Tara Fitzgerald as the mysterious Masha.

James Hawes’ novel Rancid Aluminium is a mind-blowing mix of sex, angst, rock ‘n’ roll (or the ‘old music’, as its thirtysomething hero calls it) and a bunch of Russians who make the population of South Park seem sane. No surprise, then, that the whole idea is strongly grounded in fact.

Rhys Ifans as Pete, whose efforts to stave off bankruptcy get him in out of his depth.

“Apparently a lot of it happened to Jim,” says Rhys Ifans, who plays Hawes’ somewhat distant alter ego, Pete, in the movie version of the novel. Then, however, Ifans - who made his movie debut with his twin brother, Llyr, in Twin Town, played Hugh Grant’s socially challenged flatmate in Notting Hill and is not usually the most reticent of human beings - goes suddenly silent. He makes an ‘Oops’ gesture. “Perhaps I shouldn’t say that,” he says.

Fortunately, Hawes himself has no such qualms, and obligingly sketches out where the germ of the idea for Rancid Aluminium first came from. “I had a friend who was a kind of an economics free-market guru. He was the model for the part Keith Allen’s playing, and he was going on this trip to dish out EEC money to support Russian capitalism,” explains the writer, who has achieved critical acclaim with his first novel, A White Merc With Fins, and created such a buzz with the new one that he is currently on leave from his day job teaching German at Swansea University in South Wales.

“I went along with him to have a look at the place - and we discovered the Wild West just beyond Germany. I couldn’t resist it. We were sitting at some cafe and this guy comes up to us in a black shirt and starts saying ‘I am kickboxing champion of Volga Region Interior Ministry Police. I protect you’. And I’m going, ‘Fine, give the guy a drink’. He was, like, a six-foot-six Dolph Lundgren, you know? I spent a few weeks hanging round with these people and thought, ‘This is too good to waste’.”

So he didn’t. The kickboxing champion of the Volga Region Interior Ministry Police plays a strong silent role in Rancid Aluminium, which was published in Britain in 1997 and, according to Euan Ferguson in The Observer, “confirm[s Hawes] as the funniest British novelist writing today”.

Director Ed Thomas on set with veteran DOP Tony Imi.

It wasn’t Hawes’ idea to make it into a film, though - not at first, anyway. That impulse initially came from playwright (and fellow Welshman) Ed Thomas, who had already turned one of his own plays, House of America, into a screenplay (that film was directed by Marc Evans and featured in Preview 22, way back in the summer of 1995).