A FILM OF TWO HALVES 

Nick Hornby peers at the bleary image on a black and white monitor, "I know it's a cliche'd thing", he says, "but the camera really loves him".

Hornby is in a paint-chipped school in Muswell Hill, north London, which is the location for a few scenes in the Channel 4 feature film of his best selling book, Fever Pitch. The "him" on the monitor is Colin Firth , who has been well-known since the 1984 film Another Country but was propelled on to another plane following his memorable performance as Mr. Darcy in the BBC's recent production of Pride & Prejudice.

He is now playing a rather different lead, that of an Arsenal-loving schoolteacher Paul Ashworth. Had Hornby ever imagined seeing himself on the screen in the form of an actor beloved by women from Finland to Japan.

"Colin's got a bit more hair than me", he says with a grin, "but otherwise we are indistinguishable".

The teenage pupils at the school tend to crowd round both of them. The boys are perhaps more interested in Hornby, who's pretty famous himself as probably Britain's no. 1 football fan. It's the girls who go for Firth - usually to tell him filthy jokes and comment on his "nice arse". And its not short for Arsenal.

Firth has exchanged Darcy's breeches for jeans and leather jacket but still stands out. A scene is being shot in the school corridor where his character is letting slip an indiscretion to the headmaster. The exchange, though enacted again and again, is very funny and cracks up the crew, and everybody else, every time. 

Even from this snippet it is obvious that film of Fever Pitch is rather different from the book. The book is the memoir of an obsessive Arsenal fan which stretches from 68-92 and cleverly appeals to those who know nothing about football, as well as the writer's like minded millions each one of whom is convinced that Hornby wrote it specially for him.

It was obviously going to be a hard film to adapt (one leading producer lost out because although he loved the book, he just could not see any way of doing it on the screen). The film as produced by Amanda Posey, is to be a romantic comedy, set in the 88-89 football season, with the occasional flashback to the seventies , where we see the central character of young Paul - played by newcomer Luke Aikman - between the ages of 11 and 14. Lost are the years of 15-31 but it was the only way to make the narrative possible. "There isn't a lot of dramatic content in the book", Hornby explains. "For the film we had to create a story and bring about some kind of conclusion. The romance is the vehicle which carries the themes of the book in to the film - given that you can't have a guy talking to himself for 90 minutes. But I don't think we are betraying the book - we've very much tried to keep the spirit of it".

It is not a football film. Apart from anything else as Hornby points out , almost all football films are flops - dogged by footballers who can't act or actors who can't play football. Think of Escape to Victory with Stallone as a goalie and Michael Caine as the team captain. "It was a cult classic because it was so dismally stupid". says Hornby. And then there was Yesterday's hero, with aerial shots of McShane running around between goal posts mixed in with old film footage. There is little football to be seen in Fever Pitch "because of the problem of recreating real games. They always look crap", says Hornby. Where it cannot be avoided they have two players (Leeds and ex-Arsenal goalkeeper John Lukic is one ) who were in the real 88-89 championship and are still fit and convincing. "A lot of Fever Pitch is how football leaks into everything else - relationships, family, work" says Hornby. So the film, directed by David Evans is just going to be a little bit of more of the everything else.

Hornby who wrote the script in close collaboration with Evans ditched the narrator of the book, i.e. Hornby, in favour of the fictional character Paul and created a girlfriend, Sarah (played by Ruth Gemmell), who is an amalgam of all the women Hornby has ever known, with a bit of fantasy figure thrown in for good measure. It is this relationship which gives the film dramatic impact. The major problem is the romance of Paul and Sarah is that football gets in the way. "So", says Hornby, "in that sense we have not gone completely AWOL. You still hear the word Arsenal several million times".

When Horny and Evens began working on a script they acknowledged that the feminine quality in the book was definite and significant and something they did not want to lose. "The only way you can do that with a third person visual narrative is to have the feminine quality, guess what in the shape of a woman! Sarah is the eyes and ears and mouth of lots of people who may not understand Paul's obsession."

When he wrote the book , Hornby took a decision that the women in his life had not chosen to be in it so he felt he should protect their privacy and identity. "But because the film is non-autobiographical I could put in as much romance as I liked". Though the initial big leap of the first draft was a struggle , it clearly succeeded in the end. 

Firth says that even before he met Hornby and Evans, it was purely and simply the good script and good story that attracted him to the project. The offers from Hollywood had been there but he had not wanted to go to Los Angeles as an end in itself:

"It is very boring. You have got to really love palm trees".

Firth is talking over lunch of chicken and broad beans in the warm catering coach on the school car park. He has a slightly orange face and alarmingly dark eye brows, but make up aside, he remains completely natural and easy going, far removed from any image of a pouting luvvie. 

"There is a tremendous amount of the character Paul in me, which I think is eventually true of most people I play, although I admit his cultural background is a bit closer to mine than Darcy's". 

Firth points out that he has not got a mansion in Derbyshire but does have a flat in Hackney, which is not far from Arsenal. 

"And it is more fun to be Nick Hornby."

Firth does love football but as he says, "there is a distinction in Nick's book between those who watch the World Cup and those who live on the terraces - I am more a watcher of the World Cup". 

Even so, he identifies a lot with the obsessiveness of Paul/Hornby. "there is a scene at the end during the climactic match which Paul is watching on TV. He says he's lost all hope, he's going off to the pub, it's not worth watching. He gets as far as the door but just can't leave. I've spent half my life like that with relationships and so forth, maybe wanting and having the power to go out of the door but just not being able to act on it. Nick really makes you feel as though he's written about you."

While the camera are being positioned for a scene in the school changing rooms, and the steam machines are doing their bit to make the place look suitably fogged up, director Evans says that this was exactly what he thought when a friend handed him a proof of the book four years ago. "I remember on the way up north to see my mum, stopping off at a motorway service station to read it. It was literally and totally about me. I interviewed Nick for the Late Show and we later became friends. He lives round the corner from me. I was very honest about wanting to make it into a film. He got other offers but he was honourable and kept to his word. 

"We started with the premise it had to end at the climax of the 88-89 season and that it could no longer be auto biographical and that Nick would become Paul. Paul is different in some ways to Nick. Isn't it true he is as much Colin's creation as Nick's and mine."

"When the scene was being shot a few weeks ago of the young Paul going to Arsenal with his father to see his first game, Evans was careful to make the distinction between him and the young Hornby. "I said, Nick , hypothetically, where do you think Paul would have sat and what would he have seen?" "Well," Nick said, "I can tell you where I sat and what I saw, so the non auto -biographical nature of it collapsed". 

He laughs "Nick's not so desperate to distance himself from Paul that he's going to make him a fluent SerboCroat speaker. But there is a more fundamental difference. In the book you see a man attracted to a group and aspiring to belong but not necessarily grasping it, and I love that aspect of it. In the film Paul is more integrated and Sarah is the outsider. It would clearly be a less dramatic story in the film if it was about someone having a relationship with a man who was merely trying to become part of Arsenal."

So Paul is a multi-faceted faceted character. Hornby smiles when asked if Paul is really his real self, or himself in the book, or Evans, or Firth, or even Rob in his novel High Fidelity, and probably a few of their friends besides. "Oh, yes" he says , "there is one bit of Rob in the film , a brief conversation about alphabetical record collections, though the jokes are not the same." Disney has bought the film rights to that novel and it will be set in America. - "They'll be relating to the music bits more than to the Crouch End bits." says Hornby. "I'm not writing the script or anything, it's not going to be anything to do with me." So when they mess it up he can't be blamed. "I was hoping to get away from Paul being anyone specific", says Hornby, "so people see him as someone the know, we all know."

Firth says: "The film will appeal very strongly to people who aren't die-hard soccer fans or not fans at all. They're not it's target audience - it's not something you can go and chant to. This is a romantic comedy with a capital R but there's not a lot of sweet stuff. Paul and Sarah aren't throwing petals over each others heads. They mostly argue - it's about the problem in their relationship. It's truthful and moving". 

"There was a letter in one of the papers saying 'Why is Colin Firth doing a football movie when there is Heathcliff left to do?', which was making lots of assumptions about the film, the script and the actors. It is very romantic about Arsenal but it is not a football movie."

There are many for whom even Euro 96 is no great pull. Thousands of people - mostly women - have reputedly booked their holidays while it is going on so as to be as far away as possible from their men with their unappetizing binge combination of football, beer and television . But judging form the three short scenes I saw being filmed, it seems Fever Pitch the movie will prove irresistible to even hardened football skeptics. As its star says - and it is Firth who will pull in the people who think Arsenal is a swear word: 

"Anyone who finds the football obsession absurd will find it amusing."

As there are certainly plenty of them, it's bound to be a winner..