Susan Tyrrell

But Francis doesn’t give up his voyeurism, and what he sees through his knot-hole doesn’t quite tie in with a vegan lifestyle. On one occasion, Gloria appears to be eating roast beef. On another, some distinctly non-vegetable - something awfully like a human head - appears to be going into the cooking pot. The vegans, it seems, may be secret cannibals. “It’s a perfect form of hypocrisy that dramatically underscores the difference between the world he knows and the world he sees in her window,” says Hanlon, in a somewhat offhand manner.

Buddy Boy, obviously, is no more a realistic slice-of-life drama than was Repulsion, with its hands coming out of the walls and terror lurking in the corners of the room. “The film has a quality of being unreal from the beginning, and I think the humour serves that well,” says Hanlon, who worked with Polish-born cinematographer Hubert Taczanowski (like Polanski, a graduate of the world-famous Lodz Film School) to produce a colour scheme more surreal than real.

“We banished colour in Francis and Sal’s apartment, except for the sickly, yellow-stained lamplight and the pale green face of the priest,” he says. “We were looking for a surreal quality that incorporated elements of hyper-realism: the filth, the junk of a pathetic tenement apartment, but all this at the end of a long, brown-flecked floor, like the yellow-brick road made from shit.”

To watch Buddy Boy is to be drawn inexorably into Francis’ world while at the same time watching it from outside - another form of voyeurism, suggests Hanlon, for whom cinema itself is a bit of a peeping-tom activity (“To sit silently in the darkness and peer into other worlds is, in a strictly defined way, voyeurism,” he says).

It’s a film that is funny and horrible at the same time - and its success depends very much on Gillen, star of the recent controversial British TV series Queer as Folk but little known in the US. “I’m sure that’s going to change,” insists Hanlon. “He’s a great talent. He completely wore the character of Francis. There was a point very soon after we started filming when I got a powerful sense that Francis was no longer my creation, that Aidan had brought him wholly to life and that he was, in fact, real. In a simply physical way, Aidan’s features are literally fluid, as though he has conscious control of the bone structure of his face. It’s fascinating to watch that on screen.” Francis’ nemesis Gloria is, of course, played by a much better-known actress. But Hanlon insists he didn’t cast Seigner because she was married to Polanski. “I’d seen her, obviously, in Polanski’s films,” he says, “and I think I see what he appreciated about her in casting those films, which is the devilish quality she has.”

The beautiful but devilish Gloria (Emmanuelle Seigner)

And that, without giving away too much about what happens in Buddy Boy, was something Hanlon needed to inject into the film.

“Francis is very fearful of the outside world,” he says, “and with some good reason, based primarily on the cruelty of his own life.” Voyeurism, he adds, gives him a way of dealing with the world without actually having to come into contact with it, as it did for the title character in Michael Powell’s classic, Peeping Tom - and as it did for Jimmy Stewart’s character in Rear Window (whose life also began to fall apart when he came into direct contact with the world he had been spying on from his wheelchair).

“In a life without control,” points out Hanlon, “the voyeur has all the control. Francis is a bystander: he’s never really a part of the reality that surrounds him. When he attempts to step into that reality, it takes on the quality of an illusion.

“I think we’re all in some way afraid of the world and, to a greater or lesser extent, we accommodate this,” he concludes. “But some of us are less able to accommodate that fear...”