Death becomes him

T he scene is a grand Italianate villa in London's Notting Hill. In the library, two comedians (Eddie Izzard and Keith Allen) are pacing across floorboards trying to tear the soul from one another. Izzard is destined to fly to his death from the library window. This impassioned scene took place earlier this week amid the winter snow watched impassively by Damien Hirst and a gang of young men and women clad in T-shirts, jeans and buckled boots.

What on earth was going on? Damien Hirst was in the middle of making his first film, that's what.

Only last week, Hirst was on stage at the Tate Gallery collecting the prestigious Turner prize. Not yet 30, Hirst has become Britain's most famous (or infamous) artist. He and his cases of pickled animals regularly appear in the columns of the tabloid press. They also appear in such fashionable and institutions as the Saatchi Collection and the Tate Gallery. But can a young iconoclast who has made his name sawing dead cows in half cut a film?

Back in Notting Hill, Eddie Izzard and Keith Allen, both known for uncompromising comedy (but increasingly as serious actors), were engaging not in professional rivalry, but enacting a two-minute 15-second scene from Is Mr Death In?, Hirst's 20-minute "short" commissioned by the Hayward Gallery and the British Film Institute (BFI). The feature is due to be shown in the Hayward's exhibition Spellbound: Art and Film which opens on 22 February next year, 100 years to the day that the first film was shown to the British public.

Hirst is one of several artists (including Peter Greenaway, Ridley Scott, Paula Rego and Douglas Gordon) invited to participate in the Hayward show. The choice of Hirst - famous, controversial, unpredictable - is predictable, but not without risk. For, aside from this month's promotional video for Blur's single "Country House", Hirst has no movie-making experience. What guarantee is there that this canny shark pickler can make good use of celluloid?

What does the film promise? First and foremost an anagram that spells out the name of the death-obsessed artist. Second, a shooting schedule that spells Damien Hirst, viz: a list of props for the first of five day's filming that begins with "Vomit". The first location is the interior of a Gents'. That's our Damien.

But, while Is Mr Death In? has more than its fair share of deaths, disembodied eyeballs, children bayoneting teddy-bears and angst-ridden men smashing lovingly assembled Airfix kits, it also features a gutsy script and equally visceral performances from the cast composed almost entirely of the artist's mates - Izzard, Allen and Trevor Peacock (another Comic Strip veteran).

The producer is Nira Park,another friend of Hirst. Further down the cast list is Katrine Boorman, daughter of the film director John Boorman and current paramour of one Danny Moynihan, art dealer turned musician, and pal of Hirst. ("I believe in nepotism," trilled Boorman to a newspaper diarist this week, "especially if you've got a well-known father. If you can't use your own family, who can you use?"). Hirst's girlfriend, Maia Norman, and his new-born baby, Connor, also appear.

But any suspicion that this is a bunch of luvvies day-tripping to the art world and arty-smarties toying with cinema is dispelled when you watch Hirst at work. Back in Notting Hill, he is a model of beady efficiency. Sitting on the floor among a tangle of cables and film technicians, the artist stares at a small black-and-white Sony video monitor that shows him exactly what his Hayward audience will see come February.

Hirst's concentration, matter-of-factness and bluff good humour are impressive. You might expect the much-hyped creator of all those sawn, pickled and boxed animals to act the prima donna. But, he doesn't. A slight, scruffy figure in torn white T-shirt, grubby black jeans, trainers, unkempt hair, day-old stubble and trainers, Hirst says what he wants in as few words as possible, gives credit where credit is due and shows a commonsensical deference to the advice given by his crew.

The day's exchanges are almost entirely restricted to matter-of-fact suggestions for camera angles, minute amendments to the script, carried out to the assistant director's "Is that alright for you, Damien?" and Hirst's "very good" as each shot is given the final nod. There is no chat (Hirst has no intention of being interviewed; he is in a hurry). There is no smart talk and few jokes because, on a sub-zero December day, time sprints faster than Linford Christie.

Unlike the making of an artwork, no matter how fantastical, the making of a film requires the talents of a large number of disparate people. The director can only ever be first among equals. This is clear in the Notting Hill library. The workmanlike atmosphere could hardly be more different from the hot-house torpor of art galleries and private views.

Hirst has added little to the ready-made set provided by the Notting Hill house, owned by a British banker and his American art collector wife, whose expensive interior was decorated by the famous Milanese architect Ettorre Sottsass. Contemporary art, furniture and art books abound. Hirst has added at least one artwork of his own, a "phrenology" head encased in a motorcycle crash helmet, the helmet labelled with the same cranial details as those etched into the ceramic bonce.

The making of Is Mr Death In? transforms this aesthetic room into a prosaic factory, the atmosphere laced with smoke from a chimney of Marlboro Lights. Hirst bites his nails and scratches his nose between takes. Film takes so very long, and sometimes even the director seems redundant as scenes are enacted and recorded around him. And, anathema to contemporary artists, film requires compromise.

So, here is Izzard sat at a desk with a metronome ticking away on top of it. Hirst likes this, but the sound mixer (Howie Nicol) isn't happy. So the assistant director (Ben Hughes) proposes one take with the insistent ticking of the metronome and one without. A small episode in the history of film-making, but a big step, presumably, for an artist unused to compromise.

Hirst is notably willing to give his actor chums their head. As a second scene with Izzard, playing a psychiatrist and Allen playing Marcus, the psychotic lead, goes through retakes, the actors instinctively turn up the emotional volume.

So, Allen's line as he pushes Izzard back on to a Le Corbusier chaise- longue rises from a sotto voce "Intellect has fuck all to do with power. Violence is power", to a spitting crescendo, where "Violence is power" shoots across the set like a shell from an 88mm anti-tank gun.

"Like it. Very good," says Hirst impassively, but clearly impressed as his script is lifted from words on a page to drama.

He likes the idea, too, of Izzard clambering across a desktop decorated with Surrealist icons (fur cup and saucer, smoothing-iron with spikes etc). In fact he likes this so much he finally gets off the floor to enact Izzard's part.

"But, he'll break the desk lamp and damage the iron," admonishes Ben Hughes. Hirst takes a second look. "Damage the iron? I think the iron's gonna damage Eddie's foot." Funny to see Hirst worrying about safety; if I hadn't been sworn to a vow of film-set silence, I would have liked to say, "I thought art was meant to be dangerous."

The Wednesday shoot draws to a close when the indefatigable Izzard has to leave to appear that evening in his West End show.

Mission accomplished: Mr Death is in the can, or at least a good five minutes of him.

So, what's it all about? That would be telling and spoil the surprise, but Hirst's obsession with death and dying haunts his first film, as do images of falling (Eddie Izzard being pushed out of the Notting Hill window) and flying (Keith Allen powering his way into the infinite void in a Spitfire).

What I saw of Is Mr Death In? was well crafted and vital. That other people think so too is confirmed by the fact that Hirst has been asked to make a 90-minute film, God's Games (starring Dennis Hopper), for Channel 4 next year. What next for the the world's most famous shark-pickler - Hollywood and Jaws Four?

Spellbound: Art and Film, Hayward Gallery, London, SE1 22 Feb-6 May 1996