IT'S MAKE AND BREAK: Valerie Breiman directed Famke Janssen and Jon Favreau, who portray her and her former partner in a relationship that treads the line between love and hate

Many film ideas have an air of familiarity about them these days: the hero who just wants to be left alone until someone recognises him as Mel Gibson and he is forced to go to war; the suicidal cop who finds a reason to live when introduced to the excitement of big-budget special effects; and, of course, the couple who start off hating each other, only to realise they are really in love.

But here is a new one - the chaotic love-life

of the man who wrote that charming family

film Mouse Hunt, scripted by the woman who was once his partner. In a reversal of the usual

formula, they thought they were in love, only to realise in the final reel that they cannot stand

living together.

Both Valerie Breiman and Adam Rifkin wrote screenplays based on their romance, but Breiman's is the one that got made, under the title of Love and Sex. Famke Janssen, the former Bond girl most recently seen in X-Men, plays Valerie's alter-ego, Kate, with the beefy Jon Favreau, from the hip Swingers, as Adam's alter-ego, em, Adam.

''Welcome to my sex life,'' announces Breiman cheerily at the UK premiere, though the film focuses much more on love. It charts the relationship from first chat-up line through the excitement of someone farting in bed, and not owning up, to the point where Kate/Valerie is demented by Adam/Adam continually slurping his cereal - the beginning of the end.

So what does your ex say when you turn him into a movie?

''He's thrilled,'' insists Breiman, a 36-year-old former model and actress who directed as well as wrote the #2m romantic comedy. ''He's happy because he comes over as a very adorable, charming, funny guy. And he's got a huge ego, so he loves that.''

And Breiman is happy she is being played

on screen by the beautiful Janssen, though the director herself could hardly be called plain, with long blonde hair and a figure that opened up a first career in modelling.

Breiman has known Rifkin for years. He

directed her in Tale of Two Sisters, a low-budget improvised drama film back in the eighties. His other films as director include Psycho Cop 2, though that was one occasion when he did use a pseudonym - Rif Coogan. His career has blossomed as a writer with the scripts for Mouse Hunt and Small Soldiers.

He is also, apparently, a gifted artist and Breiman changed his vocation in Love and Sex from writing to painting. She commissioned a series of bizarre paintings from another artist, including one of a woman with a head coming out of her bottom. Rifkin's own work is so dark, Breiman says, she would have ended up with an 18 certificate if she had used any of it.

They remained friends after they broke up

and, according to Breiman, talk on the phone every day and offer each other advice about

work. But so far Rifkin has found no takers for

his version of their affair.

''He wrote his in the throes of the break-up,'' says Breiman, sipping her freshly-squeezed orange juice. Rifkin apparently decided he

did love Breiman after all, but only after she had fallen in love with an Italian actor, a typical male behaviour pattern. The actor-lover

features in Breiman's film, too, though his name has been changed, because Breiman

worried the actor might sue. She says he is nobody famous.

''His script was much more the guy going through pathos and hell, and he portrayed me as this kind of horrible person. But mine is like this sweet, cherubic portrayal of this funny, charming, puckish character. I tease him about it, because mine got made and his hasn't been made yet. But I think it should be, and it will be one day.''

Although the relationship with Adam provides the backbone of Love and Sex, the film begins in the school playground when the narrator is nine and is tearfully dumped by her first sweetheart after she reveals the relationship to a friend, who tells the whole school.

''I would say the kids' piece of the film was 100% verbatim what happened,'' says Breiman. ''I wouldn't say it haunted me because I only have fond feelings. His name was Larry Stone and he was beautiful and my first love . . . But when he dumped me, after our two-day romance, it was pretty sad.''

Breiman was born in San Francisco, the youngest of five children. Her father was a

landscape architect, her mother a children's TV programme-maker. They split up when Breiman was nine, obviously a highly significant age in

the Breiman story. ''Mom really raised all of us

on her own,'' she says.

''She was a real lover of cinema and she was also really liberal . . . We went to weird gay art films. We went to anything that was there.'' That included The Exorcist, which Breiman first saw at the age of 10. ''I had nightmares for two weeks after that . . . I thought the devil was going to possess me for the rest of my life."

Breiman modelled and acted in her teens, but she also wanted to write and studied journalism at San Francisco State University. The protagonist of Love and Sex is a journalist, though Breiman dropped out and moved to Los Angeles to resume acting.

She had small parts in a few Hollywood movies, including John Hughes's She's Having a Baby, and built a circle of friends that included Rifkin and David Schwimmer, who makes a cameo appearance in Love and Sex. ''I knew David as a friend before Friends . . . We used to play Pictionary together and got into huge fights, because we're both equally competitive.''

Breiman moved from acting to directing, in television, while trying to get her film projects off the ground. About five years ago she came up with the idea of plundering her own love life for material and quickly found financial backing, not from Hollywood, but from Germany and France, and she had to find a leading lady who was acceptable to the German backers.

''Obviously, they will approve a Julia Roberts, but they will also approve certain names that you would never want to put in a movie if your life depended on it.''

Janssen played the villainous Xenia Onatopp in GoldenEye, but Breiman cast her on the strength of her performance in Woody Allen's Celebrity. ''I got her the script the next day

and she loved it and it really happened quickly from that point,'' says Breiman. ''Once she

was attached, Jon Favreau came aboard, like three days later, and we were making the

movie in a month.''

While shooting, Janssen heard she had a starring role in X-Men. ''She was on the cell-phone between takes doing the X-Men deal,'' says Breiman. Janssen's heightened profile will not do Love and Sex any harm at the box office.

Breiman's own prospects also look good. She is considering offers from several Holly-

wood studios and was last seen heading off

for a romantic holiday in the West of Scot-

land with her current boyfriend, who is in the ''dotcom business''.

She hopes she has found a way to keep the relationship fresh and avoid seeing too much of each other - she is based in Los Angeles, while he lives in England, ''which, at this stage of my life, is a very good thing,'' she says.