Can Meg Ryan cut it?

As a first-hand witness, I feel it my duty to inform our devoted readers that, yes, her whole face looked hamsteresque and completely frozen - maybe she wasn't suited to London temperatures?

She was here to talk - if she can manage it - about her new film In The Cut, directed by the New Zealander Jane Campion, which also stars You Can Count On Me's Mark Ruffalo.

It's an intense urban piece, exploring the repressive nature of one woman's personality through her relationship with a policeman, himself investigating a series of murders where women have been dismembered.

It's a very non-Ryan flick, and most column inches devoted to it have unfortunately focused on the fact that, at the age of nearly 42, she's appearing naked for the first time on film, and in some pretty saucy scenes too.

Conditioned by the ditzy blonde romanticist persona, it will be interesting to see how on earth the general public will react to it in the long term.

Ryan fiddled and fidgeted her way through the press conference. She draws huge swirls on a page, and then plays with the reporters' dictaphones, pointing out when they are turning off, and lifting them up and down. Her focus shifts constantly and it's left to Campion to answer most of the questions.

And it is no problem for the highly-regarded director of films such as Sweetie, Portrait of A Lady and The Piano. In fact, Campion only missed out on a Best Director Oscar for the latter because she chose the year that Steven Spielberg made Schindler's List to be nominated. D'oh! This project continues her fascination with female outsiders.

"Someone said to me 'I read this pretty amazing book' In The Cut by Susannah Moore and I'm like 'Where can I get a copy'?", she explains.

"I loved the prose style and it was really fresh for me that the female protagonist felt really feminine. She comes up against this world of detectives, how crude and brutally honest they were, which is very attractive, that quality of honesty.

"Women build lives around finding and satisfying romantic models we grew up with. It's interesting to see how far short that model falls and it causes an enormous amount of grief. They are still searching for their prince, in a way. In as much as we don't discuss that, I think it's really sad.

"I was trying to get the story because that's the container, and without that, everything goes. I tried to make it organic and contain references that may not have a significance at first, but later they do. It's like poetry - you don't try to work out a poem, it's what remains with you, the rhythms, the sensibility, the words, the images. It's the container for what your psyche retains later."

Ryan - cast after Nicole Kidman pulled out of the project - is more introspective than in any of her previous films. So how did she feel playing a mousy brunette for a change?

"Jane and I saw the Emily the Strange character cartoon young girl with straight black hair while out walking around New York and it started there. So I dyed my hair brown and walked around and no-one said 'hi', and that was kind of liberating. She really needed to be someone who was one of those invisible women.

"My character Frannie is someone who the world has disappointed, who love has disappointed, who has grown smaller and smaller inside", she continues. "But with Detective Malloy, for the first time, she finds herself surprised and even scared of the things he brings out in her."

And her director thought she was perfect for the role. "I wanted to see Meg really get a chance to tap her dramatic potential. I thought she was ready to take a step into the deep void and there are so few stories that really give a woman the chance to explore themselves like Frannie does.

"Meg turned out to be utterly unafraid. Unafraid is a word that sums up Frannie and it also sums up the way Meg approached the role."

Campion comes across as a vivacious and intelligent woman, succinctly analysing just exactly what she was trying to do in this very unusual piece.

"I saw In The Cut as a modern love story that is also a mystery. It explores the contemporary mythology of love and sex and the effort at union with another person, and it does so amidst all the chaos and energy of the modern city.

"Frannie is dealing with problems I think many people in today's cities face - issues of sexuality and shame, of lust and fear - you know, the things that just don't seem to behave in an orderly way. These are the things that interest me."

For Ryan, her creative energy was simply essential.

"Jane was like an atomic bomb going off in my creative life. She completely rearranged my idea of what to expect from a film-making experience and how to investigate a character. She's really interested in a very thorough process - understanding on a deep level why a woman would behave in this way."

The murder-mystery element of the plot has seen the film compared to Se7en. Does Jane see where this is coming from?

"I love Se7en - the last 20 minutes is an incredible piece of film-making. I did make the mistake of teasing my original backers with thoughts of Se7en but it became clear that it wasn't really about that. I kept saying, I want it to be a relationship movie. So we had to cut the budget and then went for 100 per cent New York City for location, but that helped make it more streety and gritty."

For inspiration, she examined a number of classic '70s pictures - most notably, Scorcese's Taxi Driver - but still found elements of the plot which weren't so savoury to film.

"I do find onscreen violence difficult but it wasn't very hard to toss some blood around. Taxi Driver is quite poetical and the thing you remember about it is its honesty and observation. Look back to Coppola - his first film Rainmaker looks like Ken Loach. There is violence in In The Cut in a very Charlie Chaplin way in the skating sequences, though."

Someone eventually dares the obvious, neglecting Meg's recent frosty reputation with the British press and brings up the obvious nudity - was Meg at all worried about such a radical move?

"You see the scenes coming up and think 'Eek'. But obviously it was a very protected environment and very choreographed. So much of the movie feels found. Jane and our DP seemed to be finding shots all the time. It didn't take a lot of bravery on my part to trust Jane. But I do think the character is very brave, a warrior. She's brave to risk her heart for a guy and I find that's something you need a lot of bravery to do."

In The Cut is showing at cinemas everywhere.