It's a Tuesday morning at Elstree Studios and Peter Mullan and Saffron Burrows are screaming blue murder at each other. Mullan (who won last year's Best Actor award in Cannes for My Name Is Joe) is playing a very different kind of role in Miss Julie, Mike Figgis' film adaptation of August Strindberg's searing, 19th Century melodrama. He's Jean, the embittered, social-climbing footman, in the throes of a destructive relationship with Miss Julie (Burrows), his boss's daughter.

As the two actors prowl around the set - a huge, grey kitchen - Figgis is standing on the table, filming them with a 16mm Aaton camera perched on his head. "You couldn't do that with 35mm. It would break your neck!" he jokes during the lunch break. "And you couldn't do that with steadicam either. Normally, you'd have to build a tower and put a dolly track on it which would take about four hours to set up."

Miss Julie is the latest in an increasingly long line of art-house titles backed by Etchie Stroh's Moonstone Entertainment (which is selling the film here on the Croisette).

Stroh's company used to be known for low-grade exploitation pics, but in recent years it has moved upmarket, supporting features by the likes of Alan Rudolph, Robert Altman, Nic Roeg and Julien Temple.

Without Moonstone's intervention, it's possible that Miss Julie would have folded. Figgis originally developed the project for Juliette Binoche and Nicolas Cage. For one reason or another, both stars had to pull out. Binoche had too many other commitments while Cage (whose services Figgis had secured for $200,000 on Leaving Las Vegas) was now a fully-fledged action star whose asking price had shot up to $22 million. "Cage dropped out because he became so successful, so expensive, we could hardly even get hold of him or speak to his people."

No stars, no dough

Without the two stars, Miss Julie suddenly seemed markedly less attractive to the financiers. "At that point," the director sighs, "the funding disappeared. New Line, which was supporting us, backed away with the charming speed of a retreating tank. Everybody had said to me after Leaving Las Vegas that they would give me the money even if I wanted to direct the phone book. But suddenly they weren't interested. They said Miss Julie was too theatrical, too dramatic."

iggis (who is already committed to shooting a European co-production of Alberto Moravia's novel 1934 in the autumn) admits that he was on the verge of "dropping the project." Then, he saw My Name Is Joe and realised that Mullan could be the perfect replacement for Cage. "He's just dropped in from Mars in terms of his potential. I'd obviously seen Peter before in very small roles, Trainspotting and things like that, but I wasn't aware of his power as a leading man."

Figgis hastily scheduled a meeting with the Scottish actor. As Mullan recalls: "He came up to Glasgow. He and I went for a pint and we talked through how he wanted to make it. I liked Mike and I liked his films and so I agreed to do it."

Although Figgis is shooting Miss Julie on a break-neck schedule of just under three weeks ("It's my version of Dogma - British amateur night!"), he has assembled some of the most respected technicians in Hollywood. "It's a bit of a team," he boasts. Sandy Powell, with whom Figgis first worked on Stormy Monday in 1988, is doing the costumes. The cinematographer is Benoit Delhomme (who also shot David Mamet's Certain Regard entry, The Winslow Boy).

Between takes, the director rhapsodises about the new-found possibilities of Super 16, which he also used on his last film, The Loss Of Sexual Innocence. "Ten or 15 years ago, the argument against it was that it wouldn't work unless you wanted a really impressionistic feel to the film, a grainy look. Now, the stocks are so fine that that doesn't matter." Figgis says he has canvassed other leading directors, including Bertolucci and the late Stanley Kubrick, who were likewise "stunned" by what Super 16 can now offer.

On the surface, at least, a Scandinavian melodrama like Miss Julie about "three people in a room beating each other to death" is a bizarre choice of material for Figgis. A former musician who also worked for many years in experimental theatre, he is renowned as the most non-conformist of film-makers. He once made a very conventional adaptation of Terrence Rattigan's play, The Browning Version, but the rest of his movies - even those made within the studio context - have all attempted to escape what he describes as "the tyranny of the three-act structure."

Scrape away beneath the surface, however, and it becomes obvious why Figgis was attracted to the play. "Thematically, it's the same as any film I have ever made. It's about relationships between men and women. We film-makers have very few ideas, but our obsessions are very singular." Geoffrey Macnab