There is one question on everyone's minds when it comes to David Mamet's new version of Terrence Rattigan's 1946 play, The Winslow Boy. Why did Mamet, best known for hide-and-seek scenarios featuring characters who fire off tough-guy, staccato dialogue at machine-gun velocity, opt for such a genteel drama as the follow-up to his zig-zagging Hitchcockian thriller The Spanish Prisoner? "I think The Winslow Boy is one of the most immaculately crafted plays I've read," Mamet told Moving Pictures. "I tried to do it as a Broadway play for many years, but I couldn't get the calibre of cast I wanted to put on a stage production." One of Mamet's close associates has a different explanation. "Down deep," he said, "there is a Victorian gentleman inside David Mamet."

Whatever the reasons behind Mamet's affinity for the work, taking it to the screen was easier than mounting a stage production. Mamet and producer Sarah Green brought the project to Sony Pictures Classics during the Toronto Film Festival in September, 1997 and by March the next year they were shooting on location in London.

The film tells the story of the real-life legal proceedings that took place in 1909 when a 13-year-old, George Archer-Shee, a cadet at the Osbourne Naval Academy, was accused of stealing another boy's five-shilling postal order and cashing it. For that alleged transgression, the boy was expelled. His father, however, believed in his son's innocence and hired a lawyer to gain the right to sue the college - which was traditionally protected from such action, since it was an extension of the Crown, which could not be sued.

Rattigan took a number of liberties in presenting his version of the affair. He changed the boy's name to Ronnie Winslow and moved the date to 1912-1914, when the admiralty would have more serious matters on its mind. The young boy's sister, Catherine, was made into a suffragette - providing a sharp contrast to the socially conservative Sir Robert Morton, the lawyer who successfully prosecutes the Winslow case. "I think the centre of the play is really Catherine," said Mamet. "Her quest for equality for women is congruent to the family's quest for justice for the boy."

Mamet was also forced to open up The Winslow Boy. The entire action of the original play takes place in the drawing room of the Winslow home. Mamet, however, added scenes set in the House of Commons, Horse Guards' Parade, a suffragette organisation's headquarters and lawyer Morton's office. And although the making of the film significantly pre-dated the travails of US President Bill Clinton, Mamet pointed out thematic similarities between the Winslow affair and the Clinton case. "The story on everybody's mind lately is Bill Clinton," said Mamet. "And one of the questions involved in The Winslow Boy is the same question that the women who accuse Clinton face. Assuming that what they say is true, is it worth it? At what point are you willing to pursue truth at the chance of either being called a liar or being acknowledged as having told the truth, and having your privacy destroyed?

"At what point does it cease being courage and become intractability or arrogance? And, again, it's an open question. What have you won when you've won? What's the cost of holding a principle?" Jeffrey R Sipe