You are directing your first feature, an independent, tightly-budgeted road movie, for which you haven't even got a camera-car. Then, two weeks before the shoot, a major studio makes you an offer. You accept, right? Wrong, as Adam Minns found out.

"I didn't need anything elaborate," says Greg Mottola, writer/director of The Daytrippers. "I wanted it stark and simple; I wanted to re-create that moment of shock when we become self-aware."

Mottola sums up the film as "a claustrophobic road movie crammed into 24 hours in New York". Beginning light-heartedly, he takes a nice, happy family (played by Hope Davis (Home Alone), Parker Posey (Dazed and Confused), Liev Schreiber, Pat McNamara and Anne Meara), packs them into a station wagon, and lets the hidden tensions surface. As they travel from Long Island to SoHo, realising they neither know nor like each other, the city becomes bleaker, the humour more cutting and the atmosphere distinctly unsettling.

The movie's rawness was in line with the aim of its producers, Steven Soderbergh and Nancy Tenenbaum, the writer/director and producer respectively of 1989's Palme d'Or winner sex, lies and videotape. Impressed by Mottola's 1989 short, Swingin' in the Painter's Room - which won a Silver Hugo in Chicago and aired on the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) American Playhouse strand - they quickly offered to finance a quick-to-shoot, no-frills production.

In a frantic, 17-day shooting schedule, the production cut down on all extraneous costs, which led to some hairy moments. Without a camera-car, Mottola remembers crouching in the back of the station wagon, a blanket over his head, screaming out the lines and shouting directions to the crew. "There were no luxuries like closing down the streets when Mel Gibson comes to town," rues Mottola.

Artistic licence freed from commercial restraint sees Mottola's vision in Critics' Week, and Soderbergh's epitaph - "Greg got to make the film he wanted" - is not only an endorsement but an indication of the rude health of the small US independent film sector.