Director Jasmine Yuen-Carrucan and actor/producer Bryan Brown have used elbow-grease and economy to make Cactus, a snaking and sometimes mesmeric road movie.

"I was just desperate to get it made," Jasmine Yuen-Carrucan admits, sitting in thinker's repose in a Sydney cafe and toying with a cup of coffee close to the colour of her Eurasian eyes. "And I just thought the time was right for me. I was going to shoot it with my husband, Florian Emmerich, who is a cinematographer [now working for director Paul Greengrass]. I had $90,000 in savings, and I was just going to use that. But when I sent it to Bryan, I started to look at it a bit differently." The "Bryan" of this retelling is Bryan Brown, iconic Australian character actor, and more recently prolific producer. When a script appeared at his Newtown Films office carrying the spare title Cactus, Brown asked himself his standard procedural question: "What do I think this movie is saying?" He wasn't sure at first, but given that the words on the page were so totally pre-occupied with men in crises, he did find Yuen-Carrucan's gender a refreshing surprise.

Cactus depicts a self-described ordinary bloke, John Kelly (Travis McMahon from TV's Last Man Standing), who accepts an offer to kidnap notorious pro-gambler Eli Jones (David Lyons from TV's Sea Patrol) from inner-city Sydney to handlers in the outback. Just what fate awaits Eli is unclear - but given the rough-and-tumble nature of his detainment in John's blood-red Ford Fairmont XA, we suspect the outcome to be fairly nasty. The abduction is going flawlessly, until a truckie, played by Kenny's Shane Jacobson, enters the fray. Things get exponentially worse when a brusque bush cop, played by Brown, starts sniffing around the trail with his gun cocked.

"Maybe it was that cop," Brown ruminates again on the script, speaking from the same office where he did the initial reading. "What I took out of it, and out of that character, is that there are rules out there. You better be careful which rules you decide don't apply to you. It's as simple as that. We do need certain rules. We need to figure out which ones apply to us, or you might not like the results. Cactus says that. in a funny sort of way."

The engine of Cactus only began to purr once Brown had elected to throw his weight behind raising further finance for the production. "I have two hats - a hat as a producer and a hat as an actor," Brown says in his practiced, salty style. "Sometimes I get turned on by someone's storyline; I want to be involved in helping them get there, and other times I want to play a character, and I don't want anyone else to do it. But I was impressed by meeting Jasmine - it's very hard to say why. I felt, without her telling me, that she could direct a movie. I've got to say that once I got the money and she was going to do it, I thought, 'Christ, I hope I haven't talked everyone into a bad director.' I didn't know till later that she was a writhing mass of terrified emotion - she didn't let me onto that part!"

Cactus might be Yuen-Carrucan's directorial debut, but she learnt the filmmaking craft from being a camera operator on international titles like Syriana, both volumes of Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill, The Last Samurai, The Quiet American and Mission: Impossible 2. Her path to a big screen directing credit bucks the local government-sponsored route of graduating from short films. "Short films are really hard actually," Yuen-Carrucan says of her atypical apprenticeship. "It's a different sort of filmmaking, and in that respect you see some directors who are really great feature filmmakers who make a short film that is really not so good. Really, it's just safety insurance for the government agencies."

Brown, rather than worrying about safety nets, was impressed by Yuen-Carrucan's unusual course to the director's chair. "I relate to people who come off the ground, who don't come from a professional body," he says. "I understand from my own experience of being an amateur actor that it's as legitimate a way of getting into it as anything else. There are no rules. We have to remind ourselves that there are many, many different ways of becoming an artist."

And he offers a typically outspoken assessment upon seeing the final cut. "When Jasmine got a cut that she was ready to show me, I was worried," he explains. "I thought before it started, 'I just don't know whether it's there, I just don't know.' By the end of it, there was only one thing I knew - I turned to her and said, 'You've made a feature film. How good, bad or indifferent this is - people will tell us. But you have definitely made a feature film, and by that I mean it's not a piece of a crap. It may not be to everyone's taste, but this is definitely a feature film based on what I believe a feature film should be - professionally told, surprising, and well crafted.'"

For Jasmine Yuen-Carrucan, setting down her coffee cup and shifting from thinker's repose to smiling uprightness, the road forward is clear, or as clear as it can be in the unpredictable business of filmmaking. "I just hope that I get to do another one," she says.

Cactus is in cinemas now.