Francis (Aidan Gillen) considers one way of solving the choice between his pious but abusive mother (Susan Tyrrell) and the beautiful but devilish Gloria (Emmanuelle Seigner).

Woods’ associate Gina Mingacci brought the screenplay for Buddy Boy to him in February 1998, and it was in production a mere 12 months later. “I felt that Mark’s vision for the film was completely unique and intelligent,” says the producer, “and I never doubted his ability to bring the script alive.”

Actually, in Buddy Boy, it is not doors that open onto another world: it is a knot-hole in the wall of the back staircase of the apartment block where Buddy Boy - whose real name is Francis and who is played by rising British star Aidan Gillen - lives with his invalid mother, Sal. Through the hole, Francis can see into the apartment of the beautiful and mysterious Gloria, played - coincidentally, Hanlon would have us believe - by Polanski’s real-life wife, Emmanuelle Seigner.

Not to put too fine a point on it, Francis is a voyeur and Buddy Boy is a film about, among a good many other things, voyeurism. But what Francis sees through the hole in the wall has less to do with lust than with a reinforcement of his already paranoid view of the world. And when, against all expectations, Francis finds himself taking part in Gloria’s life in ways which are other than voyeuristic - when, in fact, he ends up having a relationship with her - his world begins to fall apart in a major way.

“For me,” insists Hanlon, “Buddy Boy isn’t essentially a film about voyeurism. At its heart, I think it’s really a film about faith itself: it’s about personal doubt and the failure to believe - in one’s self, in others and in one’s God.”

Religion occupies a major role in Francis’ life. He is a pious Catholic and the main decoration in the shabby apartment is a glowing portrait of the Sacred Heart. Every Sunday, 30-year-old Francis quite literally carries his invalid mother (and her heavy prosthetic limb) to church. Yet the circumstances of his life are so awful, so impoverished, that he is beginning to lose his faith. It’s the exact opposite of Shakespeare’s ‘brave new world, that hath such creatures in it’. The creatures that inhabit Francis’ world - his harridan of a mother (played by Oscar nominee Susan Tyrrell); the sleazy, ingratiating priest (Harry Groener); the increasingly disturbing people and things he sees through his hole in the wall; and above all the violent events of the past that robbed him of his father and his brother - are so far from any idea of a brave new world that Francis can’t but blame their Creator.

“He renounces God because he cannot believe that a God who loves us would cause so much suffering,” says Hanlon - stressing, however, that the sheer, drab awfulness of Francis’ existence carries with it a definite aura of black comedy. “Their situation is so absurdly dismal that I think it can’t help but be funny sometimes. It’s almost shtick. There’s nothing surgical about it: it’s humour with a meat cleaver.” As it turns out, meat cleavers - or at any rate meat - begin to occupy a disturbingly important place in Francis’ world once Gloria enters his life. He encounters her by chance on the way home from work: to his amazement (and horror) she begins to show a real interest in him. Before long, Francis is no longer a virgin and is attending dinner parties in her apartment, where he meets her militantly vegan friends, who are as virulent in dismissing his Catholicism as they are in despising those who eat meat.