The name “Quentin” clearly operates as a lucky charm if you’re an idiosyncratic film-maker, especially if you deal with sudden death, craziness and Z-movie Americana. But only one Quentin – the French one, the weirder one – can these days genuinely be called a cult director. Quentin Dupieux’s films are admired, even loved, in France; puzzled over in the US; and as yet, largely unknown in the UK. That may change with the arrival of Deerskin (2019), his first theatrical release in Britain. It’s about that most universal of themes: a man’s morbidly, even murderously obsessive passion for a cowboy jacket. Starring French box-office fixture Jean Dujardin (The Artist) and respected art-house regular Adèle Haenel (Portrait of a Lady on Fire), Deerskin is a very black comedy – although its colour scheme is bizarrely dominated by shades of suede-like beige. Its hero, Georges, is a man obsessed with a tasseled buckskin blouson, the sort once seen on the sleeves of LPs by 60s California bands who fancied themselves as western bandits. On a Skype call from Uzès in the south of France, Dupieux, who sports a dense shrubbery of black beard and a dishevelled mop of hair one hesitates to call “Borisian”, explains that Georges’s jacket is a garment that has haunted the director himself for 20 years, ever since he used it in a music video. “From the start, I had that kind of jacket in mind. Yes, it’s super-cheesy, and you wouldn’t want to wear it, but it was really important that Jean shouldn’t look ridiculous wearing it. We wanted it to look good on him. The first time you see it, you think: ‘What a ridiculous jacket’ – and bit by bit you realise that actually, it’s not that bad. “We’re all a little bit Georges. Any of us can have that moment where something snaps and everything collapses into obsession. It’s like old ladies who collect owls, or rappers who own 500 pairs of trainers. It’s fetishism, but it’s also a form of modern madness. I can see loneliness behind all these cases.” Dupieux pauses. “OK, I’m talking about it in these serious terms, but what I really wanted was to make people laugh.” But that’s the thing about Deerskin, and Dupieux’s films in general. You’re rarely certain whether you’re meant to laugh – whether they are really comedies, or conceptual art projects just pretending to be comedies. Deerskin certainly has serious ideas at heart, which it handles with deadpan delicacy. But what to make of the trippy, disconnected feel of his 2012 California fantasy Wrong? “That’s what I like,” says Dupieux. “I have a problem with films whenever anything is signposted, when the codes are too obvious.” His films have often baffled audiences, and infuriated critics. Variety said his 2013 movie, Wrong Cops, “should head straight to movie jail without passing Go”. But you suspect Dupieux relishes such responses. Rubber (2010) is a US-shot, mock B-movie about a used tyre that takes revenge on humanity by making its victims’ heads explode. Dupieux dramatised viewer perplexity by having an audience in the film watching the action through binoculars, none too impressed with the result (“It’s already boring!” a child complains, six minutes in). Rubber also started with what has been read as the director’s artistic manifesto: a policeman explaining to us that often things happen in films for no reason, and that what we’re about to see is “a homage to the ‘no reason’, that most timeless element of style”. Born in 1974 in Essonne, a department south of Paris, Dupieux discovered film in his teens, mainly through American horror on rental video. He was also a fan of veteran French provocateur Bertrand Blier (Les Valseuses) and the surrealist maestro Luis Buñuel (but not David Lynch, he says, although he’s invariably likened to him). He got into music “when the equipment became available … a sampler, a computer for sequencing” and started making his own techno, then directing his own videos. One of them, featuring a furry yellow puppet, resulted in Dupieux being hired to make a Levi’s ad. The ad, and the puppet – remodelled and called Flat Eric – spawned the video for Flat Beat, recorded by Dupieux as “Mr Oizo”. A slab of remarkably single-minded thumping minimalism, it became an improbable No 1 in six countries, including the UK, briefly sparking a wave of Ericmania. The puppet still appears in occasional Mr Oizo videos, such as 2016’s Hand in the Fire, where Eric has a female counterpart who sings with the voice of Charli XCX. “I’m not going to kill him off,” says Dupieux. “He keeps me connected with things in my childhood.” Mr Oizo’s success was contemporary with a generation of French club musicians – Daft Punk, Cassius, Étienne de Crécy et al – that was dubbed “the French Touch”, but Dupieux says he was never part of that wave. “Those guys were really talented, and totally into music – they all knew such and such a record from such and such a year. My attitude to music is much more brutal. I don’t like much music, actually.” Dupieux classifies Mr Oizo’s output as “conceptual … naive”, and has mocked his own recordings on screen, notably in Wrong, where a clueless cop plays some of his more rebarbative selections, believing that it’s “what the kids are into”. Now Dupieux has stopped using his own music in his films: “It was polluting them. It’s true, I have made a lot of music in the spirit of torture.” As a film-maker, Dupieux has elicited varying responses: in the US he is often dismissed as a dilettante, whereas in France he has been acclaimed a real-deal auteur, not least in revered cinephile journal Cahiers du Cinéma, which raved about his 2007 debut feature, Steak (“leaves us slack-jawed and wide-eyed”), and devoted a whole section to his latest French release, Mandibules (2020). After Rubber, he made three more comedies in the US, including Reality, about the existential agonies of a French director in Hollywood. But his American period, he now says, “was like a stylistic exercise, about satisfying a fantasy. I needed to come back to the country and the language I understand.” Dupieux made his first French feature, Keep an Eye Out, in 2018. Set in a police station, it resembles a Monty Python sketch from which, nightmarishly, there is no possible escape. Since then, Dupieux has been remarkably industrious. Immediately after Deerskin, he made the gentler, goofier Mandibules, about two slacker idiots who discover a giant fly; you might think of it as Buñuel’s Bill and Ted. He has already shot the follow-up, Incredible But True, and is now working on yet another. He works fast, because he got bored filming 2007’s Steak the conventional way. Since then, he has shot and edited his films himself – with his wife, Joan Le Boru, as production designer – and makes a point of using every available moment on set, often getting ahead of schedule. In true surrealist tradition, many of his ideas, Dupieux says, come from dreams – but “the ones that come to you when you’re half asleep, when you doze off during the day for five minutes. The brain keeps working, and you get these great ideas.” Arcane as his work may sound, it has found its audience. Mandibules premiered to acclaim in Venice last autumn, then opened in France this May, on the Wednesday that cinemas re-opened their doors. It attracted 22,000 viewers in one day, with punters at one Paris venue queueing round the block for an 8am screening. The director sees this as a side-effect of the film’s release being delayed by lockdown: “The posters had been up in the Métro for a year – it was like a really long publicity campaign.” Dupieux has no doubt reached the point in his career where the heavyweight critical studies will start to be written. They will analyse his take on alienation, identity, the nature of the real, the ontology of inanimate objects such as tyres and furry puppets. But, sincere as he evidently is about all these themes, Dupieux says: “Just being philosophical is not my thing. There’s always got to be an exit door. Even when I’m talking about something intimate or serious, like in Deerskin, I have to break it up with laughs, otherwise I worry I’m going to bore people.” Somewhere in his thicket of beard he smiles knowingly. “Or bore myself.” Deerskin is out in cinemas in the UK on 16 July