"Have an idea, make a movie. Don't ask permission"

The discovery of HD digital cameras changed the way British director BERNARD ROSE felt about filmmaking – and gave him a new lease of life. It also got him fired from the Hollywood studio system

Ten years ago, British filmmaker Bernard Rose made the film that would change his life. Up to then, he'd been living the Hollywood dream. But now the love affair was over. He was angry. And he wanted the world to know. "It's time someone stood up and said, ‘You guys are a bunch of fucking absolutely ignorant morons'," he said of the movie industry in the press, "and I refuse to support your bullshit quietly any more. I refuse to go along quietly while you pump filth out to the world."

How quickly things change. After directing his first feature films (including the Kiefer Sutherland gangster drama ‘Chicago Joe And The Showgirl' and horror hit ‘Candyman'), the Nineties found Rose living in LA, represented by one of the biggest agents in the business. In 1996, he directed a huge production of Tolstoy's 'Anna Karenina', starring Sophie Marceau. And then it all went wrong. Everything.

When Warner Bros saw Rose's three-hour cut of Anna Karenina, they weren't pleased, took the film from him, cut it in half and released what he called "a travesty". He was then hired to adapt Clive Barker's ‘The Thief Of Always' for Universal, but they subsequently hired someone else to rewrite it and not wanting to appear difficult, he succumbed.

Meanwhile, Rose had an idea for a film of his own. Frustrated and stuck in movie limbo, he wrote a screenplay, and at the same time discovered that hi-def digital cameras would enable him to make a movie cheaply, quickly, and without the trappings of studio production.

In October 1998, he wrote in his production diary: "I realise that no one in the conventional movie business will ever finance this film." He was at a loss thinking how he would ever get ‘ivans xtc' off the ground, when his girlfriend Lisa Enos, a documentary producer, told him to stop moaning and just go and shoot it with a digital camera. Rose initially thought it wouldn't look good enough but was soon converted to the new technology.

"The speed and ease of the HD Cam is astounding," wrote Rose soon after shooting on the film began in July 1999. "We never need to supplement natural light levels. Shooting is so fast that the light always matches and the actors never get bored. The cast and crew total nine people so we all can fit into two SUVs and race around town unnoticed. We can shoot and shoot, getting some life into the thing. All the dead practices of waiting around in trailers and waiting for trucks to be unloaded and waiting for everyone's energy to be sucked out of their soul just do not apply here. It is incredibly liberating."

Rose put everything - his heart, his soul, his money - into ‘ivans xtc'. Starring his friend Danny Huston, it's an intensely powerful story of a high-flying Hollywood agent who contracts lung cancer and realises he has nobody to turn to. Based on a Tolstoy novella, it also drew from Rose's own encounters with Hollywood, notably his uber-powerful agent, Jay Moloney, who represented Leonardo di Caprio and Steven Spielberg before being fired from his company, CAA, for drug addiction.

To get the exact look he wanted, and to get more personal with the actors, Rose shot much of the film in his and his friends' houses, doing the cinematography himself. He had fallen in love with Sony's new high definition digital cameras, and during filming he gave an interview to a film website in which he stated digital filmmaking would mark the end of the big studios: "It's bye-bye to the pigs with their noses in the trough," he said.

The next day, Universal fired him from ‘The Thief Of Always'. Then in November 1999, soon after ‘ivans xtc' was completed, Jay Moloney hung himself.

The first screening of the film, put on by CAA, was immensely uncomfortable. The agents watching it squirmed, shocked by the Moloney parallels and horrified at the film's unrestrained window into their culture. According to Rose, CAA then practically disowned the film, and their lack of support made it difficult to sell to anyone who didn't want to upset one of the most powerful companies in the business.

Rose fired CAA as his agent, and went about selling ‘ivans xtc' himself, taking on all the costs. He eventually got the movie released on a few screens, although at a price: Rose and his girlfriend, Liz, who produced the film, lost their car and home to repossession orders.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Rose hasn't worked for Hollywood since. Last month, his film ‘The Kreutzer Sonata' was released. A follow-up of sorts to ‘ivans xtc', it's once again based on a Tolstoy story, once again stars Danny Huston, and once again has Rose as writer, director, cinematographer and editor. Whereas ‘ivans xtc' dealt with mortality, ‘The Kreutzer Sonata' deals with obsessive jealousy, but both films feel all too real, with a brooding intensity, and the lead characters in each are wealthy men on downward spirals. "That's sort of the point of Tolstoy," says Rose of his troubled protagonists. "You're still left with yourself, whatever you've supposedly got."

Rose knows this only too well, and his fight to make his films his way has been a tough one. Still, it's paid off. Because of what happened to him, Rose has made passionate, uncompromising movies which would never have existed otherwise. In this regard, he's in a rare position.

"I think you're right," he says, "and I think that's sad. And yes, it's not been without breaking some crockery to do it. It's not easy. But I'm gonna continue doing that because I don't really know what else to do."

When ‘ivans xtc' was released, Rose wrote a statement which said "Have an idea, make a movie. Don't ask permission." Today, because digital equipment is cheap enough and accessible, he maintains that with ideas, talent and time you really can do just that: "If there's something I wanna do, I'll just do it. The notion of having to ask permission and be at somebody's beck and call is an illusion."

He has mellowed somewhat and says he would do some things differently today, acknowledging that if you're making a film with somebody else's money, they have the right to contribute. The upshot is that Rose now knows how to make the movies he wants by ‘playing the game' - but only when necessary.

October sees the release of ‘Mr Nice', the director's anticipated adaptation of Welsh drug smuggler Howard Marks' autobiography, starring Rhys Ifans. "It's a mainstream film meant for a mainstream audience", he says. "But I tried to subvert it as much as I could. Within reason."

‘The Kreutzer Sonata' is out on DVD on 26 April