When Stephan Elliott arrives at The Times BFI 52nd London Film Festival he’ll be doing much more than celebrating the British premiere of his sparkling new movie, Easy Virtue. In fact, the Australian director, best-known for his exuberant The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, will be saluting life itself. After almost dying in a skiing accident in 2004 that shattered his back, legs and pelvis, merely walking down the red carpet will be a miracle in itself.

The 44-year-old is well aware of how lucky he is. “Everything from there to there is steel now,” he smiles, pointing from below his neck to just above his groin. “I’m entirely titanium.” There’s no self-pity in his voice, even over the rigorous pilates sessions he endures every week — “or I’ll turn to cement”.

The accident put into context Elliott’s previous main worry — how to follow up Priscilla, his riotous tale, made in 1994, of three drag queens on the road. “I’ve always been too frightened by the weight of it, the expectations,” he admits. In 1997 he made another comedy set in the Outback, Welcome to Woop Woop and, two years later, the espionage thriller Eye of the Beholder. Both films flopped. “They were not good experiences; they were miserable,” he says. “I became absolutely disenchanted. I walked away, promised that I’d never make another movie again.”

In a typically Australian move, Elliot decided to wander the globe, fitting in as much of his lifelong passion, skiing, as he could. “Then I skied off a cliff in France,” he says, matter-of-factly. “I was haemorrhaging internally, the helicopter couldn’t land . . . everything was going wrong. I said to the doctor, ‘I’m haemorrhaging, aren’t I?’ And he said, ‘Yeah. But when the blood arrives, you’ll be fine. We just need to get more blood into you.’ ”

When the air ambulance finally descended a nurse jumped out and opened her cooler bag, only to find it was empty. With enough French to know what was happening as the medical team started screaming at each other, Elliott asked the doctor how long he had left to live. “He said, ‘Ten minutes, so make your peace.’ And I did. For ten minutes, I thought about everything and I let go.”

Elliott woke up in hospital five days later. “They sent another ambulance up, got the blood in me, and I survived. I couldn’t believe that I was alive.”

His nervous system was shattered — “I still have a lot of problems” — and doctors even told him he had no chance of walking again. It took a year before he could begin the intensive physiotherapy needed to help him to get mobile. “I had a lot of post-traumatic stress,” he says. “Not being able to walk, that period was very tough. And, yes, it does with f*** with your head. But the second I realised I could walk again . . . it was just absolute sheer grit on my part.”

Eighteen months later he was walking and, remarkably, last year, he started skiing again. “Defiant little p****!"”he mutters, almost to himself. The experience changed his outlook. “It frees you up,” he says. “It changes your perspective on everything. F*** money. F*** all of it. It doesn’t matter. It’ll always work out.”

He dismisses the idea that he’s been given a second chance as “absolute crap”. “I absolutely live for the day. I’ve become more aggressive, more angry and more determined to get on with it. You know what? I could get hit by a bus tomorrow and I’m fine with it.”

Not long after he was back on his feet, Elliott was offered an adaptation of a little-known Noël Coward play, Easy Virtue. Set in the 1920s, the story follows Larita (Jessica Biel), a devilish American divorcée who marries a naive Englishman (Ben Barnes). They arrive at his family’s country pile, where she irks her new in-laws — in particular the steely Mrs Whittaker (Kristin Scott Thomas) — with her liberal attitudes.

“There’s a real sense of rebellion in this piece,” says Elliott, who took some serious liberties with Coward’s original play, not least in the casting of Justin Timberlake’s other half as Larita. “When I met Jessica I could see there was a sparkle, but like all great Hollywood movie stars she kept it in check,” he says. “I said, ‘There’s a naughty girl in there’, so half of my job was getting her to let go.” Elliott is not shy about talking up the tensions on-set, particularly between his leading ladies. He compares Biel and Scott Thomas to “cats circling each other” and it’s evident that he fed off that. “I’d just scream ‘Action’ and let them go — the electricity of that was amazing.”

As for Scott Thomas, “she terrified the hell out of everybody”, although Elliott couldn’t resist winding her up. “She was screaming at me . . . she’d say: ‘I’ve had enough.’ She was in a grey wig and a cardigan and I’d say: ‘Disney witch!’ And she’d say: ‘That’s the worst piece of direction!’ Then I’d say: ‘Moustache twirling!’ And she’d get the giggles.”

This is how Elliott has always worked, painting in broad strokes — a result, perhaps, of grafting his way through the Australian film industry during the 1980s. Born in Sydney, he was the “original pimply faced audio-visual kid” who was given a camera at 7 and decided on a career as a director a year later. After school he worked for six months in an editing suite before going on-set as a dishwasher. In 1984 things changed when, while making the period piece Silver City, he volunteered to throw straw from a moving truck full of sheep. “I had 37 takes with sheep shitting all over me,” he laughs, “but it gave me a break.”

Subsequently forging a career as an assistant director, he worked on more than 30 films before making his debut as a director in 1993, with the oddball comedy Frauds, starring Phil Collins.

He was always highly focused, and he knows why. “I was basically celibate from about 16 through to 24,” Elliott says. “I did not have sex at all. A very strange period of my life. I was just like a machine; didn’t know what drugs and alcohol were.” By the time Priscilla arrived, though, Elliott had admitted in the press that he was gay, while sternly adding: “It’s really none of anyone else’s business.”

Priscilla turned the land down under into a world of high camp, a transformation set to be repeated in the West End when the stage version arrives in March. Elliott promises that the show — which will star Jason Donovan — will be even more extravagant than the film. He should know — adapting the film was one of the tasks Elliott completed during his recuperation. “It’s so f***ing naughty,” he says gleefully. “The language is so foul.”

Meanwhile, as Elliot continues to work on Black Oasis, his long-gestating script about the murdered Fifties B-movie actress Susan Cabot, he’s thinking about taking on Hollywood, something he always ran from after Priscilla. “It’s part of this new lease of life,” he says. “It’ll be a big dumb film but who cares? I might have a good time. I’m at a point now where I’m not so frightened of what I should do with my career.”

It seems that the gung-ho manner in which he once flung himself down the ski-slope has finally been channelled into his work. “Oh, yeah,” he grins. “I’m worse now. Much worse.”

Easy Virtue will be screened at The Times BFI London Film Festival on Tues (Odeon West End 2, 8.30pm) and Weds (Rich Mix, 8.45pm). It is released on Nov 7 2008

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