Patron Saint

In A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, Frank - a fabulously bitchy small-time canine exercise tycoon, who for six bucks will walk your dog for half an hour, "or till it craps" - is hooked on Job, "you know, from the bible?" Shorthand for the suffering of the righteous, and often at the heart of the "why-do-bad-things-happen-to-good-people?" debate, the Book of Job isn't exactly a laugh-a-minute, but its central message has significant parallels to the troubled birth of the film itself.

"It's never happened to me on a film before; we lost our funding twice", explains Trudie Styler, shaking her head. "To lose everything and then to turn away 35 people who'd all committed to the time, that was really tough." Actress, director, rainforest-defender, UNICEF ambassador and, for the past 14 years, Mrs Sting, Styler is today wearing her (metaphorical, but probably still chic) producer's hat. Said hat, you can't help but assume, has become considerably more careworn over the past five years, having accompanied Styler to the battleground of true indie filmmaking: "When you make a movie of this size, you're in the trenches." With a miniscule budget of $2.5 million (compare that to Little Miss Sunshine's $11 million), A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints has been a hard won victory.

Based loosely on the 2001 memoir of first time writer/director Dito Montiel, A Guide to Recognising Your Saints is similarly battle ready - an account of the young Dito's education at, and graduation from, the school of hard knocks in 1980s Queens. Played as a teenager by rising star Shia LaBeouf and as an adult by Robert Downey Jr, the film is, however, only a brief snapshot of both Montiel's life, and of the memoir itself. "It's only almost a few chapters," says Styler, "The bit we took from the book is him as an adult, looking back at those formative years. A sort of coming of age tale."

An authentically autobiographical movie would, in truth, have taken considerably longer to film, and cost countless millions more in royalty fees. Montiel's biography crams in several lifetimes' worth of experience, reading like a who's who of the '80s New York in-crowd. As founder and lead singer of underground punk outfit Gutterboy, Calvin Klein underwear model shot by Bruce Weber, and sometime Warhol entourage member - hanging out at Factory with beat poet Allen Ginsberg, Bowie publicist/glam rock uber-babe Cherry Vanilla, and Liza-with-a-Z Minnelli - Montiel is humbly summed up by Styler as "a Renaissance man, really."

A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints (the book) is a set of vignettes, a payment of respects to the key figures in Montiel's development - his "recognized saints" that guided him through. In light of this, the extraordinary run of coincidences that punctuates the making of the movie begins to look a bit like another divine hand on Montiel's shoulder. Having written his book and kicked around the idea of a correlating film, by chance Dito Montiel meets Robert Downey Jr in 2001, through his boss at the editing suites where he works. Downey Jr. takes the project to friend Trudie Styler - reportedly the only Hollywood producer he and Dito trusted with their baby - whose rather noted husband was in a small band called The Police, whose first gigs were supporting Dito's mate Cherry Vanilla. Spooky, eh? Styler nods, "We all somehow linked up, way back in the day."

After a couple of years in production purgatory, and two false starts in the funding department, the third time was certainly the charm for the Saints project. Call it more luck, fate, or divine providence, but in a logistical miracle, the stars literally began to align. "It sort of seemed like, for the first time, the whole thing came right," remembers Styler. "Diane Wiest, who was always our first choice for Dito's mother, who all the other times was never available, she was free, and we said 'OK, this bodes well.' Chazz Palminteri likewise: he actually put back a film of his own in order to star as Monty, Dito's father. And then Rosario Dawson got the script, and out of the blue we got a call. We thought that she'd pass, but she said, 'Hey, when do we start? I'm in!'"

Enter home-grown talent Martin Compston. Still only 22, but with an awards cabinet already boasting a BIFA (British Independent Film Award) and a BAFTA, Compston is, as Styler puts it "a pretty seasoned guy when it comes to being in front of a camera." The two first met in 2002 at the BIFAs, Styler serving on the jury that awarded Compston the Most Promising Newcomer gong for Sweet Sixteen, a performance that "haunted" her. So much so, she lifted the phone when casting Dito's friend Mike O'Shea. "Trudie's taken me through this whole thing, I owe a lot to her," says Compston, "I was coming to the end of Monarch of the Glen and, as all actors do, I was thinking 'I'm never going to work again,' and then I got the call from Trudie."

Twenty-four days of shooting and four weeks of editing later, with Styler administering cheerleading and tough love in equal measure throughout - "we locked horns, quite a bit, Dito and me, in a professional way" - her unflinching support came good in 2006, at the Sundance Film Festival. "We took almost a wet print to Sundance, and won the Director's prize, and for the first time they gave an Ensemble Cast Award to our cast." Going on to win the Jury Prize at the 2006 Venice Film Festival, as well as unprecedented critical attention for its young stars (Channing Tatum, in particular, earning comparisons to a Streetcar-era Brando), this kind of professional kudos, to Trudie "just puts a light around the film." Heavenly or otherwise, the aforementioned light looks like burning for some time to come.

A record of acknowledgments, Dito Montiel's original memoir is a bunch of thank you notes to those who made a difference - from Ginsberg and Weber, to authoritarian priest Father Angelo, to Frank, the Job-engrossed dog-walker. Having picked up, fought for, stuck with, and finally produced, A Guide To Recognising Your Saints the movie, "locking horns" and "working all the hours God sent" you can't help wondering whether, if the book gets a reprint, Montiel might add the name Trudie Styler to his list.