Outlaw is brought to you by the #*!£@ (to quote the website) that gave you The Business and The Football Factory and has become an experiment in film financing for its entrepreneurial young British writer/director, Nick Love. Taking its cue from the storyline of dissent and subversion, Outlaw is to be partly financed by its fans. In a bold initiative by Love and distributor Vertigo Films, Outlaw 's website is a dedicated portal to raising funds. Probably one of the first commercial movies to take on such a venture, they are hoping it will raise at least half of the required a �1.5m budget.

"The subject matter is about the streets if you like, the common man," says Love, "and I don't think it was too cheeky of the film to turn round to the common man and say - well do you want to get involved?"

"The idea essentially comes from us lot scratching our brains going how can we be innovative and democratic," he explains. "It's not hard to get money from the film business, it's hard to get sensible money from the film business."

Some people have criticised them for not giving a financial return on the money handed over, but Love argues they are doing all the hard work of producing the film and need to make some money themselves. That's showbusiness. "So it sort of goes back to us wanting to do something different, and I think you can only do it with a film like this, where it is about democracy going wrong and people losing their voice and the streets becoming quite dangerous if you like, and a group of people deciding to do something about it. You couldn't have done it with my last film, let's say, because it wasn't that sort of a film."

Outlaw 's website has been carefully crafted by Love to reflect the film's premise of a society drunk on violence where the solution to growing anarchy is guns and more violence. Users must agree that they are of age to view its violent and disturbing content, which contains images of hangings, paramilitary-style balaclavas and games like Nonce Hunter. Love insists the site will get a different reaction from each person who visits it, and should to a certain extent be viewed with his same sideways look at the subject.

Having opted for such emotive imagery on the site, is he concerned about what type of people it might attract? "If someone's just parting with a tenner over the internet I suppose it is very hard to vet people but certainly I've never made a film where I want to endorse violent behaviour. We don't want thugs turning up on the film set. Having said that we had lots of thugs on The Football Factory and they were all really nice. I don't disagree with you in terms of the website, it has got a kind of startling feel to it. But we haven't designed it as a comedy, but I hope there is a tongue in cheek feel to it somewhere in the sense that's it's kind of cartoonised." Love is the best judge of his audience after all, as he has said many times he isn't making films for Guardian readers.

Anyone giving money through the site is not seen as an investor, they get no return or say in how the film is made, but rather an 'executive producer'. Three tiers of donation (�10, �50 and �100) get you a range of gifts from a t-shirt, a credit on the DVD, a gig as an extra or an invitation to the premiere. At this stage it's impossible to predict how much money might be raised, but Love thinks around a quarter of a million pounds is realistic. The concept is certainly there in the accessibity of the amounts involved, and the idea of giving something back that costs the filmmakers very little (a t-shirt) or nothing at all (a film credit).

Coating themes of the disenfranchised resorting to violence in football hooliganism (The Football Factory) and Costa del Sol crime (The Business), Love now presents violence as a means of coping with failures of the system in a much more explicit form. Outlaw is set in the near-future (2007), violent crime in the UK has reached epidemic levels and the authorities can't cope. Left to fend for themselves as the law fails more people than it can protect, they (mainly men) begin to form outlaw gangs to administer balaclava-clad justice as they see fit. "It's strong imagery," says Love, "it does conjure up kind of raw emotion, and it's supposed to because we're not living in a pleasant society at the moment."

Sometimes accused of glorifying or celebrating violence and crime, Love is adamant that his film don't endorse this lifestyle. "It's an incredibly difficult film to make because it's a real juggling act, you don't want to go round promoting, 'oh let's form gangs and go round fucking battering people' because that's wrong, but yet it's a subject that people feel - it's subject that's emotive to everybody, and so it's a tough one. It's a departure for me because all the films I've made before are sort of black comedies in one sense or another, you know they're very insular little worlds, whereas this is much more about very real people slowly getting drawn into a world of violence. It is a violent film. Clearly you can't make a film like this without it being violent, but the first part of the film is very much about the motivation and the decision and that sort of stuff."

He also believes it would be extremely arrogant of him to assume that his films are persuasive enough to encourage violent behaviour. "I would have been horrified if people had come back from the European Cup and said, 'Oh I stabbed this bloke because I saw The Football Factory '. But the fact is nothing happened. The films I've made I don't think are that powerful."

The most popular t-shirt design chosen on the website has been the balaclava head on a pink t-shirt, hardly the most aggressive colour, and one that spikes Love's wry sense of humour. "It says a lot about the male culture these days when they want to wear sort of hard balaclava t-shirts with a nice sort of vicious pink background."

Outlaw will be shot in documentary style, as the real CCTV footage bought by Love to make the film's trailer hints at. "It's very raw and violent that particular little promo and I guess that's for people to go, 'Fucking hell!' Just a wake-up sort of thing, but the film certainly won't feel like an assault on the senses to that level I don't think. Obviously there are some scenes that kind of get really quite bad. The Business looked like a sort of a fairy-tale, it was big and colourful and glossy, whereas this will be much more documentary style, in a very real kind of way, but not documentary style as in the camera shaking and you can't fucking see anything, you'll always have a feeling of the camera hovering as opposed to being really staged."

Outlaw's premise is a hard-hitting one, and maybe one that is already with us. For its director it's about exploring the mentality of people who have reason to act violently in extreme circumstances. Is there a part of him that would like to see Outlaw's premise become a reality? "You see on the news occasionally there are people that are starting to do it, you are starting to see no-go areas. I don't think it will take much for people to want to start self-policing. The characters in the film are the Everyman, but they all have a very definite motive. It's not like me sitting around thinking one day: 'You know what there's a bloke down there who's bullied those kids, I'm gonna fucking put a bat round his head'. At the end of the day, they're not real people, they are essentially film characters so you give them extra motives, a heightened sense of purpose, they've all had serious damage inflicted on them."

It seems likely that Outlaw will appeal to Love's established fanbase as he continues to explore the motivations behind hard-man violence. It could also net him the usual criticism for glorifying aggression and preying on popular fears, but as most of his detractors are unlikely to go and see the film Love can remain undaunted. Some may also see his maverick fundraising initiative as a cynical way of getting free funding, but it's undeniable that he is also exploring a very democratic and inclusive avenue that allows the Everyman, or woman, to be involved in a film essentially about them.

If you would like to give some money to the making of Outlaw, follow the instructions on the website: www.outlawthemovie.com