Damien Odoul: The killer inside me

The French director Damien Odoul has divided the critics with his brutal take on peasant life. He talks to Matthew Sweet about ghosts and grotesques

It's dangerous to judge a director by his press notes. The potted biography supplied by Damien Odoul for his first feature, Le Souffle, makes him sound like a conceited undergraduate. "Born on 15 March, 1968 in Le Puy (Auvergne), Damien Odoul travelled Europe and Asia from the age of 16, published his first collection of poems at the age of 19 and directed his first short film at 20. Odoul wrote Le Souffle in 17 days."

Fortunately, the director is not as insufferable as the publicity dope would suggest. Even if he was, perhaps we'd have to forgive him for it: Le Souffle is an unusually rich film, an example of a species of European movie that has almost become extinct. Many directors have tried to gesture towards the kind of cinema that Tarkovsky, Bergman and Bresson used to make. Few get away with it without appearing deluded or impertinent, or emerging with their faces slicked with egg. Damien Odoul, however, seems to be one of them.

In his black tunic and black elasticated pants, Odoul appears dressed for the temple or the judo mat. Curled in an armchair by the fireside of a chichi Fitzrovian hotel, he certainly doesn't look like a product of the sheep-slitting, plonk-sloshing, mutton-guzzling rural culture in which his film is set. But that's what he claims to be. "It's very much autobiographical," he explains, "but I went through these experiences when I was younger than the character you see. David, the boy in the film, was 15 – I was 13. So I've lived this life, I've lived with the people, I know that world. And I did use the lives of people that I knew to make the story." One of his uncles appears in the film, and "saw himself doubled", says Odoul, in the character of David's uncle.

Some critics, however, remain unconvinced as to the film's authenticity. "I've had a very good press in France," notes Odoul, "but I think perhaps the foreign press have understood the film better, because the French press were saying that the peasant characters you see in the film don't really exist, that they were unreal stereotypes." He dismisses the charge. "The people writing that didn't know the world they were criticising. Interesting, isn't it? It's as if France didn't want to see its own monsters, its own freaks. But also they are monsters that I love." For the good reason, I suppose, that he is related to them.

Le Souffle is the first instalment in a proposed trilogy of self-exploration. (The next, Errance, which will be released in France in October, stars Laetitia Casta, a former underwear model for Victoria's Secret – but presumably not in the Odoul role.) "It was at the age of 30 that I decided to make Le Souffle," recounts Odoul. "And it's not a coincidence that I was double the age of the central character. My age mirrored that of the boy. It was necessary to create a double in order to better understand my own experiences, a double who would incarnate my own history." And if David is the director's double, he argues, the unfortunate younger boy in the story, Matthieu (Laurent Simon), is a reflection of David. "In the same way that David attempts to dispose of his double by shooting him, I felt it was necessary for me to extract myself from my own history."

This is all good Left Bank stuff: Cahiers du Cinema with a twist of Lacan. And listening to him talk about it produces the same feeling of nostalgia induced by his film – a vague longing for a time when European cinema seemed to be more austere, more serious, more theoretical, more poetic, less ironical.

Keen to hear some more, I ask why the notion of mirroring attracts him so much. He blows through his mouth in exasperation, as if I've just asked him to summarise The Mahabharata. "I could go on for a long time on this subject," he sighs, before doing exactly that. And as he speaks, he moves from a critical-theoretical register into out and out mysticism. He talks of how he has always been fascinated by the history of human development, from the Palaeolithic era to the Renaissance to the modern age – and how, in each of those time periods, he has identified individuals whom he believes, in some abstruse way, to be doubles of himself. This is not, I think, an example of the common vice of identifying with figures from history and flattering ourselves that they are our precursors, our representatives in the past. He means it much more literally. It's as if he believes that there are other Damien Odouls, scattered through time and space, who might communicate with him through their works. Quite how he zeroed in on the Palaeolithic ones, I'm not sure. "It is fascinating to me that there are these doubles at other points in human and intellectual history," he enthuses, describing, but not naming, some examples. "Somebody who understands the relationship between hunting and death and eroticism, or who understands the relationship between the planets and the Earth. Doubles of ourselves that exist throughout history."

Discussion of his religious views leads him back to the subject of cinema. "My formation was Christian. But now my thoughts about Christianity would make me a good candidate for excommunication." This, he says, is one of the qualities that mark him out from his great hero, Andrei Tarkovsky. Tarkovsky was an ardent Russian Orthodox Christian who spent his last days in constant prayer; Odoul's beliefs are more all-embracing. Paganism is his greatest enthusiasm – hence, I suppose, the emphasis on nature in Le Souffle. But Tarkovsky's ghost, it seems, is still making his presence felt.

Odoul is good friends with Anatole Dauman, the producer of Tarkovsky's final film, Sacrifice (1986). Finding himself in Paris with nowhere to stay, Odoul was offered a room in Dauman's apartment. He says that he found it impossible to sleep. "It was a charged atmosphere," he says, "a very bizarre atmosphere. Afterwards, I said to Anatole, 'why is the atmosphere in your flat so strange?' 'Oh, I forgot to tell you,' he said. 'Tarkovsky died in that room.' "

On the way out, Odoul begins to curse Stephen Soderbergh for remaking Tarkovsky's Solaris (1972), the sci-fi parable in which the crew of a space station is haunted by shades of the people they most loved. "It was like a video clip!" he exclaims. "It made me really angry." I suggest that, had Soderbergh been a character in the film, it would have been Tarkovsky who visited him in the form of an alien ghost. He agrees. "All the way through, you can feel Soderbergh's frustration. It's as if he's saying, 'I could have been a son of Bergman and Tarkovsky!' But it's not true." Is Odoul any less certain about his own parentage? "I don't want to compare myself to Tarkovsky because he is a master, and I'm only a small talent at the beginning of my career." I think that almost counts as modesty.

'Le Souffle' is currently on release