His view was that with this film, finally, maybe, he could be listened to.”Behi was eventually summoned to meet the movie star at his home in Mulholland Drive, Los Angeles, in the spring of 2004. His account of his lengthy audience with the movie star can’t help but rekindle memories of those grimly comic scenes at the end of Apocalypse Now when Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) finally comes face to face with the obese, bald, frog-eyed Kurtz (Brando) deep in the jungle Brando’s bitterness and sadness were palpable. Brando was already talking about casting: he was keen to approach Johnny Depp, Jack Nicholson and Sean Penn. Quickly, the project began to build momentum.”He [Brando] said that he had tried to deliver messages to America many times on the plight of the Indians and what was happening in the Israeli-Palestine conflict and felt that he had never been listened to. However, in February 2004, out of the blue, Symes received a series of urgent personal phone calls from Brando, who was clearly eager to do the movie.”One got the impression that, for whatever reason, Brando had adopted this as something to keep him busy, to occupy his mind,” recalls Symes. Through Cowan’s connections, Behi managed to find a telephone number for the Hollywood producer Mike Medavoy.

In late 2003, Behi sent Medavoy the treatment, only to be told that, unless there was an offer of $5m up front, there was no point in Medavoy even showing the script to Brando.At that point, the trail seemed to run dry. “It was a ridiculous amount of money and he [the lawyer] couldn’t even guarantee that Brando would accept [to read the script],” recalls Ronaldo Mourao, an associate producer on the film.The British publicist Phil Symes had worked with Behi on The Magic Box and agreed to help Behi in his bid to reach Brando. Symes’ former business partner Warren Cowan had represented Elizabeth Taylor for many years. A venture that began in a spirit of idealism soon became derailed by greed, illness and misunderstandings.Behi had written a treatment about the misadventures of a young Tunisian in the US and was determined to get Brando to read it. His initial attempts to approach the legendary movie star got him nowhere.

He met a lawyer who promised him an introduction to Brando, but at a price – $110,000. In hindsight, the spat over Reeves seems like small beer by comparison with the problems that have dogged Behi’s latest project.
The Magic Box screened on the festival circuit and then disappeared from sight. The next time Behi emerged in the public eye was at the Cannes Film Festival in 2004, when he announced that he was writing and directing Brando and Brando, about a young man from Tunisia obsessed by US culture in general and by Marlon Brando in particular.What made the world’s media pick up on the project was the startling revelation that Brando had agreed to appear in the movie – as himself.The story of how Behi and Brando came together in the first place is fascinating but also a little dispiriting. One of the centrepieces of the film was a depiction of the real-life riot provoked by a Hollywood film company that came to town in 1961 to shoot a new version of The Thief Of Bagdad with musclebound star Steve Reeves. The local Muslim population was so outraged that the movie had to be abandoned. His most recent feature, The Magic Box (2002), was inspired by his childhood as a movie lover, growing up in a Muslim country.

His strict religious father deplored his passion for cinema, but the young Behi frequently played truant from school to sneak off to screenings of old Federico Fellini, Marcel Carn?nd Marlon Brando movies. I play the girl and she gets tortured and, eventually, murdered.”‘Hard Candy’ opens today. Ridha Behi is a quietly spoken, middle-aged Tunisian film-maker. “It’s very dark and so much what I needed after X-Men.”And then what? A rom-com, perhaps, or a Herbie? “Er, no. I’m just about to start filming An American Crime in LA with Catherine Keener. It’s based on a true story from 1965 from Indiana, about a girl who was left to stay with this woman and her eight children while her parents went off travelling to a carnival. “It opens with a girl naked in the back of a bus, under a shower curtain, explaining, in a non-linear way, how she got there,” she says.

“My ambition is definitely not to be a star,” says Page, whose heroines – Kate Winslet and Samantha Morton – suggest the sort of career she’s more interested in. “Not that I make any assumptions about Hollywood – I’ll do Hollywood; I want to do all sorts of work.”Her next film, The Tracey Fragments, continues Page’s taste for riskier themes. “When I was 12, I realised I was very uncomfortable having my parents on set,” explains Page. “So I told them that, and they understood.”In the meantime, her intelligent performance in Hard Candy was noticed by the right people. “I was walking through the park one day and got a call that Bryan Singer was interested in me for an X-Men movie,” she says. How those sexualised LA starlets must have been gnashing their perfect little teeth as Page won the part of the leather-clad superhero Kitty Pryde in X-Men: the Last Stand.