The elephants which, says Foster, were
“really the emblem of the film”

“You can see [Jodie and Yun-Fat] thinking and feeling all over the place. It’s all about subtlety: every scene has a subtext that is being acted and has nothing to do with what they are saying. It is remarkable to watch.”

All this, however, turned out to be an added bonus for Tennant, who was fascinated by Anna and the King long before the casting was locked in. It was, after all, a chance to do the kind of film audiences all over the world remember, but which Hollywood - in its current obsession with special effects and teenage sexuality - hardly seems to make these days.

“I loved the idea of doing a movie that they really don’t do any more,” he says, resting between takes in the tropical heat outside Ipoh in the Malaysian province of Perak, where the biggest movie set since Cleopatra has been built. “It’s a big sweeping epic that has an enormous landscape and an amazing background. Yet this story is just about two little people trying to survive within that environment.”

Moviegoers could be forgiven for thinking they knew all that there was to know about the story of Miss Leonowens and King Mongkut. Over 50 years ago, audiences needing a little relief from the post-war realities of 1946 could have seen Irene Dunne and Rex Harrison (both somewhat miscast) in Anna and the King of Siam, made from a frothy script (by Talbot Jennings and Sally Benson) based on a bestselling book by Margaret Landon. Exactly 10 years later, Fox used all the freshly minted magnificence of CinemaScope 55 to bring the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, The King and I, to the screen. Four years earlier, the story had been a Broadway hit, and the screen version boasts Deborah Kerr as Anna - a role that all but defined the rest of her career - with Yul Brynner, who was launched into stardom by his playing of the King.

That version’s screenwriter, Ernest Lehman, went back to Leonowens’ own account of the affair, but any attempt at realism necessarily faded behind a line-up of songs which have since become standards: ‘I Whistle a Happy Tune’, ‘Hello Young Lovers’, ‘Shall We Dance?’... Tenant has gone back to the original book, too, in the script he co-wrote with Steve Meerson, Peter Krikes, Rick Parks (who also wrote Ever After) and Susan Schilliday. But there are no songs in his version. What is more, in addition to the epic romance, he was fascinated by the clash of cultures - by the way in which Anna came from a Victorian culture then very much at its peak (a culture which was busy colonising huge chunks of the globe) and yet could open up to the vastly different but equally powerful culture of Siam. That, he thinks, has a lot to say to audiences at the turn of the millennium.

“We live in a time when it is difficult to discern morality and principles in our everyday lives,” explains the director. “Even with today’s globalisation, we run up against different cultures, religions, origins, and we still don’t have it right. We try to impart our own belief-system on the environment we are in. Anna did just that but, in the process of trying to change the culture, she changed herself too.”

“In this film there is a strong sense of ‘East meets West’,” adds producer Lawrence Bender, supervising a movie very different from those - like Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and Good Will Hunting - on which he made his name. “Quite often when people are different, there is mistrust or fear. The way to get along is to accept people’s differences and embrace them, as Anna and the King did in Siam.”