‘I was a very perverse child or just a future director’

French film’s infamous auteur, Francois Ozon, speaks to Adam White about his new movie, When Autumn Falls’, plastic surgery, and why Hollywood has not tempted him

- Adam White

When he was still in his teens, sometime in the late Eighties, the filmmaker Francois Ozon asked his little brother to kill their family for him. Before anyone panics, this was play-acting, and for a movie. Photo de Famille was a scrappy, seven-minute blueprint for the kinds of films that would, a decade later, transform Ozon into the mischievous French prince of lust, provocation and psychosexual chaos. His brother agreed to it. As did his family. In the film, “my brother gave some poison to my mother and smothered my father”, Ozon remembers. “And he cut the throat of my sister with a pair of scissors.” Did they mind participating in such a thing? Ozon grins. “My mother said, ‘yes, we will do that in your film because we know you wouldn’t do that in reality’.”

Even with that origin story in mind, Ozon’s creative penchant for sex and death tends to be overstated. Yes, the 57-year-old’s most internationally successful movies – the candy-coloured whodunnit 8 Women (2002), or the Charlotte Rampling murder mystery Swimming Pool (2003) – are awash in the stuff, but his output bends more diverse. There’s the bittersweet coming-ofage tale (2020’s Summer of 85), the Hitchcockian psycho-thriller (2017’s Double Lover), the other one involving Rampling and a body of water (the tender, mesmeric Under the Sand from 2000). He’s made more or less a film a year since 1997, and likes to sew a degree of tonal unease into most of them. Just when you’re getting comfortable in a particular genre, out comes another one.

Take When Autumn Falls, his 24th feature, which is in cinemas this week. It begins as a bucolic slice-of-life drama, with Helene Vincent – playing Michelle, a retiree and devoted grandmother – tending to her garden and meeting with friends in a village in Burgundy. Then her stressed daughter Valérie (