And that’s just the half of it. “Cletis Tout is a bouillabaisse: it has everything,” says producer Dan Grodnik, noting the richness of Chris Ver Weil’s screenplay. “I was floored by the script. It’s the best project I’ve read in five years.”

Ver Weil, a Tuscon-born writer and former stand-up comedian, dreamed up the idea for the film while on a trip to London. By day, he supported himself busking and reading Tarot cards in Covent Garden. By night, in a bedsit in a house near Wandsworth Common in which Thomas Hardy once lived, he wrote Cletis Tout. The character’s first name he borrowed from New Orleans, the second from someone he met in a pub who sold scalped tickets for a living. Ginger Markum, meanwhile, was based on a drag queen who lived in the same house. The buried jewels came from a news story about an East German woman who buried the family fortune in a spot on which, shortly afterwards, the Berlin Wall was built. The carrier pigeons Finch/Cletis eventually uses to send the diamonds out of the jail came from a trick used by South African miners. And the rest came from Ver Weil’s love of old movies.

Christian Slater as Trevor Finch, who assumes the identity of Cletis Tout, without realising that the mob has a contract out on the real Cletis.

“I was looking for something that would tell a quirky, interesting story and pay homage to America’s love affair with the movies,” he says. “There’s really five movies going on in this picture. It is a homage to genre film: the romance genre. It has a mobster feel to it; it’s a screwball comedy; and it has a film-noir quality. But ultimately, it becomes a romance.”

Ver Weil gave the finished script to his friend Matt Grimaldi (Swingers, Dead Man’s Curve), who got it - via his lawyer - to Grodnik, who used to be chairman of National Lampoon Inc and produced the sleeper hit, Powder. Cletis Tout struck him as equally unique, equally unusual. “This movie,” he recalls, “is so unlike anything that comes across most people’s desks that, if you don’t acquire it at all costs, you shouldn’t be in the business.”

And that is how, on June 6 of this year, Ver Weil found himself behind a camera in Toronto. “Chris is a true artist, and has leadership abilities,” explains Grodnik of the decision to let the writer make his directorial debut on the movie. “I always give my first-time directors two words of advice: ‘Take control, because if you don’t, I will’. And that’s the last thing they want!”

It was something of a baptism of fire for Ver Weil. Only two sets were built: Critical Jim’s hotel room and a pottery store which had to be blown to bits by the 500 machine-gun bullets. All the rest of Cletis Tout’s 74 basic settings were locations, with the unit averaging three moves a day (which, says location manager Peter Boboras grimly, is probably a record).

Portia de Rossi as Micah’s daughter, Tess.

With a strong cast drawn by the originality of the material - Slater found it “unique”; Connolly “laughed out loud... and thought, I’m just going to do it” - Ver Weil had little difficulty rising to the occasion. “If another director had come in who wasn’t as close to the material as Chris,” says Slater, “it wouldn’t have had the same sort of heart. He really knows how he wants the characters to look and behave. He’s got it all mapped out in his head, kind of like Amadeus did with music. I think there’s a little bit of him in every character. He’s very close to each and every one of them.”