Picture the scene. You’re an aspiring young film-maker from Austin, Texas; you’ve arrived in LA but you’ve crashed your car; your girlfriend’s just left you; your laptop’s been stolen; you have nowhere to live; you’ve lost a tooth, and you have nothing in the world but $150 in your pocket. And yet still, somehow, somewhere in your mind, you are kind of excited. Welcome to the world of Alex Holdridge.

“I remember standing in a pool of someone else’s pee, in a shower in this crappy apartment, and thinking, well, even after everything that’s happened at least I’m here, and I’m doing it!,” says the indefatigable 33-year-old director of In Search of a Midnight Kiss, while sipping a breakfast espresso in a North London café. That film, he says, shot soon after his calamitous arrival, was supposed to be his barbed quasi-autobiographical portrait of life in Los Angeles.

Initially called If LA Fell into the Sea I Wouldn’t Miss It, it would be a witty, hipster account of an aspiring writer called Wilson (Scoot McNairy) and a wannabe actress called Vivian (Sara Simmonds), and their bittersweet blind date on New Year’s Eve.

Yet as the movie progressed, financed by credit and donations from friends, Holdridge realised that his affection for the city and his own romantic optimism was creeping in, transforming the film into a love letter to the location as well as the characters. “You look up at that Hollywood sign,” he says, “And you can’t help but think of all those people who came before you, all those talented people, and all those people whose stories were never told. It affects you.”

The film, shot in soft-focus black and white and in deserted downtown locations, has put Holdridge, ironically, on the Hollywood map. Written in just ten days, and shot in 16, it is the culmination, he says, of all his early film-making ambitions. It has also made him the tyro of Tinseltown. “My life has changed,” he says. “All the doors are wide open now. It’s like being a kid in a candy store. I can have access to whatever I want.”

It’s been a long journey for Holdridge. Growing up the son of a Nasa engineer who moved the family from city to city, he always wanted to be a stand-up comedian, he says. Then, at the age of 19, he saw The Graduate for the first time and knew that film-making was his future. “I never thought that a movie could reso-nate with me on that level,” he says. “I just thought, ‘I have to do this’.”

He has had a previous dalliance with Hollywood. His first Austin-based movie, Wrong Numbers, was a raunchy comedy about two teens who spend their final high-school night roaming the town in search of beer. Hollywood was interested in a remake, and Holdridge met producers and writers and began development. The process was slow, he lost interest, and instead shot his next Austin feature, Sexless. When he eventually returned to Hollywood Wrong Numbers was mysteriously dead, although the comedy king Judd Apatow just happened to be producing a movie at the same studio called Superbad, a raunchy comedy about two teens who spend their final high-school night roaming the town in search of beer.

Holdridge is too polite, and too political, to point fingers today. “It was devastating,” he says, “But I had originally walked away from it. So, when I came back, somebody else had, er, come up with the same concept.”

It was a sobering lesson. And it stays with him even now, as he juggles multiple projects, including a big-budget comedy called 500 Ways to Kill Yourself, an adaptation of Jonathan Ames’s novel Wake Up, Sir!, and a French thriller called Hate in Paris. “It taught me that no matter how hot you think you are, you’re always only really one step away from applying for a job at Starbucks.”

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