Sam Taylor-Wood was on the red carpet at Cannes when she realised that British artists had arrived in the film world.

“I had a funny moment with Steve McQueen,” she said, before last night’s premiere of her debut feature Nowhere Boy, the closing night gala of The Times BFI London Film Festival.

It was May 2008 and McQueen, a Turner prizewinner who represented the United Kingdom at this year’s Venice Biennale, was about to receive the Camera d’Or award from Dennis Hopper for Best First Film. Taylor-Wood was in line for a Palme d’Or for best short film for her punchy teenage romance Love You More.

“We literally bumped into each other on the red carpet and I had a flashback to the two of us standing in line at a nightclub in Manchester 10 or 15 years ago, trying to convince them we were on the guest list and them saying ‘What’s your name?’ and him going, ‘Steve McQueen’ and them saying, ‘Yeah? You can f*** off’.

“Then fast forward, we’re both on the red carpet at Cannes, we’ve both got films there and I just turned to him and said something really stupid. I was nervous. I just went, ‘hee, hee, look at us’. It was one of those weird sort of colliding moments.”

British visual artists who make it from the garret to the glitz of the film festival circuit will never be quite so surprised again. Artists have always dabbled in the film world, back to the time of Salvador Dalí, who created a dream sequence for Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound. But the best British directors have tended to work their way up through the film industry or arrive from advertising or the theatre.

Now after the acclaim heaped on McQueen’s film about the IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands and Taylor-Wood’s bouncy take on John Lennon’s coming of age in 1950s Liverpool, British artists have never been more in demand as film-makers.

The Chapman brothers are working on a horror film and one other very prominent artist of Taylor-Wood and McQueen’s generation is at an early stage of preparing a feature film with support from the UK Film Council and Arts Council England.

The Scottish artist Douglas Gordon enchanted critics at Cannes three years ago with his football film Zidane, A 21st Century Portrait. Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and Wolfgang Tillmans have all made short films.

Tim Marlow, the director of exhibitions at Taylor-Wood’s gallery, White Cube, points out that something similar happened in the United States in the 1980s. He said: “Without proclaiming that the British artists are coming, I think you are on to something.”

Andrew Brown, senior strategist for the visual arts at Arts Council England is convinced. “We are going to see more of this,” he said. He credited modern art schools, which he said rarely had separate departments for painting, sculpture or video. “As a result contemporary artists don’t recognise the boundaries.”

Taylor-Wood agrees. “It seems there’s a new wave of film-makers coming from the fine art world rather than the film-making world,” she said.

Taylor-Wood has been making video art since 1993, which encouraged the London Film Festival to stage an interview looking back at her film-making career at BFI Southbank on Tuesday night, even though Nowhere Boy is her debut feature. She said that she planned to go on creating art but had film-making in her blood.

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