Todd Graff has spent many years doing many things behind, beside and in front of the camera. He has appeared as an actor in films such as The Abyss and Strange Days, featured as the screenwriter and producer on The Vanishing, turned up on TV screens in Chicago Hope. He's an all-rounder. We caught up with him at the Edinburgh festival promoting his first major directorial feature Camp, a tale of kids, classes and the things they'll learn for fame.

Tell me about the real camp. How did the whole film come together?
It's called Stagedoor Manor. It's in upstate New York and I went there when I was a kid and then I worked there for a couple of summers afterwards. It's been around forever, obviously. It's very successful. And we shot there, so it's exactly like you see in the film.

Kids go there to learn how to become actors but they have no sense as a business that they should do anything except try and train these kids in the way they think they should be trained. So there's no attention paid to appropriateness of material.

So, like in the movie, those shows that they do in the movie that's what they really do. They'll do all-black shows with no black people. We did Equus when I was there! We did Vampire Lesbians of Sodom. Their whole point is that if they do Annie, you know, what are you going to learn? They're not bringing it to Broadway. So they would rather do material that is much too sophisticated and ludicrous for these kids to perform in the hopes that they're actually going to stretch them and teach them something and train them in some way. But it ends up being hilarious.

Do people who go to the camp go on to have decent careers?
Yeah. A lot of kids do. Natalie Portman went there and when I went there Jennifer Jason Leigh was there. Mandy Moore, Mary Stuart Masterson, I was Robert Downey's counsellor while he was there.

Did he need counselling even then?
I wasn't that kind of a counselor! I used to have to tell him to go to bed and so on. And it's very much like in the film - it attracts by and large a kid that feels very isolated and freakish in their regular life and then they get to this place and it's Oz-like and everyone is like them and into what they're into and doesn't care if they're gay or if they're fat and you know, they really only care if you can belt to a G.

How do the kids find out about it? Is it heavily advertised?
It's not, no. I mean you can't get your kid in anymore, I mean even before the film they had waiting lists as long as your arm, now they get three hundred e-mails a day and have had to take on extra staff just to tell people that they can't come.

They advertise in the magazine section of the New York Times and I think that's it. There was a magazine that picked them as the number one camp in America so they get some of their own press and then kids go back year after year after year and they tell other kids and it's really sort of a word of mouth thing.

I'm surprised they haven't set up other camps and turned it into a chain or something.
They're really not interested - it's a real Mom and Pop organisation. The guy that runs it has run it for thirty years. He doesn't want it bigger than it is, he wants to be able to keep doing it the right way, the way he has all this time. I mean, he could have done that any number of times but he's not interested. It's a remarkably pure place.

Tell me about finding the kids themselves.
Well it was tough, you know. It was very important to me not to use professional showbiz kids because that sort of cutesy, selling, OTT thing is anathema to me and that meant finding kids that had never been in a film before, never been on television as none of our kids have been.

So, if they were all non-professionals, how did you knock them all into shape?
Well, auditions went on forever because we had to weed through 2,000 kids and get a comfort level that they could really do it with no training or anything. I would bring them back four or five times, sometimes for five or six hours at a go and work with them, teach acting class, improv with them and mix and match them and at the end of the day, we found them.

So when did the movie open in the States? What's the response been like?
It opened in L.A. and New York on July 25th and then two weeks later it went to 30 more places and now it's like 80 plus. I think we're on 200 screens or so. And the response has been good so far, I mean not everybody likes it but it's doing fantastically well and it's gotten some really great reviews, which is great and from places that matter to the film like the New York Times, Newsweek, Rolling Stone.

What was the main aim? I mean I suppose you could have made a documentary about the camp and kids that were going to it. Why did you decide to fictionalise it?
Well, that's true but I'm not a documentarian, that's not what I do. I wrote this on spec and then took four years to raise the money (it wasn't a lot of money) to make the film. And I decided that beyond the fact that the world of the camp could be entertaining and funny and ridiculous and exciting and have musical numbers and so on, the thing I always remember about the camp is that the kids who go there are very unhappy when they're not there.

So who are your favourite characters in the movie? Did you write yourself in at all?
That's like trying to choose between your kids! Well, there's definitely a bunch of me in Vlad. I was never cute like that, I've corrected one of the great tragedies of my life by casting someone that good-looking. But at that age in particular, that thing of the obsessive need to please and not really caring about the consequences of your actions when you're trying to do that, that whoever you have to manipulate you'll manipulate, that whoever you have to bullshit you'll bullshit because you just need everybody liking you and that was me, for many years and certainly when I was a kid.