A dirty job but someone's got to do it

Forget picturesque pastoral - writers Andrew Kötting and Sean Lock are more interested in blood, mud and lusty bulls. They tell Ben Thompson why

In the first few moments of Andrew Kötting's This Filthy Earth, the watcher's eye is caught by something that looks like the stamen of an exotic orchid. With the film opening today, it would be a shame to ruin the surprise by revealing exactly what this slender protuberance turns out to be, but suffice to say that it is of animal rather than vegetable origin. And the act of bovine reproduction in which it plays a starring role is subsequently documented in eye-popping detail.

Kötting's film – a grippingly loose adaptation of La Terre, Emile Zola's gruelling 19th-century study of rural hardship – has plenty more shocks in store. A screening-room full of critics, who spend their working lives floating serenely through the grisliest effluvia of Hollywood's twisted psyche, is prompted at several points (especially when veteran actor Dudley Sutton lances a blister on his foot with a medical instrument that even the hardest-pressed NHS hospital would be unlikely to pass as fit for duty) to audible expressions of alarm.

Yet amid the mud and the semen and the piles of rotting animal innards which are this extraordinarily elemental film's stock in trade, there are flashes not only of mordant wit but also the kind of raw, lyrical beauty which only an understanding of mother nature's capacity for ugliness can bring you.

"It's meant to be a celebration of the landscape", explains Kötting, sitting nervily outside a Southwark pub with the film's unlikely co-writer, the laconic comedian Sean Lock. "But a celebration of everything in the landscape. It's not painted through rose-coloured testicles, it's done intuitively, realistically and grimly."

In Kötting's 1996 feature debut Gallivant, this maverick performance-artist turned film-maker confounded anyone who thought this country was too small to make a proper road-movie by circum-camper-van-driving the entire coastline of Britain – all six-and-a-half thousand miles of it – in the company of his seven-year-old daughter Eden (an engaging soul whose appetite for life seems undiminished by the rare brain disorder which obliges her to communicate by sign language) and 85-year-old grandmother Gladys. Among numerous trenchant observations, the latter individual at one point feelingly describes her grandson as being "daft as they make 'em".

Lock's laconic presence certainly acts as a calming foil to Kötting's unnerving physical intensity. "There's only so much of me you can take in one evening," the latter admits, before cheerfully proclaiming himself "a right carry-on when it comes to body scarification and things like that" ("You like branding yourself, don't you?" says Lock fondly). Long-time friends, the pair had previously collaborated on 1993's Smart Alek, a compellingly nasty short film about a family going on holiday in an Austin Allegro, whose violent demise at the hands of a gang of ruffians (including Lock and fellow cerebral stand-up Simon "League Against Tedium" Munnery) comes as a blessed relief from the tyranny of domestic life.

So how did the comedian feel when he first saw a finished version of This Filthy Earth? (Having collaborated closely on the screenplay throughout a tortuous three-and-a-half-year production process, Kötting barred him from the set, supposedly for his own physical and emotional safety.)

"There were areas I was quite surprised by," Lock admits with a wry smile. "It's a bit like after an operation, when the bandages are taken off. My initial reaction was [he screams] 'Aah! Aah! What have you done to my hands... '"

"But then you look at the blisters and the scars and the damage," interjects Kötting, the grinning cinematic sawbones, "and you think 'I'll learn to live with it'."

Kötting seems to enjoy making extreme demands on all of his collaborators. Does he see working with actors as a chance to use other people's bodies as canvases? "In a way, yes," he replies calmly. "When I was casting Francine and Kath [the two sisters at the story's centre], I put it to both the actresses that they would be required to have full penetrative sex with Buto [the human ploughshare who divides them, played with rough-hewn priapic intensity by Shane Attwool], possibly even with the bull."

He grimaces: "Of course it didn't turn out that way in the end, but what mattered was the fact that they didn't baulk at the idea. For me it was a question of seeing how far people were willing to go, and they all went round the houses and came back."

From 87-year-old Ina Clough (buried up to her neck in mud at four o'clock in the morning) to French incomer Xavier Tchili (chained to a wheel) to the radiantly embattled female lead Rebecca Palmer (who boldly – and very much against the advice of health and safety experts – leaps in to play a crucial facilitating role in the interaction between an amorous bull and its mate), Kötting's cast members rise to the challenges he set them with performances of rare physical and emotional commitment.

As pungent an experience as This Filthy Earth is, it makes another impact which is, if anything, even more visceral. For all the film's apparently timeless setting – in an isolated rural community ruled by suspicion and the struggle to survive – the apocalyptic events which followed last autumn's six-week shoot in remote locations in Yorkshire and Cumbria have lent it an eerily prophetic look. Floods, foot and mouth, the persecution of asylum seekers, even the awful destructive impact of religious extremism: all are prefigured in the sombrely unfolding narrative with such accuracy that had the film been made two years ago, as was originally intended, Kötting and Lock might now be being burnt as witches.

Having been obliged to complete his delayed film on an aesthetically appropriate shoestring after personnel changes at FilmFour threatened its very survival, Kötting doesn't regret the loss of the larger budget and big-name actors (Daniel Auteuil in the role of the immigrant for example) initially attached to the project. "My inadequacies as a film-maker would have been writ large within two days of shooting," he admits cheerfully. "I would have gone into crisis and possibly wouldn't be here today."

"And hopefully," Lock chimes in, "people might find it inspiring that somebody's had the balls to do something which doesn't have that yearning to be huge."

The way This Filthy Earth uses limited material resources as a stepping stone to creative audacity is one of the most exemplary of the many exemplary things about it. By reconnecting us with the gloriously malodourous heritage of The Wicker Man, Jabberwocky and Vivian Stanshall's Sir Henry at Rawlinson End, Kötting and Lock have thrown down a gauntlet that it would be great to see British cinema pick up.

'This Filthy Earth', 15, opens 01 November 2001