Peter Chelsom 

USA

Rodman Philbrick's novel, Freak the Mighty, from which the film is adapted, was published in 1993. Although it was an immediate success in the bookshops, there was a measure of luck about its journey from page to screen. 

As producer Simon Fields tells it, Charles Leavitt's script landed on his desk more or less by accident. "I was actually looking for screenwriters for another project. Leavitt's script was shown to me as a writing sample." Fields read it, tracked down Philbrick's novel when he realised it was an adaptation, and sent both to his partner, director Peter Chelsom, with whom he had already worked on two films, Hear My Song and Funny Bones. Chelsom immediately took the bait.

"What's wonderful about these boys," Fields says of Max and Kevin, "is that they're misfits.  They are a couple of freaks in a way. It's a story about the resilience of the imagination – something you just can't squash, whether it's in a concentration camp or in the body of a crippled boy."

Casting two such unconventional leads was a painstaking business. "We had open casting calls all over the country. It was very, very toughÉ we had to be very careful not to go too much for the sympathy vote." In the end, Fields and Chelsom hit on Henson (whose acting career began at the age of two) and Culkin, Macaulay's younger brother.

Culkin's father has a reputation for meddling in any film in which his children are involved, but Fields insists there was no trouble with parental interference on the set of The Mighty. "He was involved at the beginning, but then there was a court case, the result of which gave the mother full custody, so we never saw him again. But I never experienced any of the problems with him that I hear other producers have had."

To play Max's grandparents, Fields secured the services of Gena Rowlands and Harry Dean Stanton. "They're capable of huge emotional scenes and of humour too. As Peter Chelsom says, if Gena was English, she'd be a Dame by now."  Kevin's mother, described in the screenplay as possessing 'a luminous beauty that affects Max deeply,' is played by Sharon Stone. Her company, Chaos, also co-executive produced the movie.

Fields describes The Mighty as a family movie, "but one with a hard edge". He hopes it will appeal to every kind of audience from "the age of six to the age of 70... something like Stand By Me". 

From the gentle, blarney-filled whimsy of Hear My Song (in which Ned Beatty played legendary Irish tenor Josef Locke) to the nostalgic comedy of Funny Bones (which intriguingly paired Jerry Lewis with young British comedian Lee Evans), Peter Chelsom has shown a knack for combining humour and pathos without ever quite sliding into mawkishness. 

His new film, Town and Country, which starts shooting in just over a fortnight, promises to be rather more barbed. A sophisticated romantic comedy about "rich people and their problems," starring Warren Beatty, Diane Keaton, Goldie Hawn, Gerard Depardieu and Andie McDowell, it is certainly not short on star power. Fields is again producing. 
Geoffrey Macnab