Footie fight club

Despite the accent, he freely admits to being "a middle-class boy, who happened to run amok on the Greenwich council estates". He says that Goodbye Charlie Bright was "much lighter than my actual teenage years. The crimes and the drugs I did were both far darker." So dark that he ended up on a section in the Maudsley, receiving electroshock treatment, and later in the Old Bailey for an assault on a police officer. But the system gave Love a break and he went into rehab, and hasn't relapsed since.

His life story reads like an astonishing picaresque adventure and includes a bizarre year spent modelling for Ralph Lauren in San Francisco. He didn't discover his passion for cinema until he was in his early twenties, when, prophetically enough, a chance viewing of Alan Clarke's 1988 made-for-TV film about organised football hooliganism, The Firm, ignited it: "It was about my world, people I recognised, and I thought, I can do that, I can tell a story like that." He began in the industry as a production runner in the late Eighties before going to film school in Bournemouth.

Love pays generous tribute to his mentors - in London he came under the wing of David Aukin and Sarah Gater at Film Four, who gave him a break producing one of their Short and Curlies series, 10-minute "mini features" shot on 35mm with biggish budgets. Love's was Skin, about a fascist skinhead who falls for a black girl. It was written by Sarah Kane, the brilliant young playwright who committed suicide in 1999. "She was very troubled," Love says, "and I suppose none of us could reach her. Strangely enough she ended up on the same ward at the Maudsley where I'd been." Skin was a success - "They still show it on cable every few months."

But it wasn't until Love wrote a script for a short, and the production company suggested that he was the only one who could direct it, that he got behind the camera. "It seemed like the most natural thing I'd ever done, after all, films are like battles - they're made in the preparation." Then when he moved up to Charlie Bright and a £2 million budget: "After I said 'action' I never looked back." Still, the film's commercial failure knocked Love, and rather than end up in a directorial treadmill he even did a couple of stints selling Christmas trees, as well as bits and pieces of script-doctoring.

Then production company Vertigo, which had the rights to The Football Factory, came to him desperate for a director. "I'd wanted to option the book myself 1998, but I couldn't afford it," he says. "I knew I was the man to do it, and John King knew it too." He insisted that he be allowed to handpick the cast and crew - as well as rewrite the script - and from his first film brought back Danny Dyer, Roland Manoukian, Frank Harper and Jamie Foreman, creating the beginnings of an ensemble company.

The relationship with Vertigo producers Alan Niblo and James Richardson also became very close and Love has now teamed up with them for future films. His next, The Business, is an allegorical take on Thatcherism, set against the British criminal presence on the Costa del Sol during the Eighties.

ACCORDING to the DIY philosophy of Vertigo and Love, cast and crew are paid a flat wage for the shoot, and begin to make money only when the film earns. In an unprecedented move, they are also handling distribution for The Football Factory.

"When I did Charlie Bright I was appalled by the way there were five producers creaming half a mil' off the front end before we'd even started shooting," Love says. "That and the money so-called stars are paid really knackers the British film industry."

With his thoughtful, yet testosteronefuelled approach to what he describes as "the powerful arena of male hierarchy", Nick Love is a film director who is all about knackers rather than knackering. The Football Factory may not be every vicar's cup of tea, but it's essential viewing, and its director is someone to watch.

When I ask him if - assuming the film lives up at the box office to the buzz it has already generated - he would consider the $20 million projects likely to be offered him by Hollywood, he thinks only for a couple of seconds before answering: "No. I'm lucky my life has taught me that money doesn't make me happy, so money won't have me."