Word-of-mouth is what it´s all about. As anyone who has picked up a book or read a newspaper in the last few years will know, Alex Garland´s acclaimed novel The Beach is about a perfect stretch of sand hidden away from the world on an island off the coast of Thailand. The only people who know about it are those who have been there or had the information passed on to them by someone who has. It is not to be found in any tourist brochure and there are no holiday packages to The Beach, no flight schedules, regular ferry services, hotels, restaurants, showers, jacuzzis, souvenir shops, cash machines or outposts of Manumission where you can dance till you drop... Just the perfect beach bordering the perfect sea.

The Beach is a haven from the world of the Internet, mobile phones, bills, financial responsibility. And the only way you even know it exists is because somebody trusted you enough not to spoil it that they told you about it.

It´s too good to be true, of course: The Beach exists, but paradise does not. Still, getting there - as Richard, Françoise and Étienne discover in Fox´s movie version of the book - is well worth the effort: for each in his or her different way, being there enables them to rediscover themselves.

The problem is that, as Sartre said, hell is other people. And, for all its idyllic attributes, surviving The Beach is even harder than finding it. Appropriately enough, it was via word-of-mouth that British director Danny Boyle heard about Garland´s novel, which became a bestseller not by dint of massive marketing and astute advertising, but because people loved it so much they told their friends about it.

Director Danny Boyle (with Leonardo DiCaprio) had used a picture of Virginie Ledoyen to represent how her character should look before he even knew who she was.

“Like the story itself,” says Boyle, director of cult movies Shallow Grave and Trainspotting, “the book´s success lies in people passing the word on to each other. And I was mesmerised by my friend´s description of the island and its secret community.” First published in 1996, The Beach is about a British backpacker called Richard who hears about this hidden paradise in a seedy hotel in Bangkok from a weird, drug-ravaged traveller called Daffy who commits suicide shortly afterwards. In the movie, Richard is an American - he is, as few readers of Preview can fail to be aware, played by Leonardo DiCaprio in his first starring role since Titanic - and he has a lot more backstory than the book´s narrator. But he does hear about The Beach from Daffy (played by Scottish actor Robert Carlyle, who took a couple of weeks off from playing the villain in the new Bond movie, The World Is Not Enough, to shoot his scenes). And he does set out to find it with the same mixture of confusion and determination, accompanied by the beautiful Françoise and her boyfriend, Étienne.