Forget Star Wars. This is the year of the teen movie. With the likes of She's All That and Cruel Intentions currently filling the multiplexes, and a slew of other teen-flicks such as 10 Things I Hate About You and Varsity Blues standing by to open once the Phantom Menace brouhaha has died down, adolescence is the hot theme, targeted squarely at the most enthusiastic movie-going demographic and unencumbered by the swollen salary demands of older, more powerful stars. Of course, what most of the current crop of teen-flicks have in common is their Americanness.
Virtual Sexuality, a fantasy-comedy with a cyber-twist set among a bunch of hormonally-tormented 17-year-olds, is unusual in that it's set not in southern California like She's All That or in New York's Upper East Side like Cruel Intentions, but in north London. It's clear, though, that the film-makers were looking more to Beverly Hills 90210 than to Grange Hill for their visual inspiration. This is a London where the kids play basketball instead of soccer, where the walls are festooned with New York-style graffiti, and where the sun seems to shine all the time.
"We deliberately set out to do that," agrees director Nick Hurran. "Not necessarily to make a non-British film, but we wanted an American-looking British picture, because America has defined the ways that movies look. There's a grammar that they've created: bright colours, attractive-looking people, aspirational clothes . . . We wanted to go for that, rather than a grungey-looking, underlit piece. We weren't imitating any particular movie, although obviously there's things you can see have influenced us - everything from Clueless to Weird Science. "When I first read the story, I thought it was so charming and so naive. It needed to look sunny, bright and sexy. It was originally conceived as being set in a university, but we wanted to set it and shoot it in Notting Hill, so we ended up filming at exactly the same time as Notting Hill, the film. We found ourselves following each other around all the time. But I was after the graffiti and the basketball courts that could say this might be any city. "We knew it probably wasn't going to be sunny in April in London, although we were actually pretty lucky with the sunshine, so we looked for ways around that. Usually, you can tell when a film comes on where it was made, but if you can get an audience to take all those things for granted, it's then easier for them just to get into the story."
The story itself revolves around that perennial concern of the modern teen movie: "doing it" for the first time. Laura Fraser plays 17-year-old Justine, intent on losing her virginity, but only to the right bloke; and not, therefore to nice-but-geeky Chas (Luke de Lacey). Those familiar with the genre will have a fair idea of the outcome, but Virtual Sexuality is unusual - especially for a British film - in that it goes for some "high-concept" fantasy-mongering along the way. Visiting a high-tech exhibition, Fraser creates her own virtual ideal man, Jake (Rupert Penry-Jones), only to find herself transposed by accident into PenryJones's body. Much of the film's comedy centres on the dilemma of a young woman trapped in a teenage boy's body, raging hormones and all.
"The unusual thing for a British film like this is the size of the concept - the whole body-switch thing," says producer Christopher Figg. "It's very much an American kind of idea, mainly because it's really expensive. Usually, there isn't really the money there to do that kind of thing. High-concept movies - blowing things up, car chases, special effects and all that stuff - are very rarely made here for that reason. It probably comes as well from the British tradition of screenwriting, that we limit ourselves because we know the budget isn't there, but I think we're starting to do these kinds of things now."
Unlike America, where TV shows like Dawson's Creek and Buffy the Vampire Slayer seem to provide an inexhaustible supply of photogenic stars-in-the-making for the teen movie industry, the British equivalents must find a cast from scratch, an experience which Figg admits was difficult. "For something that has such an unusual concept, you really have to believe in the actors or it will all seem very false. I wasn't convinced that 17-year-olds could carry the story, and was worried that we wouldn't believe it completely." Hence, all of the actors are in their early-to-mid-20s, which shows at times, it must be said.
"You almost have to cast them all at the same age," says Hurram. "Because if you cast some teenagers, and others in their early 20s, then you'd probably notice it. One of our problems in raising finance was that we couldn't cast a well-known name, because we couldn't have afforded it as an independent film. There was some talk of finding a pop star to play Jake, but we wanted a performance more than anything else.
"We don't really have those kind of TV dramas like the Americans. If you look at the cast of Cruel Intentions, they're all familiar to their target audience from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and those kinds of shows. The fantastic thing about Hollywood is that it's a huge, very impressive machine, and we can't compete with that."
Interestingly, despite being made in the UK, Virtual Sexuality is entirely financed from outside the country, with backing from America and France. Figg seems reluctant to criticise the way money is spent on films in the UK, but he does admit to wondering what audiences many of those films are made for. "It's more important to me that we get a good response from Smash Hits readers than that we win a Bafta. I've always felt that the 15-year-old audience is short-changed in terms of the films made for them, and always keeping an eye out for suitable stories."
In the publicity material for Virtual Sexuality, the central character is described (with some irony, admittedly) as "the world's last virgin", while there's some fairly explicit material about the sexual habits of some of the characters (the "bad girl" is nicknamed Hoover, and "gives the boys what they want . . . and then some").
Does Hurram acknowledge any validity to concerns that have been raised about the sexual obsessions of his teenaged protagonists? "Well, we had a lot of pressure to cut out the willies in the shower scenes and some of the other references. But, funnily enough, the pressure to do that came from studio executives in the UK, who had 13 or 14-year-old daughters themselves. So we sent them clippings of the kinds of magazines their daughters were probably reading, and they couldn't believe it!
"Without being preachy about it, this movie shows our leading girl demonstrating responsibility. If it encourages a debate between parents and children, then great, but we wanted to make something that was funny and unpretentious without being cynical, and I think it's a very reasonable and responsible film about not succumbing to peer pressure."
Virtual Sexuality goes on general release next Friday
