Chick enrolled at CCNY Purchase, where many New York film-makers (including Hal Hartley) have trained and which he describes as “very down and dirty and hands-on”. Graduating in 1998, he began working on a screenplay which would eventually become xx/xy, putting together his own feelings about relationships, his memories of the Sarah Lawrence years and a bewildering number of cinematic influences. As the idea developed, it also became clear that the film would have two time-frames and that each would look and feel quite different.

“The films that really influenced the aesthetics of the first half were movies like Days of Being Wild, Wong Kar-wai’s first movie, and a lot of the new French movies, like the films of Benoît Jacquot and Olivier Assayas - Late August, Early September, in particular,” he explains, “And Claire Denis, obviously: there’s a bunch of Claire Denis references.

Mark Ruffalo as Coles and Maya Stange as Sam in the contemporary section of the film.

“I’ve joked a bit that the first half is like Mike Leigh’s Naked and the second half is like a Woody Allen movie,” he continues. “It’s that sort of New York-restaurant, upper-class New York lifestyle. Even in terms of the way it’s plotted, not just the way it’s shot, the second half opens way up: the colour palette becomes much more mature, much mellower… browns and greys and beige, pale yellow.”

Partly, this is a result of the three main characters being students in the first half and more or less settled professionals in the second. And anyway, says the writer/director, “the two halves in themselves don’t really interest me so much, it’s the juxtaposition that I’m interested in.” And it’s not just the content, it’s the art direction and the visual treatment that stand in contrast to one another.

“In the first half we started with a lot of blue and yellow,” Chick expands, “and then it sort of moves towards the pukey green so that, by the time you get to the transition, it’s lit with fluorescents. We lit a lot of stuff with fluorescents and we greened it even more to give it that sickly colour. There’s the subway scene there that’s also lit with fluorescents: it gets more and more kind of dirty and fucked-up. Then, when the second half starts, it’s sort of like a breath of fresh air: it opens up and it’s a much calmer kind of world.

director Austin Chick

“The second half is also much more clearly plotted: right away, you’re like, ‘Here’s a guy with this girl, here’s another girl, what’s he going to do’? In the first half, it’s never that clear: they’re acting out, and there’s no real sense of what their motivatio

The film was shot in the summer of 2000, following a reading in the Jersey Films offices in New York. Chick had met Ruffalo through You Can Count on Me director Kenneth Lonergan but, since that film had yet to be released (it had played at Sundance, where it won the Grand Jury Prize, and had its international premiere in Venice that same autumn), there was a lot of pressure on Chick to cast someone better-known. Thankfully - since Ruffalo’s manic energy as Coles in the film’s first half and self-obsessed agony in the second are what give xx/xy much of its flavour - Chick resisted.