The story of Jim Threapleton's life would make a great film. It'd be a darker, more subversive, more complex and ambiguous version of Notting Hill: ordinary bloke falls in love with movie star, becomes one half of Hollywood megacouple, and, for a few years, lives the dream. So far, so very Richard Curtis. But then, it all goes wrong: the relationship disintegrates, they divorce, his ex becomes one half of an even starrier Hollywood megacouple, and, overnight, he's transformed back into being just an ordinary bloke.
I'm just not sure how it would end. He makes a brilliant low-budget film about a dirty political secret called Extraordinary Rendition, and falls in love with a nice school administrator called Julie whom he meets down his local pub? It's a satisfying real-life story arc but not quite a resolution. He's set a date with Julie and the wedding's next year, but the jury is still out on his film. It'll have its UK premiere this week in Edinburgh and deserves to do well. What I like best about Jim is that he knows that nothing's in the bag, and that life, at any moment, can go either way.
That's why Threapleton (pronounced Threppleton) is such a joy to interview. He pauses before he answers questions, deliberates, backtracks, tries again, and, when I ask a personal question too far, he apologises to me. This is not how interviews usually work. Where's the life-story-off-pat? The standard stock answers? When I suggest my film-of-his-life idea, he laughs. But then, having spent the last six years writing and working on scripts, and trying to develop and finance interesting stories, he doesn't need me to point out that he's been living his own story too. And when I ask a question, it's almost as if he's still trying to work out exactly what the answer might be, or how to put in words exactly who he is.
But then it becomes apparent that this is exactly what he's doing, and that Extraordinary Rendition is the best answer he has. It's the story of Zaafir (Omar Berdouni from United 93), a politics lecturer who is abducted on the streets of London, flown out of the country, interrogated at one of the CIA's so-called 'Black Sites', tortured, and eventually dumped back in this country, where he's forced to try and pick up the pieces of his life.
It's a powerful portrait of an ordinary man trapped in extraordinary circumstances, and at the Locarno film festival last week 2,500 people jammed its main indoor theatre to watch what is, in parts, almost unwatchable. At one point Zaafir is subjected to water-boarding - the contentious 'enhanced interrogation' technique that replicates the act of drowning - and I wasn't the only person in the audience who spent the scene staring at the floor.
'It was a difficult balance to find,' he says. 'It is unpleasant, particularly the water-boarding scene. But we really thought we had to portray the reality of what is at the heart of the story.' On the one hand it is, he says, an attempt by him and his long-time friend and producer Andy Noble to 'enhance the debate that's surrounding what is an urgent political story'. But he's also keen to stress that it's not a documentary but a dramatic fictionalisation. It flashes forwards and backwards to create scenes from Zaafir's life, his relationship with his wife (newcomer Ania Sowinski), and his interrogator, Andy Serkis (King Kong, Lord of the Rings).
'We hope that it asks questions of the audience about a life that's almost shattered beyond recognition without being tub-thumping or preachy. It's sometimes perceived as being a dry, political subject, and we amassed a whole archive of evidence on it, but from that kernel we wanted to extract the real human drama.'
The success of the film is that it works on both levels. It's been praised by both Amnesty International and in early reviews in Screen and Hollywood Reporter. And in Locarno, as stolidly bourgeois a town as you could hope to find, it drew a huge and appreciative audience. It's not just about extraordinary rendition. At the heart of the film is a metaphysical question: what happens when someone else is let loose with the facts of your life and they make their own interpretation of what and who you are? Zaafir is a mild-mannered London politics lecturer, but in his interrogator's version of events he's a key player in the global terror network. 'This is not me!' he screams at one point.
'It's about the footprints we all leave in our lives,' says Threapleton. 'Whether it's your credit card statements, or destinations you travelled to in your year off, or an email you may or may not have opened. Under scrutiny, that can be misinterpreted or appropriated to an agenda that can almost kind of mould you.'
There's something familiar about this - but then I've read Threapleton's press cuttings. The Daily Express had him down for a time (wrongly) as an activist for Fathers4Justice, and if anybody knows what it is to be a made-up character, it's the ex-Mr Kate Winslet.
At the beginning of their relationship he was her 'glorious-looking blue-eyed boy', and in magazine interviews she extolled the joys of their relationship. Later it was a 'fuck up' and she claimed he 'didn't want me to be famous'. Threapleton said nothing but his alter ego, also called Jim Threapleton, was given emotions and motivations that were splashed across the papers. He hasn't talked since. 'It was always my intention, if and when I had something to talk about artistically, that that would be a perfectly fine time to ask me about those kind of issues. I never sought any platform or media engagement, and by virtue of my silence a picture was painted of my existence that was wholly inaccurate. But I felt no need to search out the opportunity to wave any particular flag.'
He now has the platform, and there's an obvious satisfaction in translating the one-time attentions of Heat and Now into the oxygen of publicity for the perpetration of systematic abuse of human rights and the abandonment of due process. At the time he was simply bewildered by the attention he received. 'I didn't consider myself in any way well known, and I remember as we were sort of separating being stopped on the tube and asked for my autograph, which was a peculiar incident because I couldn't quite understand under what terms someone would want the signature of someone who hasn't got a canon of work to their name.'
There's something almost old-fashioned about this. But then Threapleton had a sort of old-fashioned background: he was a forces' child, his father was a pilot in the RAF, and he and his younger brother moved around until he was packed off to boarding school in Yorkshire.
His brother became an army officer while he took quite a different life course: going off to Manchester University to study history of art. His family, he says, have always had 'wide-ranging' political debates, and although they haven't seen the film yet he doesn't see any conflict between their occupations and his current subject matter.
But he comes from a background steeped in the concept of principled public service, and the disjuncture between where he came from and the pages of Heat is a huge one. Which is where Extraordinary Rendition comes in. There was, he says, an 'urgency' about making the film; he and Noble wanted to catch the tide of public debate. And for this reason Threapleton wrote the outline, but the script was, very unusually for a thriller, improvised. 'My point of contact for the subject matter was really the Orwellian tradition or the Kafkaesque scenario - one individual lost in faceless machinery,' he says. (One of the film's few clumsy moments is when Zaafir is filmed prior to his abduction with a copy of Kafka's The Trial resting on his desk.)
'Trapped in faceless machinery'? Like, say, the subject of various tabloid stories? He took action against the Daily Mail a couple of years back when they published an article headlined 'Whatever Became of Mr Winslet?' Underneath, it said: 'We all know what happened to Kate. But three years after their surprise divorce, Jim Threapleton's still the struggling film-maker she left behind.'
It described how Winslet had 'traded up with a powerful new husband, Sam Mendes, an Oscar-winning film director' whereas Threapleton 'has not had a conventional job since 1999'.
'I just couldn't work out why they were doing it. Their interpretation of my life...this idea that I'd forlornly head down the local pub, speak to no one, get up in my pyjamas at 2pm in the afternoon... it just bore no resemblance to anything that I was doing with my life.'
When he and Winslet met, in 1997 on the set of Hideous Kinky he was a 'third assistant director', way down the food chain from her role as principal artist, although he had already rapidly worked his way up from his first job as a production runner on London's Burning. A year later he worked, again as a third assistant director, on a huge Hollywood production, The Mummy, and it was this that galvanised him to re-think his career path.
'I had a really good time but I was given an opportunity to work on bigger and bigger films with regularity, and it was just a fork in the road. I realised that I was about to embark on what could be a very happy and fruitful career but if I didn't stop now and attend to what I was really hoping to do, personally, then it would probably be a very long way further down the line before I would have realised that I'd never done it.' It was a brave decision, and one that he's been working through for the last six years. 'I'd be lying if I said it hadn't been testing,' he says. And taking the solitary path of being a writer while working through his divorce and arrangements for seeing his daughter, Mia, now six, was, he says, 'a necessary period of reflection'.
In that time he's written several scripts and, with Andy Noble, has been developing projects and attempting to raise finance to produce their own features. But the difficulties involved seem enormous. Figures vary for the total cost of Extraordinary Rendition but Threapleton calls it 'sub-£100,000' - what Variety calls a 'no-budget' film. The shooting of it was somehow achieved for the kind of amount you can get out on a credit card: around £20,000, which, he says, 'is a real testimony to Andy's creativity and tenacity'.
On the big screen in front of a large audience, the film stands up amazingly well. But getting there, says Threapleton, has been sheer, hard slog. 'Getting to the first rung of the ladder has not been an easy task. To have expected by virtue of a prior relationship that I would be given access-all-areas to the film industry is absurd - it was just never going to be the case.'
Was it particularly difficult, I ask him, untactfully, that Kate went off with another film director? 'It didn't factor. I mean we're hardly in the same game. Sam is highly acclaimed, quite rightly so, but it wasn't "Oh shit, this guy, the director of American Beauty, is eclipsing everything I ever wanted." I have nothing but the utmost respect and admiration for his work, and subsequently I've found out over the years that he's a fantastic person to be in Mia's life. The hardest thing with divorce when children are involved is working out how the new relationship will work. You are obligated to generate new terms of friendship quickly, and I had beers with Sam as soon as possible so that there was never going to be this sense that we couldn't talk.'
He is very proud of how well they've all managed to arrange things in Mia's life, although it sounds far from easy. He flies to New York 'religiously' once a month and the upshot is that Mia is 'probably the most confident little girl I've ever met'.
A Hollywood version of Extraordinary Rendition is waiting in the wings. It's called Rendition and stars Reese Witherspoon and Jake Gyllenhaal. Which just seems absurd somehow to me, although Threapleton shrugs when I say so. But then as somebody whose own life featured a leading Hollywood player in the co-starring role, maybe he sees it differently. It hasn't stopped me wanting to see the story of his life turned into a film, though: a rom-com pastiche with, perhaps, in a playfully postmodern touch, Kate Winslet playing Kate Winslet. And we'd see Jim, in his own personal version of extraordinary rendition, transported to Planet Fame and then spat back down to earth. He's doing a fine job back down here, though. And while the last act could still go either way, it's a pleasingly open ending, with a character you want to root for.
· Extraordinary Rendition is showing as part of the Edinburgh Film Festival on Tuesday and Thursday.
The ex factor
1974 Born James Threapleton in North Yorkshire.
1997 Assistant director on Hideous Kinky, where he meets Kate Winslet. They marry the following year, but divorce in 2001.
1999 Assistant director on The Mummy
2000 Daughter Mia Honey Threapleton born.
2007 Writes and directs Extraordinary Rendition
He says 'I don't want this film to be regarded as a docudrama.'
She said 'I really fancy him. He is so dashing and he makes me laugh my head off.' Kate Winslet, 1998.
Hayden Colledge