In the 2002 television documentary The Trouble with Michel, the English novelist Will Self famously described his French counterpart, Michel Houellebecq, as “just a little guy who can’t get enough sex. That’s it, isn’t it?”.

Well, yes and no. Last year, Houellebecq was still complaining to an interviewer about how “solitary and sexually frustrated” he was. But he was also showing signs of uncharacteristic joy. His dream of one day directing a film was about to become a reality. His first feature film, The Possibility of an Island, which he adapted from his 2005 novel of the same name, is now in postproduction.

Its location and look were inspired by the arid, volcanic landscapes of Lanzarote, where Houellebecq, who spends most of the year in Spain, often goes to sunbathe nude. “Before it became a book, The Possibility of an Island was just a bunch of impressions about living a solitary life with my dog in a deserted place,” Houellebecq writes on the film’s website. “That and the fact that certain Spanish landscapes evoked a feeling of what it would be like after the disappearance of the human race. Right from the beginning, the visual aspect was totally present. That’s why it seemed natural for me to direct it myself.”

The film, which cost £4.8m to make, stars the French actor Benoît Magimel (the young stud in Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher) as both Daniel 1 and his clone, Daniel 25, who exists years into the future, after the human race has suffered numerous natural cataclysms and been all but wiped out. Other members of the French-speaking cast include the veteran Belgian actor Patrick Bachau, as Daniel 1’s father and the high priest of a religious cult in favour of human cloning; the appropriately ageless Arielle Dombasle, as the cult’s Mexican delegate; and, as Marie 23, the Malian actress Ramata Koite, who, if the photos on the website are any guide, spends much of her screen time frolicking naked in the sea.

What kind of erotic impact Houellebecq’s film will have is a moot point. In the book, he makes clear his disdain for the work of the American director Larry Clark (Kids, Ken Park), whose sexually explicit films he detests for their “vulgarity” and “cynicism”. This seems a bit rich coming from a writer whose novels have described the ins and outs of sexual tourism and swingers’ clubs. Instead, Houellebecq champions the work of the Austrian Haneke, “the painful and moral” nature of whose films – Hidden, Code Unknown, Funny Games – he says is the antithesis of Clark’s work.

Houellebecq is not without film-making credentials. He gained a diploma in cinematography from the Ecole Louis-Lumière in Paris in 1981, and has directed three shorts, including an erotic short, La Rivière, in 2001. “I framed a lot of the shots myself [on The Possibility of an Island],” Houellebecq told Les Inrockuptibles magazine. “Better to do it yourself than ask someone else. But I do find it difficult to concentrate at the same time on the actors and on something when it’s moving, so I didn’t frame the moving shots.”

By becoming a fully fledged film-maker at the age of 51, Houellebecq is following in the footsteps of other noted French novelists, including Marguerite Duras and Alain Robbe-Grillet. Duras, best known for her innovative chamber piece India Song (1975), decided to direct because she was dissatisfied with the kind of films other directors had made from her oeuvre, especially Tony Richardson’s The Sailor from Gibraltar (1967). Houellebecq was similarly put out when his 1998 novel Atomised was made into a German film, not a French one. Later, he refused to sell Michael Winterbottom the rights to his terror-themed novel Platform, and wrote a screenplay of his own, which never went into production.

Hopefully, some of Houellebecq’s impish humour will find its way in and leaven a film that is essentially about the end of the world. It will also be interesting to see if the constant name-dropping and discursive pop-cultural references that permeate the novel survive. Connoisseurs of French blue movies, however, might be in for a shock. “People who are waiting for a porno are going to be disappointed,” the film’s producer, Eric Altmeyer, has said. “Michel has refocused his intentions on the passing of time . . .” Could it be that the little guy, to paraphrase Will Self, has finally had enough of sex? That’s it, isn’t it?

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