Teens who fall to earth

Hunky Dory, named after Bowie's 1971 album, is set in a south Wales comprehensive in the long, hot summer of 1976, when rivers ran dry, platforms were high and hairstyles bordered on the criminal. Into this strangely un-British land steps a trendy teacher, played by Minnie Driver, who has the idea of making The Tempest more accessible by filling it with the songs of Bowie, ELO, and others.

"You could definitely go on a fantastical journey with those artists," says Evans, recalling his own 1976, when he was in his last year at school in the Valleys.

Coriat, born in Normandy and brought up in Paris, was 14 in 1976 and had become a frequent visitor to Britain through exchange visits. She didn't meet Evans until years later, but the two turned out to be leading parallel lives, both into music and films, but above all music.

Coriat found school life in Britain very different to France. What particularly fascinated her were the different musical "tribes" that pupils were divided into. "There are tribes in France but they are not based on music as much as in England. That's what I loved about England. I was into music but my French friends wouldn't have reacted in that way."

French schools were very focused on academic work, she says, whereas in Britain, in those punk days of the mid-1970s, there was more freedom.

"I could do things I could never do in France. That could be from being somewhere else, you are not with your family, but it's also because all my friends were in art school, in bands. That side of England was very exciting."

Marc Evans and producer Jon Finn had long wanted to celebrate British teenage pop culture in the way that films such as American Graffiti and Dazed and Confused had done with the US variety. Just one problem: while it was natural for kids to hang out on long summer nights in California and Texas, in Britain they were more likely to be scurrying to places between gales and cloudbursts. Hence the decision to set the piece during the hottest summer in decades.

Despite its surface similarity to Glee, Hunky Dory was on the go long before the American TV series appeared on British television screens. Evans acknowledges, though, that the Glee effect could do the film favours at the box office. "I hope so. I love Glee but this was a very different approach, luckily in a way."

In Hunky Dory, Evans wanted a "scruffy, bit more observed" look at British secondary school life. He certainly achieves that in a film where the closest any kid comes to having a set of hot wheels is owning a racing bike. Coriat, who wrote the script with Evans, wanted to show all human life in a secondary school, from the sons whose mother has left to a young man wondering if he is gay.

Coriat, the writer of Wonderland, Genova (both with director Michael Winterbottom), Me Without You, and Patagonia (the latter with Evans), is drawn to ensemble dramas, even if they are more difficult to sell.

"I feel comfortable juggling the different stories. But in terms of financing a film it's difficult to do ensemble. People think they don't do well, they want to do the classical kind of dramas, very strong, one-person journeys."

The casting took a long time because Evans needed kids who could sing, dance, act, and in some cases play musical instruments. Everything had to be kept as natural and authentic as possible.

Like Driver's teacher and her pupils, Evans and Coriat are natural-born pop fans. It was by way of an introduction that Coriat gave Evans a mix tape containing Gainsbourg and Brigitte Bardot singing Bonnie and Clyde and Sparklehorse's It's a Wonderful Life. "Those tracks changed my life," laughs Evans.

Again in those parallel lives they led before striking up a working partnership, Coriat was a bass player in an all-girl band, while Evans admits to being "a very bad drummer".

The film's soundtrack ranges from Nick Drake to ELO, but, as the title suggests, the main inspiration was the pop star who fell to Earth, David Bowie. The godfather of glam rock and much else afterwards was the perfect fit for the Seventies, says Evans. Not only did he tap into the science fiction so popular at the time, but his sexual ambiguity spoke to arty kids of both sexes. Above all, says Evans, Bowie "allowed insiders in".

"I remember Lou Reed's Transformer, which Bowie produced. I had no idea that album was about transsexuals in New York. That experience was alien to a 17-year-old in South Wales. There was something about Bowie you could imagine a connection. You didn't quite know what he was talking about but you could imagine connections with it."

In Hunky Dory the songs are given their own arrangements. Though recognisably versions of the originals, they have their own style, something that was important to Evans and composer Joby Talbot.

"Everyone has their own desert island discs," says Evans. Pop records that change your life are not timeless like classical music but they can mean something else, something different, when you are older. "The great joy of having different arrangements and kids singing them is that the song might hit you in a different way to the first time round."

The filmmakers dealt with Bowie's representatives rather than the man himself when it came to securing permission to use the songs. It wasn't as expensive as might be thought, says Evans, because they were performing version of the songs rather than using the originals.

Coriat says it's impossible to choose one favourite Bowie track – "There are so many great ones" – while Evans, cornered, plumps for Memory of a Free Festival. Another artist they have in common is Duffy, who appeared in their film, Patagonia, a drama set in Argentina and Wales, and performed on the soundtrack.

Both Coriat and Evans are going on to do different things– she hopes to direct a feature, he has another couple of music themed films in pre-production – but they hope to work together again. Like Bowie, Evans sees Coriat, a French writer who works in English, as an outsider on the same wavelength as him.

Evans says of Coriat: "If you're British you think why would a French person come over here and make films because France is much more cinema oriented. She's got her own view on the world and she's very rock and roll. What I love about her writing is her otherness. She looks at Britain in a slightly different way to maybe a British writer would, and she loves music."

Sounds like a hunky-dory fit for this most British of high school musicals.

Hunky Dory opens in cinemas next Friday.