Korine on set with Werner Herzog, who plays julien’s abusive father.

“Harmony is committed to allowing the viewer to come up with his or her own point of view on characters and situations,” says producer Scott Macaulay. “Even when he’s presenting extreme events, he does so, I think, in an honest way that trusts the audience to form their own reactions to what’s on screen. In julien, there were scenes we shot that explained elements of the characters more explicitly, but Harmony cut them in editing. julien may technically be schizophrenic, but Harmony was adamant that the film not explain or define him through psychiatry or the point of view of society at large.”

The film was shot on digital video by Anthony Dod Mantle, the director of photography on Danish director Thomas Vinterberg’s award-winning The Celebration, according to the rules of Dogme ’95, the discipline invented by a group of Danish film-makers to rid the cinema of its tricks and manipulations, its “decadence” and “bourgeois romanticism”.

Those who have worked under its extremely harsh rules, which specify among other things

- “The sound must never be produced apart from the images or vice versa. Music must not be used unless it occurs where the scene is being shot”
- “Special lighting is not acceptable. If there is too little light for exposure the scene must be cut or a single lamp attached to the camera”
- “Props and sets must not be brought in. If a particular prop is necessary for the story, a location must be chosen where this prop is to be found”

include original Dogme signatories Vinterberg, Lars von Trier (The Idiots) and Søren Kragh-Jacobsen (Mifune) plus, more recently, French actor-turned-director Jean-Marc Barr (Lovers). Korine’s julien donkey-boy is the first American Dogme film, following a call to its director from the original Dogme boys inviting him to subscribe after they got wind of the project. Reportedly, they like the finished result so much they have rewritten the rule-book as a result.

“A lot of American independent film-makers are excited about Dogme ’95,” says Macaulay’s producing partner Robin O’Hara, who worked with Korine on Gummo, “but I don’t think they really know what making a Dogme film involves. It’s very demanding, because so many decisions have to be made prior to shooting. It requires a great deal of discipline - you can’t cheat things in post-production by adding dialogue or moving the sound.”

What makes Korine’s adoption of Dogme for julien donkey-boy surprising is that he is obviously not a born joiner. “I had a conversation with Harmony, and he didn’t want to hear anything about any kind of ‘system’ in the shooting or sound design,” recalls Mantle. “He just wanted to go.” And the director has since told Screen International’s Colin Brown: “It becomes a kind of game after a while. It was good to do this one movie this way.”

But the play-it-as-it-lays principles of Dogme are ideally suited to the unique world Korine wanted to achieve in his film, and the way he has textured the shots recalls Mantle’s work on The Celebration, where the image starts to break up as the family unit in that film begins to disintegrate during their weekend get-together.

For his part, Bremner was so moved by the whole experience of making the film that, when he get home, he named his newly-born baby daughter Harmony.

“Thinking about it now,” admits the actor with surprising cheerfulness, “it all seems like a big bowl of soup. We are all worlds apart - Chrissy, Harmony’s grandmother, myself - but Harmony is bringing us all into the world of the film and making us all part of the same family. For the actors, the struggle wasn’t, ‘Oh my God, how do we become brother, sister, father, son?’ It was ‘We are this family, so how would we behave?’”