A few weeks ago, my internet broke and the technician took control of my computer down the phone line to make the changes himself. At one point, the on-screen cursor he was manipulating stopped moving and its little black arrow quivered on the spot. "I'm sorry," he gasped. "I've just seen that file on your desktop that says 'Mighty Boosh movie'." He almost choked. "Is there really going to be a Mighty Boosh movie?"
Well, yes and no. Bunny and the Bull has all the elements you would expect if the cult comedy duo migrated from television to film. There's the Mighty Boosh themselves, for instance, Noel Fielding and Julian Barratt, acting in it. Paul King, who directed every episode of the television series, writes and directs. The story is surreal and twisted, moving between dreams and reality, with a set made from paper and two bickering buddies at its heart. It's just a tiny bit different, though. Julian and Noel aren't the lead characters - the housebound hero, Stephen Turnbull, and his womanising, gambling, booze-hound friend, Bunny, are played by the actor Edward Hogg and the comedian Simon Farnaby.
We meet Turnbull sitting in his flat, flicking through snapshots and souvenirs of a road trip he has taken with Bunny across eastern Europe and down to Andalusia, to recover from a recent heartbreak. His memories merge with the souvenirs, so if he sees a map, the mise en scène is littered with cartographic symbols. It is as if Michel Gondry had directed Withnail & I in the style of Delicatessen. With a bullfight at its centre.
For this entire spectacle, however, the show is, if not stolen, then at least borrowed by Veronica Echegui, the young Spanish actress who plays Eloisa, a waitress the pair meet in a Polish restaurant. Her passionate behaviour and the shenanigans of her imaginary friend, Conchita (also played by Echegui), threaten to destroy the boys' friendship, but also offer the film the soulful core it needed to jump from seeming like an extended Boosh episode into a proper feature film.
"Spanish women are sexy, beautiful - and, because of the bullfight, we knew we wanted to end the story in Spain," says the film's producer, Mary Burke. "When Veronica came in, everything fell into place. She was so silly - small and fiery and ridiculous - and her accent was just amazing. She's so brilliant. This is her first English-language film, as well."
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Echegui is the latest and youngest of Spanish cinema's new conquistadors - a cultural flowering that has seen Spanish-language global hits such as Pan's Labyrinth and Volver; Spanish-produced films in English, such as Sexy Beast, The Machinist and The Others; the post-Almodovar directors Julio Medem and Alejandro Amenabar; and a string of pulse-troubling actors, from Maribel Verdu to Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz. In fact, the 26-year-old from Madrid stands almost exactly where you'd want to stand if you were hoping to become the next Cruz.
This year, she was one of the Shooting Stars at the Berlin film festival - a talent-spotting accolade given to 10 rising young actors each year, whose UK alumni include Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz - as well as gaining two nominations for a Goya, Spain's national film awards, as best new actress in 2007 and best actress in 2009. This puts her roughly level with Cruz's career in 1999, the year she picked up her Goya for The Girl of Your Dreams and was moving towards Captain Corelli's Mandolin and Vanilla Sky in 2001. Bunny and the Bull isn't quite on the same scale as Captain Corelli, but it is romping round the festivals, and people are starting to talk about her.
In person, Echegui is disgracefully cute - in the full Bardot/Loren, Eurokitten tradition. So cute, in fact, that squirrels probably feel awkward and heavy when she's around, while the anti-fur brigades must already have a team working to prevent her being made into a coat. She is wearing a medley of T-shirts and singlets that alternately cling to and drape off her tiny frame, causing male journalists to blush nervously during the interview and make terrible jokes instead of asking proper questions. Fortunately, she turns out to be a fan of British humour. "Since I was a child, my father was a big fan of Monty Python, Peter Sellers and Benny Hill," she explains in faltering English, pausing every few seconds to think of a word and humming softly as she does so.
"I used to watch all the shows with my father. The first time I saw Life of Brian, I laughed the most ever of my entire life. My stomach hurt."
This proved a useful infatuation when she arrived on Bunny's Nottingham set for weeks of improvisation. "I was very comfortable with the humour. The hard thing was that everyone spoke so quickly that I had to imagine what they were saying." Thus, she invented the film's imaginary-friend character, Conchita, who is superstitious and fancies bad boys such as Bunny; Eloisa, on the other hand, thinks timid, bashful Stephen may be worth a second look.
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"I had an imaginary friend myself," she explains. "She was small, with really long hair, and so naughty." She gives a brief giggle. "I had friends, but she was the friend I would love to have had. When I was 12, there were many changes and she disappeared." She smiles. "Her name was Susanna. And I said to Paul, the director, 'I would not like to call the friend in the film Susanna. I think Susanna would not be happy, you know? If I don't ask her.'" She laughs and shrugs.
Given her skilful clowning around the surreal oddness of Bunny and the Bull's sets and scripts, it seems strange that Echegui's route to Britain came via hard-hitting realist cinema in Spain, playing junkies, bank robbers, Basque terrorists and kids from the wrong side of the tracks. In her breakthrough Spanish movie, My Name Is Juani, she played a provincial girl with a shiftless father and an unfaithful boyfriend, who flees to Madrid in a failed bid to become an actress.
"I like drama and comedy," she explains, "but my favourite films are science fiction - Blade Runner, Mad Max and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind." So, does that mean Hollywood tempts her? She thinks for a minute.
"I am still very young," she shrugs. "I had my first job from drama school. I think I need to have some time to grow up first. When I was eight or nine, I believed there was an island in some place where all the people in the movies were living and working. Well, there is a place: Hollywood. The island is why I wanted to act. I thought it was a place lost in the world, where you could be whatever you wanted and you could be always playing. I was always dreaming I would go to this place. But now I'm actually doing it, it's..." A pause.
"In some ways, it is disappointing." She smiles and imparts the wisdom of her 26 years: "Things are never like you imagine." Then she's gone, leaving just the softest wisp of imagination behind her.
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Bunny and the Bull opens on November 27