I think the film works on several levels," says John Polson, first-time director of Siam Sunset. "What I'm most interested in is that it's dangerous to live but you've got to do it anyway." Shot on location in South Australia, the film tells the story of a tragically widowed Englishman who wins a bus trip to Australia and inadvertently rediscovers the power of love - but only after battling catastrophes and misadventures.

"Perry, the central character, tries to close himself off after the tragedy of his wife's accidental death," Polson explains.

"But then he falls in love and starts to live again. There are lots of funny bits but the turning points are often sad."

Don't expect the standard romantic comedy, however - Al Clark, the film's producer, prefers to think of it as "a dangerous, funny, romantic adventure." The script was "already highly evolved and completely engaging" when Clark was invited by production company Artist Services to take the film on, but four more drafts were completed prior to shooting.

"John Polson, Max Dann and Andrew Knight and I - in various combos - worked on the next four drafts," says Clark. "Not just for the sake of having a high draft tally, but because it brought a rigour to the work. So each of us was on the lookout for the dead word, the redundant phrase or the dispensable incident." Clark says the team wanted to go into production on the film safe in the knowledge that "if we had to wing it it would be because the circumstances, rather than the raw material, was failing us".

The same rigour was applied in post production, with a hard-nosed attitude to scenes, and even entire characters. "Do they need to be on the screen?" was the question the team asked themselves - an especially tough criterion given Polson's grounding as an actor (Polson won an AFI award last year for his supporting role in psychological thriller The Boys and is currently filming Mission: Impossible 2 with Tom Cruise).

Siam Sunset's original music comes courtesy of one of Australia's best-known composers, Paul Grabowski, and is recorded by the Melbourne Symphony. "The score feels close to a John Williams score - I think it's some of his best work," Polson enthuses, which suggests that his hopes for the film might be well-founded. "I wanted the film to be universal," he says. Andrew L Urban