Even when she goes mainstream and tries her hand at Shakespeare it’s Henry VI Part 3 – the first time this play had

Even when she goes mainstream and tries her hand at Shakespeare, it’s Henry VI Part 3 – the first time this play had been performed on its own since 1594 Still, one label is hard t o resist. `Clerks’ (no cert yet), which Mary Harron wrote about in the `Sunday Review’ of 13 November, opens on 5 May For cinemas and times for`Amateur’, see Going Out, page 74.. He adopted a unique approach to dialogue coaching: he lent his male lead a copy of Trust and told him, “Justdo the lines like in this movie.” In a neat vision of US/European cultural exchange, Clerks was filmed in Leonardo, New Jersey.! `Amateur’ (15) is out now, `Barcelona’ (12) opens on Friday and `Before Sunrise’ (no cert yet) follows in the spring. Its director saw Slacker on his 21st birthday, and it changed his life.

Kevin Smith’s brilliantly original convenience-store talk-fest Clerks connects the new eloquence with the populist traditions of Wayne’s World and early John Hughes The film is dedicated to Linklater and Hartley. The first half-hour or so of Shallow Grave is certainly a step in the right direction.We’d better get a move on though, because the next wave of young American talent is already waiting in the wings. It’s hard to know why this should be the case, as European influences both obvious (Godard in the case of Hartley) and not so – the Roger Moore James Bond films for Stillman, Eric Rohmer for Linklater – abound in the Americans’ work Maybe it’s just a matter of time. Even Stillman, the most bookish of the three, is happier making films than he would be writing novels: they “g et so much more coverage”.Asked if it was an idea of European culture as somehow more literary that drew him to finance Amateur from here, Hartley replies “No, it’s just easier to get money in Europe.” There is no law forbidding our own film-makers from participating in the sort of deft, high-precision cultural discourses these three directors are putting on the screen: they just don’t seem to have got around to it yet. For all their makers’ literacy, these films could, as Linklater asserts, “only be films”.

With Hollywood ever more reliant on adaptations of ideas first aimed at bookshelf or television, it is heartening to see purely cinematic ideas edging closer to the mainstream. “It’s easy if you throw in a lot of plot intrigue and car chases, but to just show two people communicating and the subtle drama that goes with that – which to me is just the essence of life – to make that work in a cinematic form, to give it a pace and a feel and its own little trajectory, that is a real challenge.”The most important thing that Hartley, Stillman and Linklater’s films have in common is that they are intensely watchable. “What story there is.” Linklater is happy for his films not to be thought conventionally dramatic. It’s “a little chamber film essentially”: a young American persuades a French woman to get off a train with him in Vienna, and they walk around all night, talking. “The number of characters in my films seems to be reducing,” Linklater laughs, “So does the time-scale.” Slacker was 100 people over 24 hours, Dazed and Confused was 20 for 18, now Before Sunrise is two for 12.