expect from the average art-house director. He also has a good line in self-deprecating humour, something he demonstrates when he guiltily explains how he exploited his ethnic heritage - both parents were born in India - to suggest to investors that he was more at home on the subcontinent than was actually the case.

"I do understand the culture," he says of working in north-west India. "I eat the same food. But I do stand out there. I walk differently, I sit differently. You put me in a crowd, I look like an outsider. I learned to say that I was from Bombay. If you say you're from London, they jump a bit. Whereas if you say you're from Bombay it's like: oh, they're all a bit weird down there."

And playing loose with the facts helped keep curious bystanders at bay. "I also learned to say: we're not making a fiction film, we're making a documentary. You say that and everybody ignores you. What, no stars? No choreography? They leave you to your own devices."

Kapadia learned these techniques while making The Sheep Thief, his graduation film from the RCA. Also shot in India, the short won the Jury Prize at Cannes and launched its director on a successful career directing commercials.

"It had everything that you weren't supposed to have: children, animals, it was in Hindi. And after it did really well in Cannes, I thought: whatever happens I'm not going back to India for the next one. I tried to get a simple screenplay made in London. Meanwhile in our spare time, a friend - Tim Miller - and I came across this footnote in a book of Japanese myths where a boy is asked if this dead body is his father's. I just thought that was so powerful, just four lines of text.

"So we wrote it and my agent said: forget it. But every time we'd pitch the London story, we'd also pitch this. And people would say how much they preferred this mad Indian story. So, in the end we said: oh, sod it, let's go for it."

That  mad Indian story feels familiar. With its timeless scenario - an outlaw seeking to hang up his weapons - one can't help but think of the reciprocal trading of influence which existed between the western and the Samurai film. John Ford begets Akira Kurosawa, Kurosawa begets Sergio Leone.

"Yeah, I guess subconsciously we were continuing that," he says. "But we were giving it a new spin. Obviously, I was influenced by those films, particularly Leone, whose films I saw first. But we didn't want to go to America to shoot it because there was too much baggage there. Nonetheless, it had to be a sort of Western. It is, after all, the story of a man with no name. I suppose it could have been a gangster film: this guy defies the boss and the boss sends someone to kill him."

Why is it that the killer who wants to turn away from violence is such a persistent theme in movies?

"Well it's the whole thing of redemption," Kapadia says. "A bad person who isn't allowed to be good. It's like a folk tale, everyone has their own version of that story. You have a way into it. That helps me, because I'm really into telling a story visually. There are only seven pages of dialogue in the whole script. It's not a radio play, you must see it on the big screen."

But is there not a concern that when a film features such overpowering landscapes the story may be suffocated by all that beauty? Might one be left with a monumental slide show?

"I suppose that can happen," he says. "I'm perhaps not the person to ask. You have to make a choice: you can make films that are really gritty and nasty looking or you can make films which catch your eye. I am quite concerned about the way things look. But, yes, you don't want it to look too pretty. You don't want people to be overwhelmed by the prettiness of it."

Kabadia already has a formidable reputation to manage. The Sheep Thief and The Warrior have combined familiar elements - the amateur actors of Iranian films, the picturesque grandeur of Chinese cinema, the frontier tales of the American west - to produce an individual new voice. Unsurprisingly, he is in negotiations with corporate talent-hoover Miramax. Starting another chapter in the reciprocal cycle of influence, he is seeking to direct an adaptation of Tom Eidison's western novel, St Agnes's Stand. "It's a great story, and we're just waiting to hear how it works out," he says. "We're relocating it to Mexico. Miramax currently own it, so that's one of the people we're talking to."

So is dealing with Hollywood as frightening as working in the Indian desert?

"Oh scarier! But that's just one of the ideas. There's also a Japanese ghost story about a couple from rival clans who fall in love but keep dying on each other."

So he might be about to embark on a third film without having made one in his home country.

"Well, yeah. But at least it might be in English," he says, cackling.

The Warrior is showing in selected cinemas