British director Michael Radford let the actors decide the subject majtter for his latest movie. They opted for the seedy world of stripping, he tells Steve Pratt.

GIVEN the choice, it's strange that actresses should decide to make a movie about strippers. Aren't they forever moaning about being exploited and made to take off their clothes on camera?

But when British director Michael Radford - whose past credits include White Mischief, Il Postino and 1984 with Richard Burton - decided to make an improvised film, that's exactly the subject his cast opted for. The result is Dancing At The Blue Iguana, which chronicles the lives of Los Angeles strippers.

"I made a film about strippers because that's what the actors wanted to do," says Radford. "I'm not someone who goes to strip clubs. I hate them and don't see the point of them. Once we decided, though, it was useful for an improvised movie because it's a closed environment and a pretty dark side of life. It's more depressing than we show it. What I wanted to show was how the strippers created a community."

He was surprised by famous actresses who arrived at auditions. "I interviewed about 150 actors. Every day a small group of them would arrive in in character and we'd do sketch improvisation. I played a documentary film-maker and filmed them as they played out little scenes," he says. "I was looking for a bunch of actors who had a knack for this kind of thing, and I was also looking for a mix of people - and all these famous actors turned up, which I wasn't expecting at all."

Among them were Splash star Daryl Hannah, whose documentary about the film, Strip Notes, is on C4 tomorrow, and Oscar nominee Jennifer Tilly, whose films include Bullets Over Broadway, Liar Liar and Bride Of Chucky.

Tilly, in Newcastle to talk about the film, says the cast spent their spare time hanging out in strip clubs. She was more of an observer than participant. "I'd go to the clubs and we all had strip mentors teaching us to dance in different styles. When you see the movie everyone is doing a lot of fancy movies and spinning around," she recalls.

"I went to the strip clubs and, number one, I'm lazy, and number two, didn't enjoy being there very long. But I noticed that only one out of ten had good pole work. The rest pose, strut around and harass the customers. I decided my character Jo was the bad stripper who harassed the customers. So I didn't have to spend as much time at the strip joints as the others.

"There were times we would be practising in the clubs when they were open. It was very interesting. We'd be on one stage, fully dressed, crawling around on the floor, learning stripper moves. On the other stage would be a totally naked girl, bumping and grinding, and all the men were watching us because they were wondering when our clothes were going to come off. I guess that had more mystery than someone who is totally naked and open to the world.

"Once, I was stripping at this club and mastered one move - I would climb up the pole and then fall off. Someone felt sorry for me, and threw me a dollar bill on the stage. I was very excited because we weren't getting paid much."

What appealed about the film was the say the performers had in shaping the characters and story. "Usually on movies, you do a lot of improvisation, think of better lines, funnier lines, and then the director says, don't do that, don't say that. So the idea of creating a character from scratch was very interesting," says Tilly.

"You have to trust the director because Michael did sit us down and say, 'everybody has to be naked'. He wanted to make a documentary-style film about strippers and didn't want fake nudity. A lot of us had to sit down and examine whether we wanted everything hanging out - and we decided we did."

She admits that, spending so much time in strip clubs, the lines between being actors and being strippers became blurred. "Some of us - not myself - would get up and actually strip in these clubs," she says. "We were hanging out on Hollywood Boulevard, shopping where the strippers shopped. Some of us were making money stripping. I'm not saying who. It was very hard after the movie was over to shake off the character. Actually Sheila Kelley installed a stripper pole in her house and is teaching stripping to housewives."

l Dancing At The Blue Iguana (18) is now showing in cinemas. Strip Notes, Daryl Hannah's documentary about the making of the film, is on C4 on Sunday at 12.10am