Long-awaited UK movie Fanny Lye Deliver’d, a regular fixture on Cannes prediction lists, has finally been delivered.

Thomas Clay’s third feature, shot in 35mm, bows this week at the BFI London Film Festival after more than three years in post-production, a delay that prompted speculation over the movie’s health and whereabouts. Ahead of the film’s premiere, Deadline had the first opportunity to sit down with multi-hyphenate Clay and get the inside track on his passion project’s winding road to screen.

“It’s going to be strange putting the film in front of an audience, it has been so long,” the 40 year-old director tells us. Clay, whose previous two feature-length films played at Cannes (The Great Ecstasy Of Robert Carmichael in 2005 and Soi Cowboy in 2008), has spent the best part of a decade working on this feature.

Styled as a “Puritan Western,” Fanny Lye stars Maxine Peake...