He’s one of France’s hottest film-makers. He makes award-winning movies filled with knockout French femmes (including Catherine Deneuve and Ludivine Sagnier), bursting with transgressive sexual subtext and topped by occasional musical numbers. So what made the 40-year-old provocateur François Ozon shoot a traditional English period drama about a fictional Edwardian novelist?

“Did you think it was traditional?” he gasps in horror at the very thought that his new movie, Angel, about a deluded English writer played by Romola Garai (Atonement), might belong to the Merchant and Ivory stable. “I tried not to make it traditional at all, but to make it about dreams and fantasies, and the effects of fame, and how artists reinvent themselves and their lives.”

True, Angel is in some ways a confectionary of Ozon obsessions. His previous Palme d’Or-nominated Swimming Pool also focused on a formidable English scribe (Charlotte Rampling’s contemporary novelist). Here, however, Garai’s precocious Angel Deverell (based on the pulp Victorian writer Marie Corelli) is defined by her stormy relationship with her artist lover Esmé (Michael Fassbender) and her all-consuming imagination.

Yet does Ozon’s first full English-language feature represent another step towards the mainstream for this former enfant terrible? “I try not to think about that,” he says. “And I try not to analyse my work too much. That’s a very French pastime – French film directors love to analyse their movies, but I like to make them and let them live by themselves.”

Directing at a rate of one movie every year, Ozon switches genres with ease. He’s done gross black comedy in Sitcom, heavyweight melodrama in Under the Sand and musical whodunnit in 8 Women.

He burst onto the French film scene in 1998 as an openly gay film-maker . . .

“Actually I never say that I’m a gay film-maker,” he corrects. “In the films there are many things about my sexuality, but I’ve never declared anything about myself. It’s journalists who say it, especially in America, where your sexuality comes first, and after that your work. In France your work is first; they don’t really care about your sexuality.” He starts to giggle. “Or they just pretend not to care, but really they’re fascinated, like everyone else.”

The son of teacher parents, he says that he was a difficult child. “I was very shy and uncomfortable in my skin, in my development and in my sexuality.” However, when he borrowed his father’s 8mm camera and began to shoot family movies (often involving the murder of his parents by his younger brother, Guillaume) he knew that he had found his vocation. “When I directed people I had to trust myself, and have faith in myself,” he says. “After those first few films I never stopped.”

He is a graduate of the prestigious film school La Femis in Paris, and says that he slowly matured as a film-maker, and now finally doesn’t feel the need to provoke, as he did with Sitcom and Criminal Lovers. “I’m more of an adult now,” he says. “I can show my ideas with more distance, without being shocking.”

He prefers to work with actresses rather than actors. Women are better at “seducing” the camera, he says. And indeed the doyennes of French cinema can be found in Ozon’s work: Virginie Ledoyen, Isabelle Huppert and Emmanuelle Béart. He then adds mischievously: “But really I like working with women because they are like dolls to me! These actresses want to be beautiful in every scene. They want to look like models on the cover of a magazine. It was Buñuel who said that when you have a close-up you have to make it beautiful, so that’s what I do.”

He would consider making a movie in Hollywood but he’ll do it only if he’s given complete authorial control, as he has in Europe. He dismisses all discussion of his matinee-idol good looks, but flinches when he’s compared to Luc Besson – “Besson is fatter than me!” And he happily maintains that even though he makes a movie every year he has enough time for a Parisian private life. And a love life? “Yes, I have some love stories in my life too,” he says obliquely.

At the moment he is directing his next movie, Ricky. It follows the fortunes of an ordinary couple who have an extraordinary baby. It has many special effects, he says. Why? “Well, the baby is very strange. You’ll have to see the film to get it.”

In the meantime, he claims to have no driving ambitions. “I’m not sitting here waiting for super success. If I have the ability to get on with my films, and to make what I want and need to make, then that’s the most important thing.”

Angel is released on August 29 2008

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