the thrill of the purchase; Late Night Shopping is the new

WE'RE sitting in a dank room, decorated with plastic pot-plants, that smells faintly of ancient plimsolls. During the night, this is apparently one of the hottest spots in Berlin, where the gorgeous and sexually adventurous go to gyrate in glitter pants and bodypaint. But on this cold spring day it is just a smelly room - and the unorthodox location for my meeting with Saul Metzstein.

A Glaswegian who divides his time between here and London, Metzstein is fidgeting on a sticky vinyl banquette. He has a grin that makes him look like an Aardman cartoon character and a laugh that creases him in the middle and leaves him gasping for breath. And he's laughing rather a lot because yesterday his film Late Night Shopping premiered at the Berlin Film Festival to a riotous reception.

He's still slightly bemused. "The Germans are a way more expressive audience than the Brits. Last night it was amazing - I've never seen anything like it."

Fast forward to June and Metzstein is starting to get used to it, with Late Night Shopping now one of the most talked-about British films of the decade so far. This week Scottish audiences will finally see what the fuss is about when it opens in cinemas across the country.

Metzstein is no newcomer to the world of Scottish film. He's been around since the early 1990s, working as a runner on Shallow Grave, a location manager on Trainspotting and a programmer at the Edinburgh Film Festival before making a number of documentaries and short films. Late Night Shopping, his feature debut, is partially financed by Scottish Screen and shot in Scotland but - as with Shallow Grave before it - don't expect to recognise many of the locations. Metzstein was keen that the picture should have no great sense of place.

"From the very beginning we said it wasn't to look like Scotland," he explains. "British films tend to get very precise about geography and very precise about class, and they were two things we didn't want to specify. In one sense, the film is about people in the shapeless place that the world is now. Cities are all becoming very similar in a funny way."

Late Night Shopping is in part a reaction by Metzstein and writer Jack Lothian to current British cinema. "We watched some terrible British films and actually analysed what it was we shouldn't do. But we've watched too many now. We've got a conceptual festival planned running bad British films of the 1980s and 1990s."

The pair were also keen to avoid cinematic cliches. "You always have that tedious scene where the young people have a meal with their parents and their parents never understand them because the parents are middle-class and they're rebellious youths. I've seen that so many times," moans Metzstein. "And I'll tell you the other scene I hate: you go into a poor neighbourhood and there's three guys around an oil drum on fire. I've seen that so many times in British and American films, but never in real life. Ever."

The research seems to have paid off - Late Night Shopping is refreshingly cliche-free. A slow-burning comedy about a group of disaffected night workers and their struggles with life and love, it is also a perceptive snapshot of a generation with no real sense of identity or purpose, for whom youth culture is commodified and for whom making a statement involves buying the right T-shirt.

"Jack [Lothian] just turned 26 so it's much more his generation in that film than mine. I'm 30 - and yes, there is a profound difference. For example, when I was young I used to buy records - and then CDs came along, and the whole concept of reissues. And video became much more popular. Yet he's always been used to that world.

"Of course, my generation is already different from the ones who went before us - the punks, who were into the whole idea of rebellion. We don't have that anger. We are already a lot less politicised, and Jack is probably even less politicised. The characters in the film are totally unpoliticised - they have no concept of politics. They are totally in a vacuum, and I think that's very modern."

The film revolves around four acquaintances who meet at a local cafe to kill time during their night shifts. Sean (played by Luke de Woolfson) is a hospital porter concerned that his girlfriend may have moved out - but since she works days and he works nights, he has no way of knowing. Vincent (James Lance) is blessed with unshakeable self-belief and a God-given mission to get through as many women as possible. Mild-mannered Lenny (Enzo Cilenti) finds it impossible to approach girls because he is cursed with a compulsive urge to imagine every woman he meets in a pornographic video. (That, Metzstein confides, is a joke with just half the population in the know. "All men have got that. That's the key to it.") Finally there is the wonderfully irascible Jody (rising star Kate Ashfield) who sits spikily in judgement on her hapless friends.

The film's title has proved to be a source of confusion - though remember there's not much trainspotting in Trainspotting. "The name came straight away to Jack," says Metzstein. "I think it's a faintly oblique reference to the more disconnected world - like shops being open late and the social things getting fractured. The other thing is that they are also shopping for love in their own sad little world. I didn't think that it mattered that we didn't have a specifically relevant title."

Metzstein discovered his writer when Lothian was babysitting for a mutual friend - and writing a novel on the friend's computer. Impressed by the dialogue, Metzstein encouraged him to start writing film scripts, and the pair have developed a healthy working relationship. "Jack can write almost in real time," enthuses Metzstein. "I've seen him write 10-minute film scripts in 10 minutes."

But although Lothian is the writer, the script was developed specifically to cater for Metzstein's sensibility and sense of humour. "He writes it, I just edit it to death. I also force him to do things - he writes what I like. It's all tailored to me anyway, it's not just me dealing with someone else's work."

One of the film's funniest jokes is a running gag involving a car radio stuck on a 1980s soft rock revival station. "It's a very expensive joke. We turned the radio on and it cost the producer #10,000 in licensing fees," says Metzstein, before going on to discuss (at length) the merits of power ballads. "I think Foreigner's I Want To Know What Love Is is supreme. It's the great power ballad of all time. And a lot of people like it secretly."

Metzstein extensively researched his soundtrack using two soft rock compilation albums. "There was one I didn't get that was very expensive: Broken Wings by Mister Mister," he says a little regretfully. "I would have loved to have Mister Mister. But we got Kayleigh by Marillion. I think that was a huge hit in Germany, because that got a massive reaction. They applauded because they knew they loved it really. And I think that was actually quite cheap."

One of the most noticeable things about Metzstein in conversation is that he doesn't come across as a director who takes all the credit for his success. He never refers to the film as "mine", always "ours" - and in addition to his praise of Lothian he also glowingly mentions his producer Angus Lamont, his editor Justine Wright and his director of photography Brian Tufano - particularly the latter.

"If there's one guy who's made hit films in Britain, it's him. He shot Shallow Grave and Trainspotting and he did Billy Elliot. He's 60 and he's dictated what modern British films look like in a way." Metzstein confides that Tufano even inserted a playful reference to one of his previous films in one scene of Late Night Shopping which involves milk shakes. "They're a homage to Trainspotting. Brian said he wanted to pay homage to himself," he laughs.

The core team behind Late Night Shopping recently announced that they would be reuniting for another project, a film about fans of Northern Soul music in Blackpool, called simply Northern Soul. So will they be paying homage to themselves with a reference to Late Night Shopping? Metzstein grins his huge Wallace And Gromit grin. "We'll just recycle all the lines."

Late Night Shopping is released on Friday

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