The sun is shining in Somerset -- for the moment at least -- and the clouds which have dogged British filmmaker Julien Temple intermittently over the last decade are beginning to recede.

Recently we saw the long-awaited release of Temple's most powerful, and possibly most commercial, film to date, a drama based on the stormy relationship between Romantic poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth. For a director whose career has seen more jump cuts than the average pop video, it is a triumph of both ambition and perseverance.

Temple launched The Great Rock and Roll Swindle on an unsuspecting public straight out of film school in 1980, before receiving an unprecedented critical mauling for Absolute Beginners four years later. He went on to direct groundbreaking, award-winning music videos for David Bowie, the Rolling Stones and many others before being critically savaged and derided once more for Vigo -- a dramatisation of the life of legendary French filmmaker Jean Vigo -- just three years ago.

Pandaemonium, a cohesive and dramatically controversial film, is certainly not Vigo, but it also deals with national icons; in this case British, and the leading artistic figures of their day. Beautifully shot in Somerset and the Lake District, the movie charts the explosive two-year period in the late 18th Century when Coleridge and Wordsworth -- by some accounts, the first 'pop star poets' -- dropped out of conventional society to live a simple, rural life in a small Somerset village.

Now, back in the same village in the warm sunshine, the director is in expansive mood. We revisit the hidden valleys and muddy seashore which are as much the heart of Pandaemonium, shot for the most part only a few miles from his home, as they are of the Lyrical Ballads, and as he talks Temple's lifelong identification and obsession with Coleridge -- poet, visionary, academic, opium addict -- becomes clear.

"My father is from Bridgwater and we spent a lot of holidays down here, being indoctrinated about Coleridge and Wordsworth," Temple explains. "We were literally dragged over the hills in their footsteps. I didn't appreciate it at the time, but something must have sunk in."

Now in his late forties, Temple is a tanned, wiry, slightly scruffy figure, equally comfortable at home in a restored medieval Somerset longhouse (he won't reveal its exact location, but it has very strong links with one remarkable episode in Coleridge's own life), muddling around the hills or his garden, or pitching ideas (and sometimes full wine glasses) with the best of them in fashionable London media land, where he's still obliged to spend at least a third of his time.

"I think any time you get close to a major historical figure and realise they must have huffed and puffed and got out of breath when they were climbing a hill... it does make them more approachable," says Temple. "If you walk in the path they took and the beech trees are still there... it's a way of getting closer to them. I think it's important to be able to feel that whatever they've done, they're all human beings and they're all very similar to you."

"Coleridge in particular was a very accessible figure to me; he was gullible, he was frail and he was someone that seemed to be going through a lot of things that other kids in my generation were going through at school in the sixties." Temple cites the teaching of Kubla Khan as masterpiece, "'yet they wouldn't explain why it was a masterpiece. It's more like a spell than a poem, it doesn't have to make sense."

In the spring of 1797, when he was in his early twenties Samuel Taylor Coleridge turned his back on literary London and moved into a tiny cottage in Nether Stowey, a village on the Quantock Hills. Determined to found a new society, the poet instead found inspiration and hardship in roughly equal quantities. "That aspect was a help to us in making the film," says Temple. "They turned their back on the pump houses and chiffon gowns, and became Withnail and I."

Joined a few months later by William Wordsworth, and his sister Dorothy, the trio began one of the most extraordinary collaborations in the history of English literature. Their joint creation, The Lyrical Ballads', written in Nether Stowey by candlelight and published anonymously in London in 1789, to a large extent defined the beginning of the Romantic movement in the arts.

"I love the fact that the Quantocks, these hills here, could inspire something that huge and abstract. The power in that poem... it could be a time capsule, a spaceship..."

After a ten-year sojourn in Hollywood, where he directed one major film and became one of the most influential pop video directors of the first MTV decade, Julien Temple returned to Britain in the early1990s, determined, as he puts it, "to try something as different from LA as it was possible to find." From ghetto shoot outs and limos for his kids to the school gates, Temple and his young family travelled backwards in time to rural England. His new home in the Quantock Hills, a small area of outstanding natural beauty right next to the Bristol Channel, reawakened childhood memories and began a decade-long quest to film the Romantics.

Those same hills are today part of the director's lifeblood; two of his three children were born here, and there is a sense that his house, his garden and his surroundings provide almost endless inspiration for new projects. A studio in a converted barn at the bottom of Coleridge's "deep, romantic chasm" enabled Temple to work on his last two films -- the Sex Pistols' documentary The Filth and the Fury and an extraordinary short for environmental organisation Greenpeace, The Wind ("like shooting an ad you believe in", says Temple) -- in uninterrupted tranquillity.

"Obviously I wouldn't live here if I couldn't get away,"Temple admits. "But I'll stay here until I get bored with it, and that certainly isn't the case now."

Working with screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce, Temple seized eagerly on the real meaning of the events which had taken place right on his doorstep; the emerging theme became the power struggle between two colossi of English literature. .

"So many of their concerns, reflected for the first time in their poetry -- nature, revolution, new technology -- are, even 200 years later, our concerns. The challenge was to film them in a manner that was faithful to their revolutionary status but at the same time was relevant to today's audience."

"Coleridge and Wordsworth were visionaries, and Coleridge was a time traveller. There is the sense that they were the first celebrities outside an 18th century court," Temple suggests. "They took the readership, reading public -- which was widening dramatically at that point -- and if you look at Coleridge's letters, the crowds were extraordinary... Albemarle Street was the first one way street in London because of the jams of carriages arriving.

"It was a slightly Iggy Pop kind of phenomenon; he'd either be completely spellbindingly brilliant, reading Shakespeare by lightning flashes -- or vacantly, catatonically embarrassing. And yes too, he never found the same establishment acceptance, because of his drug addiction."

While Wordsworth went on to become the colossus of school syllabus poetry, a national icon, Coleridge is a much more mysterious figure. His restless mind, his self-chronicled addiction to opium, his relentless experimentation; all were factors drawing Temple deeper and deeper into the explosive events which took place in this small Somerset village in the 1790s.

"I don't think anyone can deny that there was a strange wiggle in the 18 months they spent working together on the Ballads in Somerset..." he begins. "Any combined creative breakthrough on that scale has a huge fall out... whether it is the Beatles in the 1960s, or the Stones at the same time, or the Sex Pistols in the 1970s. There is a fascinating love/hate dynamic to all major creative collaborations on that scale."

But like Coleridge, visionary hero of his latest film, also dogged by an albatross, Temple suffers for his art. He became more and more convinced that the film should be shot as near as possible in the places where the events actually happened, creating massive logistical problems for a loyal but increasingly battle-weary crew. "I filmed a pop video for Bryan Adams in Holford Glen, and there was still a strange magic there... despite the old rockers' proliferation of acne vulgaris," he says. "The Quantocks have remained slightly impregnable. The Romans never got beyond Spaxton -- they couldn't take these hills, I don't think Disney will, or MacDonalds."

'Pandaemonium' by name, the film was pandaemonium by nature. Raising money was hard enough ("it's an arcane subject," Temple admits); making it was harder still. As production began in the summer of 1998, Temple was besieged by demands for script cuts by backers fearful that the shooting schedule was unrealistic. "The odds were being stacked against me," Temple admits. "I couldn't see the film I wanted to make for the money we had."

The director's eventual response was to absorb the problems "and make them as much as possible a part of the energy of the film". Temple aimed to film the past as it happened -- "in candlelight, in smoke, in frost and in sunshine". Chocolate box period scenes were ditched in favour of risky, low light photography -- and when the money ran out by a Boy's Own Paper adventure featuring just the director and his leading actor, working for nothing to complete what they both saw as a crucial scene. Thus Linus Roache's heroics continued to the last with a desperate swim across the mud and the rising tide just below the lowering bulk of the nuclear power station at Hinkley Point.

"I got the look I wanted, I brought out the guru in him," Temple admits with a smile, convinced that this conscious risk taking adds an essential element to his film. "His eyes were mad and staring, really crossing the centuries. At that point he was Coleridge. A minute later and the camera would have been swamped by the tide... that's the kind of film making I enjoy!"

Sheer strength of will, and in the latter stages of filming in a deluged Lake District, the capacity to work for days without sleep got him through. In his own mind, Julien Temple consciously plays outside -- and against - the system. At heart the director of The Great Rock and Roll Swindle (and, twenty years later, The Filth and the Fury) is still regards himself as a Sex Pistol, an anarchic spirit. Temple's undoubted satisfaction with the final product ("my response to many of the script cuts was to film them anyway," he admits) indicates that it's that it's only when the odds are truly stacked against him that Temple really starts to perform.

For years Temple had spent most of his time scouting Coleridge's "airy ridge" of the Quantocks, and the ghostly mud flats of Bridgwater Bay -- the unique, and sometimes inaccessible locations for Pandaemonium -- while the script grew to feature four separate leads. That these four distinct characters -- Coleridge and his wife, Sara, Wordsworth and his sister, Dorothy -- would attract the cream of Britain's new generation of acting talent was, in part, happy accident, in part too, the solution to bringing the drama of the past into the present.

Linus Roache, a late replacement as Coleridge for Robert Carlyle who dropped out due to illness only three weeks before shooting began -- yet another bad omen for a production who were on tenterhooks to the last; just weeks before release even their distribution company went bankrupt -- convinced Temple there was still a chance of making the film he wanted to make. "His physical commitment, let alone his ability to intellectually grasp the role was extraordinary."

Roache is joined by John Hannah as Wordsworth, playing a dark and menacing figure for the first time, by Samantha Morton as Sara ('a true rebel and a soul mate... and a good farter on set too," says Temple) and by Emily Woof as Wordsworth's inspirational sister, Dorothy.

"I liked the fact that they all had something to say," Temple explains. "I'm not interested in history for history's sake, more in how the present and future are defined by the past. The past is part of us collectively and I'm more interested in time travel than period drama. The partnership began with Coleridge very much in the ascendant. He was the rising star of the literary firnament; a published poet, a radical lecturer, a man with a brilliant nationwide reputation in his early twenties. Wordsworth was a far less known figure, less confident. Yet at the end of 18 months -- when they'd produced this extraordinary breakthrough, using a democratic approach to language -- the roles had been reversed."

Central to the drama, too, is an unstinting approach to Coleridge's painstakingly self-chrnonicled opium addiction, again with many modern parallels, and also to Dorothy Wordsworth's addiction; each providing further physical and mental challenges for Temple's actors.

"He was a complete addict -- he couldn't write any more, he felt that the poet in him was dead, burned out. At that point Wordsworth went off , turned his back on him; a very well-documented rift between them which was of epic proportions... and healed in a kind of cosmetic way towards the end of their lives..."

And while Temple's own sympathies may veer very much towards Coleridge, the maverick in him couldn't resist one appearance as Wordsworth in the film. In a splendid Hitchcockian cameo, it is the director's period-clad silhouette who appears from behind a tree. "I was the only one apart from John Hannah who could do the Wordsworth walk!"

"It's been tears of rage, tears of joy, all the way through, which is the way William Blake might have put it," says Temple. "And there will be more tears to come. It was always an odd notion for the British film industry to finance a film about the writing of the Lyrical Ballads. But that was the whole point, to do something they wouldn't normally do."

Today, hordes of Japanese and American scholars trawl Holford Glen and the lonely Hare Knapp in Coleridge's footsteps, searching for new clues about the poet's inspiration, while the National Trust have largely renovated Coleridge's rural hovel. Yet in the local pub, wizened drinkers still talk darkly about the "drug addicts" who descended on the village over 200 years ago.

"The central riddle of what happened, the personal politics of that relationship is the core of the story, the core of Pandaemonium", says Temple. "I think it is perfectly valid to take one side or another. If people want to make a film about Wordsworth then they can -- to tell the other side of the story..."

As audiences for Pandaemonium have discovered, the Romantics were far more adventurous, almost contemporary, in their approach to the developing world around them. They experimented with recreational drugs, not just opium, absorbed and observed the impact of the Industrial Revolution, 'dropped out' of society and witnessed, among many other wonders, the world's first balloon flight, the invention of electricity and the first experiments in photography.

Almost exactly two hundred years after Samuel Taylor Coleridge's desperate last bid to retain Wordsworth's friendship led to an ill-starred move to the Lake District, Temple and his crew made the same journey, chronicling decline and betrayal in the most sustained deluge in meterological history. By then, says Temple, the journey back in time was complete.

"It's not a costume drama, it's not a contemporary romantic comedy or a gangster film, but it is a different kind of film. Not a hugely commercial film, but still a tribute to the people at the BBC who backed it. And the BBC should back things like this," Temple asserts. "It's creating a debate, a controversy, about our heritage, rather than just a schmooze job..."

As if to prove the point, a long day's walking and talking over, we return again to the beach at Kilve, the wildly contorted rocks and channel pools which exert an almost magnetic attraction for Julien Temple the filmmaker, and equally as much for Temple the country dweller, the parent, the restless mind, the planet conscious citizen.

The coast here exerts a powerful attraction for him, in particular its remarkable conjunction with the hills inland. There's scarcely a day when he doesn't visit, on foot ("after ten years in LA I gave up ever trying to drive"). "The Quantocks really do drop down into the sea," he says. "I don't know anywhere else which has that magic." He's both content and inspired here; an unchanged haven of ever-changing light.

No, Julien Temple has not yet become Samuel Taylor Coleridge. But in Pandaemonium he comes pretty close to creating his world. It could be a new dawn for the poet's reputation; yet Temple's far greater achievement is to catch a glimpse of his -- and Wordsworth's -- life in ours.

Also by John Shearlaw:
The Sex Pistols on film
Hiding in the limelight