Gretchen Mol as Liz.

To LIVE & LOVE in LA

Like most Angelenos - a title to which spending five minutes on the San Diego Freeway basically entitles you - film-maker Russell DeGrazier arrived in the City of Angels from elsewhere, sporting a BFA in Theater Studies from Southern Methodist University, before signing on at USC to do an MA in Film Production.

But he quickly adapted to his new home, where he directed plays for the stage and wrote and directed short films which won prizes at festivals and one - Mad Boy, I’ll Blow Your Blues Away, Be Mine - that was short-listed for an Oscar. DeGrazier’s first feature script, which he co-wrote with Randall Johnson for Fox, was similarly a 100% LA project: Sunset Strip, the story of a group of friends on that world-famous stretch of boulevard set in the late summer of 1972 which opened in the US this summer.

It comes as no surprise, then, that DeGrazier’s directorial debut, Attraction (which he also wrote), is a quintessentially L.A. movie. “In this film,” he says, “the loneliness the characters feel has a lot to do with living in L.A. and a lot to do with where their careers are - or aren’t - and the past relationships they’ve had.”

Like the earlier film, it is about a group of friends. Except that here, ‘attraction’ - that strange blend of insecurity, sexual desire and manoeuvring for position - gets in the way of friendship, and the two guys and two girls on whom the film focuses form an uneasy love quartet. That, too, has to do with living in the City of Angels. “In L.A.,” says Samantha Mathis, who plays one of the four friends, “we’re so isolated from each other. We don’t come in contact with each other as we would in a normal city. We’re all in our little cars, in our little worlds.”

The hipper they are, the harder they fall: Matthew (Matthew Settle, right) can’t get over losing Liz (Gretchen Mol, above) and begins driving by her apartment and hanging round outside her workplace.

The four people in their own little cars and their own little worlds are: Matthew, played by relative newcomer Matthew Settle, best known for being the unstoppable guy with the fisherman’s gaff in I Still Know What You Did Last Summer; his former girlfriend, Liz, played by actress and Vanity Fair cover-girl Gretchen Mol; Garrett, who works with Matthew and is played by Tom Everett Scott from Tom Hanks’ That Thing You Do (he was the drummer); and Cory, Liz’s best friend, an actress who has just come back into town and who is played by Mathis, seen most recently in American Psycho.