Well, it is set in the Arctic
By Melanie McFadyean

Sue Clayton was on the dole when she and a handful of other young film directors were invited to showcase their work in the States. "Five trendy Euro twentysomethings and me were driven in limos to meet the agents and studio execs." On her return, the sponsors had a cab collect her from Heathrow. She made it wait while she stopped to sign on.

"Shuffling up in the queue, loath to take off my California shades, I tried to hold on to that last bit of glamour. When I got to the desk, the woman asked me why I was late signing on.
'What have you been doing?' she asked. 'Drumming up work in Hollywood,' I replied brightly. 'There's no need to be sarcastic; she said, and sent me to a corner to wait with a mad guy who insisted he ' was Napoleon. The cab meter was at £74 when I got out."

Clayton, whose film The Disappearance Of Finbar will be released next week, is not what you might expect of a director: in her early forties, she's small, friendly and lives in a one-bedroom flat in Hackney. But if her new film is anything to go by, her fortunes could be about to change.

Finbar was started in 1993 when David Aukin, then head of film at Channel 4, invited Clayton to make a feature, advising her to make it personal. Clayton is too intellectually idiosyncratic to take that literally, and so didn’t crash face-first into adolescent rites of passage. Her identification with Finbar is far subtler.

The film tells the story of a working class Irish teenager, Finbar Flynn. (moodily played by Jonathan Rhys Myers). Everyone around him thinks he is exceptional in some unspecified way. Conscious of their need for him to excel, and having no idea how to do so beyond following the urges of his stroppy spirit, Finbar jumps off a fly-over arching over his urban wasteland estate, lands in a truck and ends up in a tango bar in the Arctic Circle, leaving those who love him devastated at his disappearance. Clayton shot the film in Tallaght, a vast, grim Dublin estate, where she had the flyover specially built, and in the Arctic Circle.

Like Finbar, Clayton has always been different. She was the first pupil at her comprehensive to try to get into Cambridge, and her headmaster gave her a cupboard in which to prepare for the entrance exams - something she wrote about in the exams, along with her observations on DH Lawrence's early unpublished works. When she went for the interview at Cambridge, she realised she'd created something of an impression.
"The interviewers treated me, with awe, as if they'd discovered someone brought up by wolves."
At the start of her first term, she felt weird among her middle-class contemporaries. "They said 'buks', 'Yah', 'baaath'. I hated them thinking, ‘What a funny little Geordie', so I learned words with'aaas'in them, like Frascati and avocado, and practised in the mirror - yah, buks, avocado, baaath."

Clayton left Cambridge with a first in English and went into photography, though film was always on her mind. "But I never dreamt women could make films any more than be brain surgeons or fighter pilots. It was 1976, and although feminism was in its heyday, there were very few women making films. I'd heard of Leni Riefenstahl, but she was no role model."

Nevertheless, Clayton went to the Royal College of Art, from where she got into documentary film before making two short dramas: Heart Songs, a 10-minute film which earned her a Bafta nomination, and The Last Crop, a 60-minute film that won the Irish Film Festival Award in 1991.

Clayton often visits her family in Newcastle and they still say, "Hinny, but are you not courtin’ yet?" It so happens that she is currently courting, but has never felt able to have kids because she feared it would be incompatible with her film career. "If women slip off the ladder to have babies, they risk losing their place," she says.

Clayton ascribes the lack of female directors to women’s reluctance to bullshit. `When the investors ask you if you are certain if it's worth spending £100,000 on building a flyover, you have to say yes, even though everyone knows it's nuts - they're banking on confidence"

Clayton is not what the, industry calls a "genre" director, more an 'auter’, a word whose pretentious connotations she dislikes. She was delighted when a Frenchman at the Cannes Film Festival referred to her as a "reluctant otter". This soubriquet suits her — she’s not one of those stuck-up, designer-dressed termagants.

Finbar was shot on a £2.8million budget, small by global standards, but big for a newish director. Clayton was involved in everything from co-writing the script with Irish writer Dermot Bolger and collaborating on the score to raising the money. She had to deal with nine investors, nine lawyers and 12 insurers in four languages.

"The investors all had their views. The French wanted more sex, the Germans more philosophy, the Swedes more landscape. The Brits wanted safe sex, the Finns didn't give a shit. A meeting would end with a Eurobureaucrat saying, 'Okay, is that clear? We want a script that’s shorter, longer, funnier, gloomier, for teenyboppers, for the art-house crowd, less sex, more sex, no sex, more snow, no snow, in Swedish, English, no subtitles'."

There were some anxious moments, like when, at the 11th hour, the investors sent their insurance guarantor to check the viability of the Arctic location. Clayton knew it could be done: she had done the recces herself, getting dropped by helicopter in frozen wastes in minus 40 or riding through tundra on a snow-scooter - "Better than sex, driving a snow-scooter at 10Omph across a frozen lake at sunset with elks and wolves for company!"

There were only days left until the financial cut-off point, and the investors' panic happened to coincide with the winter solstice. ‘The helicopter pilot warned us there might be no light at all, half an hour at midday if we were lucky. We set off in a blinding snowstorm. The pilot couldn’t see a thing. But when a ghostly mauve light suddenly appeared from under the horizon it was utterly magical and weird. The guarantor clutched his head in what it looked to be like a fit of nausea, but it was emotion. He said, ‘Yes! It's obvious to me now. That is what Finbar’s looking for - oblivion!' I said,
'Does that mean we've got the film?', and he replied, ‘Against all rational judgment - yes!’ That made me cry."

What thrilled Clayton as much as the news that she had secured the financing was that the man in the suit understood Finbar's quest, his need for .a sense of elsewhere - oblivion, the Arctic, the image of the tabula rasa on which to start out all over again"

For Clayton, Finbar’s journey parallels her own restless spirit, her desperation not to let her imagination fester, whatever the cost. Her next projects will take her to Alaska and the backwoods of Michigan.
It sounds corny, "she admits, "but the only thing I really love doing is making-films"