what the victorians did for us; With AS Byatt's novel Possession, the

The movie Possession gives you two love stories for the price of one, but - as if that wasn't enough - there's yet another long- standing relationship behind the scenes. Director Neil LaBute and actor Aaron Eckhart have a collaborative history which stretches back to their years studying theatre together at Brigham Young University in Utah. In fact, Eckhart has featured in all of LaBute's films to date.

But though he is a gifted, chameleonic actor, Eckhart isn't exactly marquee-name material. So when it came to sprinkling a little stardust over LaBute's adaptation of AS Byatt's Booker Prize-winning novel Possession, a touch of glamour was needed. And if you're looking for an A-list actress to play a brittle Englishwoman, there's really only one name on the list: Gwyneth Paltrow.

"It was the thing that made the movie," admits LaBute, on a flying visit to London from the Deauville Film Festival in France. "Gwyneth was the first person cast, and we built it around her. Aaron was a much harder sell. The studio liked his work but had never seen him as a romantic lead. The closest he's come would be playing the boyfriend in Erin Brockovich. He had to go in there and sell himself."

Eckhart won the role, however; starring with Paltrow as two modern- day literary scholars who slowly fall for each other whilst piecing together an illicit affair between the two Victorian authors they've each dedicated their lives to studying.

Byatt's dense, lyrical novel represented rich raw material, but condensing 500 pages into a film proved tricky, not least because much of the book is given over to the Victorian correspondence and poetry of fictional poets Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte - a startling piece of authorial ventriloquism on Byatt's part.

"She was very generous about understanding the process of how much telescoping there would be," says LaBute. "She knew that very little of the poetry itself would make it to the screen, and she knew that not just incident but characters themselves would be lost."

The recent past is littered with book-to-screen adaptations which have misfired; for every Bridget Jones's Diary, there's been a Captain Corelli's Mandolin. The difficulty appears to be in striking a balance between faithfulness and economy. For fans of Byatt's book, the biggest wrench will undoubtedly concern the character of Roland. In the novel, he's a reticent English dormouse of a scholar, circling around an equally shy Maud as they slowly fall for each other. In the movie, he's transformed into an impulsive, studly Yank; a bit like Indiana Jones raiding the lost literary archive.

"We made him more outgoing," chuckles LaBute, "jumping from conclusion to conclusion rather than going through things step-by- step like Maud does. I wanted to have a friction that would create some romantic or dramatic heat. So I just made them as opposed as possible. Whatever it would take to get them into bed, basically."

Changing Roland's character helps keep things moving - and he was a bit of a drip in the book - but the other controversial change involves the (admittedly relatively small) role of Professor Blackadder. He was Scottish in the novel, but he's Irish in the film. For God's sake, why?

"When you're casting, you're creating a family of sorts," explains LaBute, humbly. "You're looking at faces and how they'll work with each other and I really just wanted the best person for the job. I knew I'd gone into casting in a mishmash way, with an American actress playing an Englishwoman, changing Roland into an American and so on, so I wasn't too concerned. Ian McDiarmid would have been great, but I'd seen Tom Hickey at the Royal Court and thought: that's the guy."

The action in the film cuts between the two sets of lovers. Maud and Roland embark on a detective quest in the present-day, while the doomed love affair between Hearst (Jeremy Northam) and Christabel (Jennifer Ehle) is told in luminous flashback. In an ironic twist, the liberated modern couple seem awkward and anxious around each other, while the supposedly repressed Victorians pursue their passion with dangerous enthusiasm. Their stories are interconnecting by some simply but startling transitions; in some clever scenes, they almost appear to be sharing the same air.

But though the book is a rich evocation of Victorian literature, it's not really that funny. In his adaptation, LaBute has upped the joke content.

"It was a way to both leaven the material but also to balance it," he says. "In the modern love story, if you didn't think it was as passionate or as rife with melodrama as the Victorian couple's, at least there was humour. I'm not above using humour to soften an audience up before smacking 'em. But I don't smack 'em that much here, just occasionally turn on a dime to something quite serious."

The unashamed melodrama of Possession is a marked departure for LaBute, who made his name in the late 1990s as an independent film- maker and playwright unblinkingly examining the moral vacuum of modern society. His stark writing/directing debut In The Company Of Men saw two salarymen systematically destroy the life of a lowly, blind receptionist. It won the Film-maker's Trophy at Sundance in 1997, but also saw him labelled a misogynist. His brutal follow-up Your Friends And Neighbours - a bruising examination of the sexual relationships between six friends - drew more brickbats. Is Possession a move away from that?

"There's no winning," says the decidedly cuddly looking director. "You're either a misogynist or a misanthrope, or you just hate everybody. And then if you do a movie like this, you've gone soft."

His next project sees him return to the stage, directing his new play The Mercy Seat, starring Sigourney Weaver. Until now, all of LaBute's pieces have been set in an unspecified modern timeframe, but the events of The Mercy Seat take place on one specific day: September 12, 2001.

"I don't see it as a September 11 play," he says. "It's just a relationship piece that happens after that day, although those events do catalyse the action."

But his next movie is already in the can, a bare-bones film interpretation of his play The Shape Of Things. LaBute shot it in LA in just 19 days with the same cast that performed it in London last year - including Rachel Weisz and Gretchen Mol. But - tellingly - there's no sign of Eckhart on the cast list. Is this the end of a beautiful relationship?

"The film opens with a shot of a magazine," he chuckles, "so I found one where Aaron was on the cover. So we're still together, although he's started to be unfaithful to me by starring in other movies." He chuckles again. "But that's OK."

Possession is released on October 25. The Mercy Seat opens at the Acorn Theatre, New York on December 18

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