Ben Hopkins

First-time British film-makers who quote Heine are about as common as… well, first-time British film-makers who don't want to make romantic comedies about sexual identity or gangster spoofs with an Irvine Welsh sensibility.

All of that applies to Ben Hopkins, whose feature debut, Simon Magus - a mystical tale set in the not-too-distant past in a country somewhere to the east of where you are reading this - has neither a moment of romantic comedy nor a single scene in which someone pelts down the street to the strains of Iggy Pop.

But, for a director who has just completed a project that could easily engender a truckload of mystical context-setting, Hopkins is remarkably down to earth, even self-deprecating, about the film-making process.

Freely admitting that he is "boringly" 100 per cent English (notwithstanding the fact that he was born in Hong Kong), Hopkins claims that he would much rather have lived in another time and another place. "I should have been born in early 19th-century Germany, because that's where I belong, I think, in my sensibilities," he says.

Which is where Heine (Heinrich, the 19th-century German poet) comes in. Mind you, the piece that Hopkins quotes comes pretty much in the "every German schoolboy knows" category. But then he is not a German schoolboy, and the phrase rolls trippingly enough off his tongue.

Gin and Teutonic

"Mein Herz, mein Herz ist traurig, doch lustig leuchtet der Mai," he says, referring to the irony of having picked the Brecon Beacons in Wales as a location in the hope of getting rain, mud and mist, only to be confronted with Barbados-style sunshine for four weeks. "It's meant to be about this village that is falling apart and everybody wants to leave," he says. "But it kind of looks like they should be sipping cocktails out on the veranda."

The Heine quote refers to a head-on confrontation between romantic torpor and the pathetic fallacy, with Heinrich feeling down in the dumps as only a German romantic poet can, but having to do so in the most glorious weather. Hard to sympathise with in Berlin in February, I grant you, but a crucial condition of the romantic soul nonetheless.

But Hopkins, for all his 19th-century romantic sensibility, didn't mind the sunshine too much. "We were all having a whale of a time," he says. "It was an extremely pleasant shoot. Obviously it was still stressful and all that - you take that as read. But, given that, it was extremely good-natured."

So is Simon Magus a 100 per cent original screenplay or does it have specific sources? "I don't think there is such a thing as a 100 per cent original script," Hopkins says. "But it's not inspired by anything specific. It's a cobbled-together mishmash of different sources - things as diverse as Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West and the railway story in that, through to a novel by Isaac Bashevis Singer and real historical events in Eastern Europe that I read about.

"The genesis of ideas is always very complicated," he continues. "I've been trying to think about how to answer that question, because I'm sure I'll be asked it in Berlin." (How did he guess?) "I'm sure I'll come up with some sort of answer by the time I get there. But things just go in my notebooks, and it probably took about two years to come up with the final story. I had all these different strands and at some point they amalgamated. Ninety per cent were rejected and it kind of organically - or some sort of stupid word like that - became its own world."

Clearly not one for labelling things, Hopkins suddenly remembers that he - or someone - has come up with a cracker of a label to describe the film. "I'm inclined to refuse to do soundbites, but refusing is a bit self-important, really, isn't it? And anyway, there's the subtitle: 'A magical tale from a vanished world.' That's the official subtitle of the film."

Rail against the machine

Simon Magus boasts a strikingly international cast: Australian Noah Taylor as Simon; Irishman Stuart Townsend as Dovid the merchant; South African-born Embeth Davidtz as Leah the widow; and Dutch star Rutger Hauer cast against type as the gentle, poetry-writing squire. It is the story of a Silesian village that the railway boom of the mid-19th century has passed by. As a result, it has gone into sharp decline.

Simon, the outcast who clears away the "night soil" (shit), gets caught in the middle of a struggle between Dovid, who is Jewish, and Hase, the Christian merchant (Sean McGinley), to bring the railway to the village and thereby restore its prosperity. In the process Simon also gets done over by the Devil.

"There are several stories, actually. It's really a quite complex film in that regard," says Hopkins, who resists simple synopses in the same way he resists soundbites. "I think the plot is the motor. It takes a bit of time to get going, but gets quite absorbing once it does.

"The plan was to create a world where it would not seem out of place if the Devil appeared at the crossroads. And I think that's worked - I hope it has, anyway. It's a fairytaleish world, but also one where people have real socio-economic problems and real emotional lives and so on. It's a slightly magical world, but also a believable one, I hope."