'Mr Kubrick wonders if you can do him a favour."

It was, says Bill Lawrence, as if the Prime Minister himself was on the phone.

The year was 1995, and Bill was in the middle of organising the first Bradford Film Festival. Among his main attractions was a 70mm widescreen presentation of Stanley Kubrick's spaced-out space fantasy, 2001.

"Someone came through and said, 'There's a Leon Vitali asking for you'," Bill recalls. "No-one knew who Leon Vitali was, but I did. He'd been Kubrick's key assistant since the Sixties, and I couldn't get to the phone fast enough."

Obeying his master's voice, Vitali handed down a commandment from the mountain. "Mr Kubrick would like you to send him your print of 2001."

Bill obediently packaged it up as soon as the Bradford screening was complete. Kubrick took one look at his own work and declared it unfit for further use.

"He didn't like the grading on the star sequence," says Bill. "It was coming out off-black instead of black. He was such a perfectionist, he banned all the 70mm prints coming into Britain."

Five years on, as Bill Lawrence puts together the programme for the latest Bradford Film Festival, he would dearly love to show 2001 again, especially as the calendar ticks towards the year itself. But Kubrick's ban still stands, even after his death.

"Besides, the people who own the rights know there'll be a big market for it at the end of this year, so they're biding their time," says Bill.

So, 2001: A Space Odyssey will not be on the bill of fare for Bradford's sixth film festival, beginning in seven weeks' time. Just what will be on the programme, not even Bill can say just yet.

The industrious head of cinema at the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television, which organises the festival, is currently engaged in his annual round of horse-trading with the major movie distributors.

On his shopping list are around 150 titles, two-thirds of them features. Some - like his early acquisition of Luc Besson's Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc - will precede their general release dates by weeks or even months; others will be classics, rarely seen on the big screen. They will be presented over two weeks at venues across the region, with Bradford the hub.

The festival, says Bill, has a dual purpose. "Mainly, we want to provide a really good focal point for the local population to get plugged into the industry, to see films prior to release and somehow feel that they're at the forefront of the whole thing.

"But we also have to keep the film industry happy, because if we don't do what they want in terms of promoting their films, we're going to struggle to convince them that we're a serious festival."

As with every other aspect of the film business, money talks. This year, Bradford has doubled its sponsorship arrangement with the railway franchisee GNER, and renewed its association with American Airlines.

"If you're going to bring guests across from America, you need to be able to pay their air fare," says Bill. "And it's not just an economy ticket from New York - you're looking at four or five grand for a first-class flight."

It was the question of guest appearances that threw a spanner into the works of that first film festival in Bradford. Alan Bennett, whose acclaimed screen version of his play, The Madness of George III, was set for release, had agreed to attend. He didn't need an air ticket, either: he was coming from just a few miles up the road to the Dales.

The film's distributors, however, refused to release the film until after its London premiere. Only Bennett's personal intervention secured it for Bradford.

"Some distributors are easier than others," says Bill. "Buena Vista (Disney) have been very supportive, and although we're still waiting for them to confirm pictures, they told us before Christmas we could have half a dozen.

"This is why January's our really tense time. It's like a jigsaw puzzle - but at this stage, we haven't even got the pieces to start putting together."

The 2000 festival will be the first to be staged since the film museum reopened in its new, enlarged form. Nevertheless, the event will spread its net wider than ever before, with satellite screenings in Holmfirth, Hebden Bridge, York and possibly Shipley, as well as Bradford's Priestley Centre for the Arts.

Though its principal attractions remain a secret, not least to Bill himself, one or two titles are considered to be in the bag. These include Winona Ryder's Girl Interrupted, the story of writer Susanna Kaysen's 18-month stay at a mental hospital in the 1960s, and Vanessa Paradis's romantic drama, La Fille sur le Pont (The Girl on the Bridge).

It is also known that this year's festival will provide a showcase for a pan-European drive to identify the 15 best films ever to have been made on the continent. A director from every participating country has nominated one film each, and all will be shown during the Bradford fortnight.

The British feature is Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's 1946 fantasy, A Matter of Life and Death, which starred David Niven as an injured wartime pilot, caught between this world and the next.

There will also be another 'widescreen weekend', a festival within a festival, designed to exploit Bradford's unique facility to project every film format yet devised.

Into this area of the programme, Bill longs to insert a 70mm presentation of the three-hour, 1970 epic Patton: Lust For Glory, in which George C Scott portrayed the maverick American war general, George S Patton. But he can't find it.

"That's my Holy Grail," he says. "We did get our hands on a print once, but it was so badly decomposed you couldn't lift it out of the can, never mind lace it on to a projector.

"It had been sat in a damp basement somewhere. The metal reels had rusted and corroded into the celluloid."

Time is running out for Patton this year, but as Bill prepares to embark on a sequence of 80-hour weeks between now and March, the festival programme will, he promises, be filled somehow.

That, of course, is assuming he isn't interrupted by too many phone calls from directors asking for their films back.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.