SO YOU WANNA BE A FILM DIRECTOR...?

Dateline: 15 September, 2001.

He's a touch flat-footed, looks like he's just crawled out of a hedge backwards and sports the sort of characterful, gap-toothed grin that you'd expect to find on any self-respecting geek.

Even when you see him dolled up in a penguin suit, Justin Edgar still looks a bit dishevelled.

But there's so much more to him than meets the casual eye.

Justin left school in Sutton Coldfield with no 'O' Levels yet he's got a First Class degree.

And, as the young cast on his debut £1.4 million, Birmingham-made comedy Large will tell you, he's also an unnervingly calm inspiration to be around in the maelstrom world of film production.

If celluloid was an oxygen-carrying liquid it would be found in 30-year-old Justin's veins.

One reason that he dropped out of Plantsbrook School is that he used to bunk off lessons to watch movies at the nearby Sutton Odeon.

But, after a string of dead-end jobs, the young Martin Scorsese fan realised that if he ever wanted to realise his ambition of making a film, he'd have to do something about it.

His first step-up came in 1991-93 when he joined a media course at Sutton College in the days when basic equipment suddenly began to enable ordinary people to shoot what they could see.

'It was really, really bog standard stuff and the edit suite was simply two VHS machines joined together,' grins Justin.

'But I used to stay there until last thing at night until the caretaker came to kick me out.

'I really got into editing and started to take it seriously. From that, I got on to my film degree at Portsmouth University.'

It was also where he met Large co-writer Mike Dent from Tamworth, and the secret of their success is now simply defined thus: 'It takes a lot of commitment and tenacity so that you are in the right place when the breaks arrive'.

That's useful advice when you consider that this youngest of three sons was brought up from the age of three by his mum after his parents' marriage broke down.

'Maybe that also gives you a subconscious will to do well,' he adds.

Like the great Steven Spielberg, Justin began small. His first film, Larging It, was just ten minutes long and he's been working his way up to bigger and better things ever since.

His second short was a comedy about two Birmingham shop assistants working in an underwear shop. Dirty Phonecalls won the BBC Drama Award at the city's 1998 Film and Television Festival.

Day-glo pink

At the gala dinner he met Acid House producer Alex Usborne, charmed him with his demeanour and then gave him a script for Large wrapped in his trademark day-glo pink cover.

'This is always my tactic,' says Justin. 'I know that people will either have to read the script or throw it away.'

More recently he has been making corporate videos for disabled groups.

After also making short programmes for Channel 4, like the ones at 7.55pm which give young directors the chance to experiment, Justin suddenly found himself in charge of his own million-pound Film Four movie when Large began shooting in Spring last year.

Like Scorsese and Stanley Kubrick, Justin wants to make rather different films each time. He quotes the late genius behind 2001: A Space Odyssey when he says: 'I might not know what I want to make, but I know what I don't.

'And I don't want to make another teenage comedy after Large.'

Love affair with film

THE first film Justin ever went to see was The Man With The Golden Gun.

'I just loved the whole experience,' he says. 'The atmosphere, the curtains, the choc ices. . . and I've never been really interested in television since.

'I then did really badly at school, got kicked out of the sixth form and went to work for a few years.

'Because I had no academic background it was difficult to get into university, but I made it and learned about things like the French new wave, which was really good experience because it broadened my view of cinema.'

Though he admits he'd love to visit the US for the first time, you only have to look at battered-Golf-driving Justin to realise that he's not a material person.

It's clear that the job will always come first, but, since his hair looks like a 1970s' footballer gone wrong, I wonder what he actually asks for when he goes into the barber's.

'Oh, my girlfriend just cuts the ends off,' he laughs. 'She used to be a teacher at Queensbridge in Kings Heath before she moved down to London with me.'