It is a Hollywood truism that film-makers and their films, like dogs and their owners, are sometimes eerily similar beasts. Think of the rat-a-tat intensity of Martin Scorsese and his obsessively textured movies. Or the swaggeringly self-satisfied Michael Bay and his loud bombastic blockbusters. Thus, when meeting the fêted French director Jacques Audiard in person, it’s hardly surprising to discover that the man behind the visceral white-knuckle prison drama A Prophet is, in short, restlessness personified.

In an upmarket hotel bar, in the snazzy Yorkville district of Toronto (where Audiard is promoting his movie), the 55-year-old director, wiry and lithe in denims, open shirt and baseball cap, will simply not sit still. He moves, rapidly and erratically, from the chair to the couch opposite, to the floor (really!), to standing, to pacing, and back to the chair, and to the floor again. It helps, of course, that A Prophet is a handheld joyride of a movie, one that follows the fortunes of a young Arab convict called Malik (Tahar Rahim) who transforms himself, over the course of a six-year stretch, into a powerful criminal kingpin. It is an exercise in dramatic intimacy that is made all the more visceral by a camera that continually buzzes around Malik, over his shoulders and in his face, and hints at a sense of realism previously unseen in prison films.

“But this is nothing new,” says Audiard, modestly deflecting any sense of innovation here. “Treating genre with realism is always an option in the paint box for any film-maker. Look at Mean Streets. Look at Gomorrah. I was thrilled by the way these films used genre to observe reality in a very intimate way.”

He adds, nonetheless, it was important for him that the film avoided looking either like a documentary, or “like something created by US television.” And so he built an entire prison set in Paris, filled it with an extraordinary range of French actors – from the veteran Niels Arestrup (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) to Rahim, a newcomer — and then littered the movie with fantastical dream sequences and delicate flights of fancy, including a ghostly cellmate for Malik. The latter sequences were included, Audiard notes, “not because of an intention to be mystical, but as a way of giving Malik an inner life, and exploring what goes on in his head behind closed doors.”

Malik’s Arab ethnicity was also very deliberate, says Audiard, whose four previous features have included among them the thriller Read My Lips, and the award-winning crime drama The Beat That My Heart Skipped. “In French cinema, you see Arabs in one of two contexts, either naturalistically in a social realist context, or in a genre fiction playing a terrorist. And we didn’t want to do that. We wanted our Arabs to be heroes.”

The finished film charts Malik’s journey in unsparing detail. He is hugely sympathetic, thoughtful and intelligent. And yet he also murders to get ahead within the barbaric prison society. It’s this complexity that Audiard champions, this urge to be free of what he calls “black and white moralising” which has made him such a celebrated find of recent years. Thus though he’s been writing movies since the 1970s, I wonder if his decision to wait until the mid-1990s before becoming a director made him a better, more mature, film-maker?

He winces and, naturally, leaps up from his chair, paces, and sits down on the floor. “That would be totally presumptuous of me, if I was to say that I’m a ‘better’ film-maker,” he says. “But as well as being a writer, I did work as an editor, too, for seven years, which helped me to understand how films are put together.”

Audiard admits that there was a certain inevitability to his career choice. His father, Michel Audiard, was a famous French writer-director, and his uncle was a producer. Growing up in Paris, he planned to become a teacher, and even briefly studied literature at the Sorbonne. But the call of moviemaking was too strong. “I looked around me and the whole world seemed to be involved in film-making,” he says. So, did he ever feel competition with his father? He laughs at this. “My father was an execrable director! So no!” he says, chuckling. He adds: “He was a wonderful writer, though. Just not so good as a director.” (Audiard Sr wrote the iconic 1981 French thriller Garde à vue which was eventually remade in 2000 with Gene Hackman as Under Suspicion.)

Today Audiard, who lives in Paris with his wife and three children, has little to fear from competitors, and indeed the Grand Jury prize that A Prophet won at this year’s Cannes Film Festival suggests that he’s currently one of French cinema’s hottest commodities.

He is determined, however, to hit the ground running, and is already preparing an adaptation of Rust and Bone by Craig Davidson, a Canadian writer. The film will be based in the world of boxing and dog-fighting, and it will be, says Audiard, “tragic, and with despairing characters once more”. He gives another mocking smile, as if he knows that he can only undersell his own genius. And then he’s up again, back on the move, restless as ever, on his feet again, and out the door.

A Prophet will be shown on Oct 24 at 7pm, Vue5 and Oct 26 at 12.30pm, Vue5. It goes on general release on Jan 15, 2010

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