Flushed with largesse, the quintet will mingle with the metropolitan literati, swilling Sauvignon and fending off pre-emptive enquiries. In the dining room, fenced off at a Judges' Table far from earwigging hacks, they will eat their supper under the hot lights of Channel Four's patrolling cameramen and, amid the debris of coffee, stickies and cigars, Ms Beer will make a speech about the state of the nation's literature. "I have got to make one, haven't I?" she says with fake alarm "I haven't even thought about it yet. Unlike one of my predecessors, George Walden, the former MP, who apparently started writing his Booker speech at the beginning of the summer..." The organisers need not gnaw their nails with worry, however, about Professor Beer's ability to string some literary- critical words together. This is probably the first time for a long time that you've felt so angry' ." And with that, the young Turk takes his unshakeable confidence off to work on his next movie, the ominously-titled Bleeder.Pusher goes on general release this weekend. "Pusher was showed to some West German filmmakers a couple of months ago and they hated it so much You know they absolutely despised it," he smiles "But I told them 'Good Great. "The greatest critique you can have is if people really love or really loathe your work," he says.

"Four years to tell you 'this is a camera, this is a viewfinder', and often these artistic institutions forget to teach you the most important thing of all, which is that art is about vision, about inspiration, about having something to say."Many people won't like what Refn has to say in Pusher And Refn can hardly contain his excitement at the prospect. "Sure, I'd never written a screenplay, never used a camera, never worked with actors, but how difficult is it? Film schools take so long to teach you things," says the impatient revolutionary. I thought it would be interesting to have people leave with their black and white morality screwed up."His filmmaker father, Anders Refn, editor of Lars Von Triers's Breaking the Waves, was not impressed. "I thought 'fuck film school' ," he recalls and eagerly set about planning his contribution to the "mental revolution" he believes necessary for social evolution. "The first thing he said was 'you can't do that, you haven't been to film school'," remembers Nicolas, with relish. "In Western society we're very quick to judge people," says Refn, "And too many films these days support that by telling you what to think.

We all know that selling drugs is wrong, that the people who do it are bad. But I wondered what would happen if I made the audience spend two hours hoping a drug dealer would save his skin. At 21, Refn dropped out of an acting course at the New York Academy of Dramatic Arts to write the screenplay for a prototype Pusher. Not your traditional hero, then, but a strangely sympathetic one nonetheless. A super-confident autodidact, Refn, rather surprisingly, likes to draw parallels between Frank and himself.