Bill Condon's career has flown under the critical and commercial radar, starting with his precocious horror script, 1981's "Strange Behavior," followed by several movies for television and cable. His appearance at Sundance this year with "Gods and Monsters" was one of the treats of that festival. Ian McKellen's performance as James Whale, the openly gay English expatriate director of movies like "Frankenstein," is hands-down brilliant. There are so many layers so effortlessly arrayed in his work that one would be forgiving even if the film were not as good as it is.

Condon's portrait (based on a novel by Christopher Bram) of Whale as an artist in the last days of his life is also richly multifaceted. Brendan Fraser is very good as a gardener whom Whale becomes fixated upon, a straight man who remains curious and ambivalent about Whale's need for his companionship. "Brendan listens a lot," Condon says. "I love the way he does it. If he didn't have that equal weight in the scenes, I don't think it would come off. By definition, that character he plays is so unformed and inarticulate, but he's got this stuff raging inside."

While shot in widescreen, "Gods and Monsters" was made on the modest scale of a cable movie. Condon's script was widely respected, but the finance was slow to come. "Clive Barker signed on as executive producer, and Ian attracted other actors. One of the most amazing things, I don't think any movies get made..." Condon trails off, still exasperated.

"In my experience, movies get made because someone has a gun to their head. Ian had been involved for two years, but he had a commitment to the National Theater in London for a year. All of this fooling around had to stop, we had to be shooting by July 1. That was it, there was no choice. If there hadn't been that, I wonder if it'd still be, 'Oh, we'll do in a month.' "Brendan's name helped, not tremendously at that point, 'George of the Jungle' hadn't come out yet and he had done his share of movies that no one cared about. But ultimately, it's a really distorted system. Ian is a big enough star to get the movie made, but it all gets driven by overseas sales agents who give you lists of names and combinations that might make it palatable enough. Then I could go to bank and the company could borrow the money.