‘I want to make people laugh’: Quentin Dupieux, the fun auteur of French cinema

The cult director talks about his first UK release - about a man's obsession with a cowboy jacket - surreal dreams, and why he won't kill off Flat Eric, the yellow puppet that launched his career

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 Adele 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 Uzes 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.