ΒιΆΉΤΌΕΔ

A director with a distinguished list of credits, Richard Loncraine has also collected awards for his work in commercials, and his development of specialist camera lenses and equipment. Career highlights on film and TV include Brimstone & Treacle, Blade On The Feather, The Missionary, Wide Eyed & Legless, Ian McKellen's tour-de-force Richard III, The Gathering Storm, and the forthcoming My House In Umbria.

You don't have too many romantic comedies in your CV - how did you take to this new genre on Wimbledon?

All directors are a bit arrogant, so I thought it would be quite easy to do one, but they're much harder than you think. That shocked me. The fact that this had sport in it as well made it twice as difficult, as we were constantly trying to balance the one element against the other.

What did you take as your inspiration when it came to reproducing some thrilling rallies on court?

I said it should be somewhere between MTV and a Nike ad. I've made quite a lot of commercials, so I had a go at doing that. We storyboarded everything and I looked at what other tennis movies had been made - not that there are many. We stole from everybody really, in terms of technique.

And actually filming at Wimbledon, was that an easy feat to pull off?

That was our biggest challenge, because for a long while they didn't want us filming there. It took an awful lot of persuading. The late sports agent Mark McCormack introduced Wimbledon to Working Title and got the two groups together. But they were nervous about us making a film there. Wimbledon is a very valuable property to them, and a lot of damage could have been done. So that was really tricky, but once they accepted us and came on board they were fantastic.

With only the odd exception, you decided not to use current players in major roles, but wasn't there someone who nearly found her way into the film?

We had to find an opponent to play against Kirsten Dunst early on when we were shooting at Wimbledon, and I turned down a Russian player I was offered called Maria Sharapova - I thought another blonde just wouldn't work. Much later on when I was watching her win the women's singles final {in 2004] I thought, 'I know that face, where have I seen her before?'.

Your film also owes a lot to a great many blow-up dolls...

We had seven and a half thousand of them! We could only afford 600 extras on one day, and as the court seats 13 and a half thousand people, there was no way we could have filled it. The special effects people were the unsung heroes of the piece because we'd shoot 400 people applauding, and then take the arms of those 400 people and stick them over dummies. There were some amazing effects.

Was it easy getting John McEnroe to appear as himself, in a cameo as a commentator?

Actually he was very hard to persuade to be in the movie. He doesn't suffer fools, which is a problem in my case. But we eventually won him round. We decided early on we weren't going to have famous tennis players, the Roddicks and the Federers, but we wanted it to have as much credibility as possible because you wanted to believe in these people as tennis players, so people like John McEnroe and Chrissie Evert were very important to us.

Wimbledon is released in UK cinemas on Friday 24th September 2004.