Hollywood studios specialise in ruining simple ideas, and perhaps Speed was lucky that no one took it very seriously. It wasn't an A-list picture like the summer's other big action hit, James Cameron's True Lies, which had Arnold Schwarzenegger, a dollars 100m budget and enough hardware to relaunch Desert Storm. Instead, 20th Century Fox cast Speed from the B list, and hired a first-time director, Jan De Bont. A celebrated cameraman who had begun his career in Holland, De Bont, now 50, shot most of Paul Verhoeven's movies, including Basic Instinct, and was director of photography on innumerable action pictures (The Hunt for Red October, Black Rain, Lethal Weapon 3), including the best one of the Eighties, Die Hard. When De Bont first heard about the project, he went to Fox and pleaded for it. 'I knew I could really do something with it because it's pure excitement, it starts on a high level and just escalates. I wanted to make it rough, pure - not high-style, because then you'd lose the power of this big dumb bus.'Meanwhile, Yost's screenplay went through what he estimates as 17 versions, including 10 major rewrites.

The hero, Jack Traven, is a policeman who, taunted on the telephone by the bomber (Dennis Hopper), boards the bus and sets about saving the passengers' lives. In the script's early stages, Traven was burdened with guilt over the death of a hostage and tormented by his relationship with his authoritarian father, also a policeman Hollywood action heroes are always tormented. It puts a redemptive gloss on all that random slaughter by giving the violence a purpose: to enhance the hero's self-esteem. It also makes actors and writers feel better, giving an impression of complexity - even though what passes for psychology in Hollywood is often banal and formulaic.De Bont wasn't having any of that.

'People always say you have to know the character's background, you have to understand his psychology The audience doesn't need all that bullshit. We learn everything we need to know about the characters from how they react to things.'Jack Traven, too, was changing with the script. He began as a wisecracking thirtysomething cop: Bruce Willis, say, or Mel Gibson. For a while he became black, as Denzel Washington and Wesley Snipes were offered the role.

But he ended up as a Canadian / Hawaiian dreamboat with a limited range of expression: Keanu Reeves. 'Denzel would have got dollars 5m; Keanu probably got dollars 1m,' estimates Yost. (It was a bargain; following Speed's enormous success, Reeves is now said to command dollars 7m.)'I thought of Keanu after I saw him in Point Break,' De Bont says 'He's young, he has a vulnerable quality - open, romantic. To me, Keanu - if you had a daughter you'd let him take her out.