Irma Vep is the result of one of those brilliantly-inspired but hopelessly-impractical ideas that, according to common sense, really should have been stillborn. A brief meeting with Hong Kong star Maggie Cheung - more of a handshake really - inspired writer/director Olivier Assayas to write an entire film for and around her. The only problem was, Cheung did not know anything about it. Adam Minns investigates

Assayas' idea was for a film within a film, with Cheung (Actress, Full Moon of New York) playing herself on the set of a remake of Louis Feuillade's silent classic Les Vampires. While Cheung and the French crew struggle to converse with each other, and director Rene Vidal (Jean-Pierre Leaud) tries to hold both the film and his marriage together, Assayas explores how people communicate and what drives them to make films.

"I wrote it up as a screenplay almost for the fun of it," remembers Assayas, whose previous features include L'eau froide and Une nouvelle vie. When it came to casting, however, there could have been problems. "I knew that if she [Cheung] turned it down, I would probably never be able to make the film," says Assayas.

Cheung was very busy and she was turning work down. Through a friend, Assayas got a meeting, made his pitch, and managed to bag his leading lady.

Describing the US$1.5 million budget as "laughable", Assayas was forced to shoot in Super 16, pay the cast and crew on profit-share deals and wrap the project in under a month. "There was no safety net," says Assayas. "No going over schedule. No re-shoots. No contingency whatsoever."

Irma Vep has proved that a naive young innocent called inspiration can, with a little work, be happily married to that nasty old brute known as practicality. Yet the fact that these two unlikely bedfellows ever got together in the first place testifies as much to Assayas' intuition as a filmmaker as it does to the faith placed in him by Dacia Films and the film's major financiers, Canal+. And as the director puts it: "Irma Vep was never a sensible idea."