“The films of François Ozon provide a good reason to get excited about cinema – and stay excited. His presence was announced in the mid-90s by some succulent short films including A Summer Dress, in which the erotic focus is cleverly transferred onto a dress with which three characters – two squabbling gay teenagers and a beachfront floozy – come into contact.

The most astonishing of these short films is See the Sea, a psychological thriller about a young mother in a French coastal town who befriends a sinister female backpacker. See the Sea attracted comparisons with Chabrol, Polanski and Clouzot. It is beautifully shot, full of alluring images of tranquility, each of which is contaminated with menace. Only David Lynch has so comprehensively covered his tracks after an expedition into the unsavory unknown.

Ozon made his full-length debut with Sitcom – a camp comedy which paid affectionate homage to John Waters and Luis Buñuel. The frivolity of Sitcom was unexpected after See the Sea, but then unpredictability is one of the qualities to be treasured in Ozon's choice of styles and subjects. He goes where his inspiration takes him, regardless of jarring switches in tone or genre, with the result that one film can be, superficially, strikingly different from another – but who ever held that against Powell and Pressburger?”

Extract by Ryan Gilbey taken from Projections 12: Film-makers on Film Schools (Faber & Faber, 2002).

His subsequent films include Criminal Lovers (a thriller about two teenagers who murder a classmate which warps into a homoerotic take on Hansel and Gretel), Water Drops on Burning Rocks (an adaptation of an obscure play by Fassbinder), 8 Women (an Agatha Christie musical comedy), 5x2 (the birth and death of a marriage told backwards), Time to Leave (a tale of a young man with a terminal disease, with Jeanne Moreau at her most profound and wise), and Angel (his first film in English based on an Elizabeth Taylor novel).

But the height of his achievement are his two films with Charlotte Rampling – Swimming Pool (a sinister tale with the seductive Ludivine Sagnier) and Under the Sand – a moving study of grief and isolation about a woman who retreats into fantasy when she is unable to accept her husband's disappearance The film's chilly beauty never feels cosmetic: each shot, each frame, pulls us into this widow's solitude, until the last moment, when Ozon abruptly severs our ties with her. The shattering final shot leaves her to wade deeper into her own delusions.

François Ozon has this to say about his approach to his work:

"I began with Super 8 because I didn't have anything to record sound with, so I had to write my stories without dialogue and just by using the images, the actors and the situation. So I had to work in a particular way, like the first directors of silent films, and very quickly I picked up a sense of the image and of making the story very visual. That's also why I now try to make my films without dialogue as much as possible, or to just use dialogue that isn't so direct, because I don't like it when things are conveyed by the dialogue.

I write because I want to film. First I have the image in my head and then I have to write, because I need to communicate and share my work with the team that will make the film with me. When I made my Super-8 movies, I didn't need to share, I was alone. I had the camera, no sound, and I lit everything myself, it was just me. And I'd tell the actors, 'Do this, do that, and that's it'...Once I took the Super-8 camera off my father – it was the camera he made the family home movies with – I realized directing was for me, because I could be hidden by the camera and yet I could also express myself and make very passionate things without revealing it was me who made them. I liked the idea of being behind a camera saying very personal things using other people. It was like wearing a mask, and I liked that because I was very shy at that age. I eventually lost that shyness by making movies – because as a director you have to explain what you want, you have to express yourself and communicate with people."

Extract taken from Screenwriters' Masterclass: Screenwriters Talk About Their Greatest Movies, edited by Kevin Conroy Scott (Faber & Faber, 2005).