Shot on the stunningly beautiful island of Phi Phi Le off the beach resort of Phuket, The Beach is, as Boyle´s description of Richard´s character implies, a romantic tale of finding paradise only in the first half of the story. As it progresses, it becomes an increasingly dark and violent tale of how the most beautiful of dreams eventually turns inward and becomes a nightmare. By the end, the very thing that made The Beach so perfect - the fact that it was completely secret and cut off from the rest of the world - is what makes it so threatening. Hard to find, it is even harder to leave.

“Searching for paradise is ingrained in many of our psyches,” says Boyle, the characters in whose first two films sought happiness in rather less idyllic ways (via theft, murder and drugs). “But the problem with paradise is that it´s exclusive by nature. The characters who live at what they think is paradise - The Beach - don´t want anyone else coming and spoiling the land. They want it to remain exclusive. And inevitably, when they are threatened by new arrivals, they´ll do anything - even resort to violence - to protect paradise. That´s one of the ironies of the story.”

One of the ironies of making the film, meanwhile, was that Boyle hired as his director of photography Darius Khondji, a cinematographer whose finest achievements to date have been on films which are very much city stories. After all, Khondji, who was Oscar-nominated for his work on Alan Parker´s Evita, counts David Fincher´s Seven - a film about the exact opposite of a natural paradise (an urban hell) - among his most notable achievements. But that, claims Boyle, was always part of the plan.

“We wanted the film to be a deeply sensual experience, because it relates a passage to paradise,” he says. “Darius certainly gave us that. But, in the second half, there is a darkness that has to grow out of that sensuality: it has to ripen until it decays. Also, despite its location, I wanted the film to have an urban consciousness, and I think Darius is probably the greatest urban cinematographer in the world.”

That sense of paradise first found, then lost for ever, is precisely what The Beach is about, notes Boyle. “The first half is a deeply pleasurable, romantic, sensual journey into what many of us crave for: paradise. The second half explores some of the moral complexities and contradictions that surround the concept of paradise. So,” he concludes, “I hope that people will find the film both a pleasurable and a challenging experience.”