After a New York screening of "Asylum," Mackenzie and I adjourned to a bar that would actually permit him to chain-smoke Marlboro Lights, in defiance of local law. (I'm not telling.) After establishing that we both have toddlers the same age, and hence haven't slept properly in more than a year, we moved on to the film.

Let's talk about the incredible screen chemistry between Natasha Richardson and Marton Csokas. That isn't something that just happens, is it? I mean, you see them together and you say, "Wow. These people just can't be stopped. They are going to hump like rabid bunnies."

I'm really pleased that you think the chemistry is there, because that's what the movie's about. I think it is something you have to create. I mean, they're both great actors, so they're able to do a lot. It's partly acting, it's partly directing, it's partly editing. Obviously it's the meat of the story -- he's somebody who she's just drawn to. Of course, it's casting too -- Marton is quite a presence, isn't he?

Yeah, that guy's going to be a serious lady-killer. I know he's been in other films, but I've never noticed him before. Was there a point when you knew you had one of those actors who just commands the screen?

When I met him, yeah. [Laughter.] He's been around for a while, but he's relatively new to this level of filmmaking. As soon as I saw the first lot of rushes -- dailies, as you call them over here -- I thought, "Well, we've got something here." It was very exciting. It was even there in makeup tests; we hadn't started shooting yet. It was really powerful and immediate.

OK, so "Asylum" is a story about sexual obsession. But that really doesn't define it entirely, or even essentially. For you, what else is it about?

It's complicated. Some of it is about consequences, and I was really interested in that aspect of the story: How an act, or a force that runs inside human beings, can have all these ramifications. Some of it's about civilizing influences versus human instinct. You've got the walled asylum as a metaphor for that. What happens when you transgress those boundaries? Strangely enough, I think it's also about love. Although it comes from sex, it is actually all about love. Maybe it's not the happiest ending -- I don't know how much we want to give away -- but everyone in the story suffers for their love in some way.

One of the frameworks for this story is psychiatry, the science that's supposed to tell us about our minds. But nobody in this story knows their own minds, or can control them.

That's right. We were careful not to delve too deeply into the psychiatric details. Patrick McGrath, who wrote this novel, actually grew up at Broadmoor, a famous asylum in England. He told me that when his father took over at Broadmoor, there was only one other psychiatrist for 600 seriously ill patients. They were uninterested in treating them, really. The weird thing is that at that point in time psychiatry was much more about Freud -- all about sex -- and nowadays it's more about drug administration than anything else. But we wanted to avoid mental hospital clichés. Even the interviews that Ian McKellen has with patients are really opportunities for the characters to engage one another, rather than therapy sessions.

Capturing the period, right on the cusp of the 1960s, is essential to this film. I know that Paramount wanted to make this a contemporary story at one point, which wouldn't have made any sense. As in your previous picture, "Young Adam," you've captured that slightly depressing, moldy-feeling postwar Britain. Has that become your specialty?

"Young Adam" was set in 1954, and this film is set in 1959 and 1960, so we were trying to show a little bit of difference between the two. When Stella goes to live in the London warehouse [with Edgar], you can see there's a proto-beatnik vibe there. In terms of the costumes, we start with all this stiff stuff, whites, creams and dull colors. Then we move to reds and deeper textures; her hair comes down. We were trying to suggest that the times they are a-changing, a little bit. Later in the film, of course, she has to go back to that world of postwar trauma.

One of the tragedies here is that if Stella had been able to hang on for a few more years, swinging London was waiting for her! Nobody would care if she screwed the studly gardener, right? Everyone was doing it.

If she had been born just five years later, everything would have been fine. That was one of the main reasons why you couldn't transplant this story from its period. I think the 1950s is quite an interesting period, actually. It's far enough away that you can observe it comparatively dispassionately, but it's close enough that you can have all these reflections on our own time and our own experiences.

You said earlier that your next film, "Hallam Foe," is about a child voyeur. Is that set in the '50s too?

No, it's contemporary. I'm a bit scared in a way. In a period world, you know you can't pan your camera two inches the other way, because you'll see modern cars and billboards. So you design it really carefully, to create this jigsaw puzzle you can edit together to make your film. Without that restriction, it's going to be interesting to figure out how to design the film. I can point the camera anywhere. It forces you to aestheticize yourself, I suppose.

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