TWO weeks after the release of the space opera Sunshine, and a week before the release of the zombie sequel 28 Weeks Later, Andrew Macdonald is thinking about the future. And what he thinks is that the future wears a sheepskin coat. Macdonald, and director Nick Love (The Business and The Football Factory), are planning a remake of The Sweeney, the 1970s drama in which public confidence in the quiet decency of the police was obliterated by the squeal of a Ford Granada's tyres, Denis Waterman's coitus being interrupted, and John Thaw greeting villains with derisive lines such as "get yer trousers on, you're nicked.
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Macdonald has a tendency to emphasise the slog of filmmaking, perhaps because it is such a risky and illogical business, in which the producer is at the sharp end. (Sunshine, directed by his old Trainspotting buddy Danny Boyle, took three years to make, and was killed at the box office by a heatwave. "There's nothing you can do - even Rupert Murdoch can't affect the weather over Europe.
") But when he talks about The Sweeney, his enthusiasm pours out. "We've had so many, from Goodfellas to The Godfather, to the ridiculous British gangster movies. But they're all about criminals.
Our idea is to make the police force feel like you want to be part of that gang."
Their initial researches into the real-life Sweeney have shown that the Flying Squad is the most glamorous posting in the police "like being in the parachute regiment if you're in the military. They have these parties, and they have girls chasing them.
And they're quite close to the criminals. They all live in Kent, oddly enough.
"What we also hope to smuggle in is something about the realities of policing in Britain, and elements of how close the criminals and the police can be.
The key thing will be about who we cast for the two parts - especially the part made famous by John Thaw. That's what you remember about it. Him.
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Thaw played irascible DI Jack Regan ("We're the Sweeney son, and we haven't had any dinner.") and Macdonald, with his producer's hat on, is aware of the difficult chemistry of casting. "You need charisma in the same way Clint Eastwood had it.
He doesn't have to be handsome, but he has to be convincing."
He pauses for a moment, and we ponder the success of Life On Mars, which was rooted in nostalgia for the political incorrectness of The Sweeney. "Well, the biggest thing in Life On Mars is Philip Glenister.
It's not John Simm, who everybody knows. It's the other guy who's become a huge star out of it. Maybe we should get him.
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The night before meeting Macdonald in the Soho offices of his company DNA, I watched him give a masterclass to film students in Whitechapel, not far from the studio in London's East End where the Sunshine space station was docked, and a couple of miles from the "Green Zone" in which the zombies of 28 Weeks run drooling. The students wanted to know how they could get on in the business. Macdonald's answer was to keep trying, because talent would eventually be recognised.
His own success (and that of his Oscar-winning brother, Kevin, who directed One Day In September and The Last King Of Scotland) is often attributed to the fact that his grandfather was Emeric Pressburger, whose work with Michael Powell resulted in some of the masterpieces of British cinema.
Macdonald concedes that his grandfather was an inspiration, but luck and perseverance played a bigger role. Seeing Bill Forsyth's Gregory's Girl was a key moment.
"It's the beginning of Scottish film. It's the first time that people in Scotland could see a story about something contemporary. My grandfather made a film in Scotland - I Know Where I'm Going - which I know Bill Forsyth loved, but it was all made in Shepperton, and it was using Scotland as a romantic, wild place.
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Gregory's Girl was different. "Here was a film you could go to the cinema with a crowd of people who'd paid their money and really loved it, and could relate to it. The only other films like that in Britain are those Indian films, like East Is East.
They have that same sense of where they're from, and a sense of joy."
The Macdonald brothers' first significant experience of filmmaking was the STV series Shadowing, which was commissioned on the basis of a short shown at the Edinburgh Film Festival, about raising money for the film that would later make their names, Shallow Grave. In Shadowing, they followed people for a day.
"It was the beginning of super cheap television. We thought we were Nick Broomfield. And obviously Kevin's gone on to do documentaries and has moved that technique on.
But it was a reality TV show - following a stripogram, a nurse, a deerstalker, a doctor, and trying to make something happen."
Macdonald has always favoured films with a popular edge (he produced Notes On A Scandal and executive-produced The History Boys), and talks often about respecting the audience. "It's much more difficult to make a comedy that pleases people and is smart, than it is to make a film that is going to open the Cannes film festival.
I absolutely guarantee it. To make The 40-Year-Old Virgin - I have a lot more time for that..
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He is bracingly dismissive of the British film industry, and has plans to move into television production. "If they didn't show the Champions League and there wasn't Coronation Street, what would people do?
If they didn't make British movies, nobody would care. Therefore, there is a business, and television has tons of money, and they need their new Shameless-es, much more than they need investment in films. They make investment in films because it's politically correct.
They don't make it because they really want these films on their channel. They want Trainspotting and Four Weddings, but they have hundreds of films that nobody watches."
Whatever he does, Macdonald will probably always be defined by Trainspotting, as will most of the actors who starred in it.
As a producer, he is aware that the film's audience would love to see those characters again. But it needs a script, and the original stars on board. "It will only work if it's those four lads.
Or men. Whatever they are."
Trainspotting, he recalls, was meant to be an obscure little film about junkies which he, Boyle and Hodge would make before getting on with the more apparently commercial A Life Less Ordinary.
A similar inversion of expectations followed when The Beach, starring Leo DiCaprio, performed poorly, and the follow-up, 28 Days Later, became a phenomenon. "This was a little thing that we shot on digital video that we thought would make 20 or 30 million dollars at the worldwide box office. We never thought it would be the biggest film Danny's ever had, bigger than About A Boy and Four Weddings.
"That's what makes film so exciting. On a business level, you don't know the result. Steven Spielberg can be pretty confident that Indiana Jones 4 will be a big hit, but how big a hit will it be?
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• Sunshine is screening now.
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