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"There's a bank robbery scene with a guard sitting on a toilet," Boyle explains. "But on the day of the shoot, the guy we hired to play the guard wouldn't take his trousers down. He said: 'I can't do that. I'm wearing my sacred Mormon underwear, which only members of the temple are allowed to see.' I thought he was trying to hide skinny legs or something, but it turned out to be absolutely true."

Diaz felt Boyle's pain. "I'm American, and it was a culture shock for me," she says. "But it was especially hard for those guys, with the strict no-alcohol rules in Utah. They are, after all, British."

There are script doctors and then there are script doctors. Wearing a medical smock, sitting in a waiting lounge at St. George's Hospital in south London, where he sometimes practices internal medicine, John Hodge definitely fits the latter category.

Literature, he points out, has a long tradition of medical men moonlighting as scribes. "Arthur Conan Doyle, Chekhov," he lists a few. Of course, none of those guys got nominated for a best-screenplay Oscar last year, but who's counting? Slightly built, a bit bookish, and so soft-spoken you practically need a stethoscope to hear him, Hodge is the shy, sensitive muse of the group. He's also the one most responsible for bringing them together in the first place.

"I'd wanted to write scripts since I was a teenager growing up in Scotland," he says. "So after I finished postgraduate exams [at the University of Edinburgh], I thought I'd take some time off to write and see what happened." What happened was Shallow Grave, a clever, creepy story about three roommates who find a dead body and--what else?--a suitcase full of money. At the time Hodge was writing the script, his sister, Grace, was working as an assistant editor for Andrew Macdonald, who was looking to produce his first feature. She arranged a meeting. "The most fortuitous introduction of my life," Macdonald calls it. Soon after, the well-connected producer (Macdonald's grandfather was Emeric Pressburger, codirector and coproducer of the 1948 Brit classic The Red Shoes) decided to lens Hodge's script.

The second most fortuitous introduction was with Boyle, who landed the job of directing Shallow Grave by promising Hodge and Macdonald he'd leave the script alone. "I just told them: 'It's the best script I have ever read in Britain. Hire me.' It was easy." The next teammate to be hired was McGregor, who'd been knocking around the London stage and acting in TV movies. And he's still grateful. "I don't ever want to not be involved in one of their films," he says.

Hodge began writing Life while Shallow Grave was still in production (it ultimately became a cult hit in the U.K., earning $8 million). "The first draft was set in Scotland," he recalls. "But the story got so extreme, it just seemed to say, Let's go to America." Before he went, though, he took a break from Life to adapt Trainspotting, Irvine Welsh's harrowing heroin tale, for the screen, a detour that led Hodge into a drug-addled world even bleaker than the industrial green halls of St. George's. Amazingly enough, none of his patients have ever made the Trainspotting connection--although he did meet an actor being treated in the emergency room who had seen Shallow Grave. "He didn't like it," the doctor recalls.


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