People: Mike Leigh calls on Halcrow to help engineer realism

STAFF at infrastructure consultancy Halcrow are used to advising on planning, design and management services - but now they've turned their hand to the big screen too.

Paul Maliphant, the firm's highways and transportation sales director, was contacted through the Geological Society in London to advise Oscar-nominated director Mike Leigh on Another Year, his latest film.

In the movie, actor Jim Broadbent - of Moulin Rogue, Iris and Bridget Jones's Diary fame - plays Tom Hepple, an engineering geologist.

Maliphant says: "I was convening a field trip in Wales in my role as chairman of the southern Wales regional group of the Geological Society and they contacted me to see if he could join us. I arranged for Jim to have dinner with a former colleague, whose career matched the early stages of Tom's - mineral exploration in Australia in the early 1970s."

Maliphant went on to advise on the correct number and type of vehicles that should be on set.