Director Mark Romanek made his first film 17 years ago, and has been making music videos in the meantime. He tells Donald Clarke how he dealt with the Robin Williams irritability factor

Long held cultural certainties have seemed more secure than ever this year. Martin Amis has droned on about his beastly friends and his boorish father, much as he has been doing since the 12th century. Another batch of celebrity pond-scum has been cluttering up the TV schedules with its solipsistic antics. And the wretched Robin Williams has returned to our screens, thereby sending all sensible people tumbling out of the cinema in pursuit of more palatable entertainment, such as relining their septic tanks.

But hold on a moment. In both Christopher Nolan's Insomnia and Mark Romanek's excellent One Hour Photo, Williams delivers cold, contained performances, which contrast markedly with the saccharin-crazed circus act we've grown to know and loathe.

Romanek bridles when I voice my feelings about Williams's career up to this point: "Robin made those films that annoy people for families - for his own family. And he couldn't give a f**k if 50-year-old  journalists enjoy them or not. His son laughed at them and that brought Robin a lot of joy. They're for children!"

One Hour Photo, on the other hand, is very definitely not a film for the Flubber demographic. This "Jungian nightmare" (the articulate American writer-director's own words) tells the story of a lonely photo shop employee whose obsession with a seemingly perfect family drives him to ever more desperate actions. Part of the appeal - though appeal is perhaps not the word - of Williams's creepy performance is surely rooted in our memory of the irritating child-man that hides within.

"Oh I think that's definitely true," Romanek says, warming to me a little.

"It's all about tension, about the awareness that there is a massive, manic energy that is being buttoned-down. Because the dialogue is generally quite banal - 'What size prints do you want? 4x6? 5x7?' - it's all about what's bubbling underneath. The fact that we know there is a volcano of energy in Robin puts tension into even the most innocent scenes."

Among its other singularities, One Hour Photo stands as one of the most belated second features of all time. In 1985, Romanek wrote and directed Static, the wonderfully eccentric story of a man who devotes his time to collecting the malformed crucifixes that are rejected from the factory in which he works. Why has it taken him so long to produce a follow-up?

"Only Europeans ask me about Static," he says, slightly surprised. "Because it wasn't really distributed in America. I don't even regard it as a real movie. I didn't make it out of any desire to communicate in a mature way. I was 24, and I felt that if I was going to be a great director I had to be a prodigy; I had to make a film before I was 25. These were not good reasons to make a movie.

"But I pat myself on the back a bit for then saying I wasn't really ready to make a movie. I needed to learn about myself, learn about my craft and when I had that confidence then I would make a movie again. Now that period was only supposed to last five or six years, but I got off on this tangent of making music videos and it became 17 years."

Indeed, Romanek became one of the most sought-after video directors of the 1990s. But despite working with David Bowie, REM, Lenny Kravitz and anybody else you might care to name, he has managed to avoid turning into a tousle-haired Armani monster; with his woolly beard and woollier jumper, his image is actually closer to that of the well-dressed trawler captain. I assume that it must have been a nightmare dealing with the likes of Madonna and Michael Jackson.

How did he control those celebrity entourages?

"You know, I'm actually pretty careful about who I work with," he says. "If I hear somebody is silly or unprofessional, then I just don't work with them.

"Let's just be clear on one thing: Madonna does not have a big entourage, she has a manager and an assistant. She is professional; she is not a pain in the ass. Michael Jackson does have a massive entourage, but he is a very special case. And again that all worked out fine."

Romanek's background in music video has led many American reviewers of One Hour Photo to focus on the coldness of his visual aesthetic. It must be annoying to constantly have your film assessed in those terms.

"It doesn't annoy me," he says, sounding annoyed. "But you can't get over what people expect from you. There is so much discussion in the media about movies. There's so much marketing. It's impossible to approach a film in a fresh frame of mind without preconceptions.

"The way I defend this is to say that if Orson Welles - not that I'm comparing myself to Orson Welles - had made a few music videos before Citizen Kane then some journalist would have said, 'Oh, that domineering visual style he has is very music video.' Films should be aggressive and stylish; if that dovetails with the content of the movie, then you will end up with something intelligent, persuasive and interesting."

One supposes that in One Hour Photo it is the cleanness of the art direction and the photography that suggests pop video sensibilities to critics. The interior of Williams's house is all the same drab colour as his clothes. Everything in the mall where he works is a loveless shade of powder blue.

"Well, most of the design work is actually character work," Romanek says. "I was trying to set up a Jungian nightmare that does not play out naturalistically. It hovers around a dark sort of magic realism. But that's just my taste. That type of film tends to stick with an audience longer. It gets under your skin. It lodges in your subconscious better when it plays like a dream or a nightmare."

I had heard that the costume designer was unable to find sufficiently unfashionable clothes for Williams's suburban drone in America's discount stores.

"Yes," Romanek laughs. "I was shocked by this. I thought that the wardrobe would be the cheapest thing in the budget. But we just couldn't find the right look. So it ended up being bespoke crap. We had to pick out fabrics and special colours. Robin ended up wearing enormously expensive junk."

When the picture begins, Williams is under arrest for some unidentified crime involving the middle-class family whose life he follows in close detail, as he develops their photographs. It is a brilliant concept for a film: the story of a barely acknowledged figure who is privy to one's most intimate moments. As Romanek says: "He sees these lives that are seemingly so much more rich and fulfilling than his own. That's a great dramatic conflict ."

But I can't help but feel that there is a touch of condescension in the portrayal of the suburban little man. Where does a big, cool video director (albeit one who looks like a young Captain Birdseye) get off caricaturing the ordinary guy? "Well, you know, I don't think of myself as not being an ordinary guy," he says. "I've had jobs. I've worked behind counters. There is a fine line between stereotype and archetype, and I hope that I am operating on the side of archetype. I think the film is very sympathetic towards this guy. I certainly don't feel snide towards him."

Well maybe, but there's a distinction between sympathy and empathy. Surely we see ourselves in the well-heeled, successful family rather than in the lonely sociopath. "I don't know," Romanek muses. "We all have those moments when we feel disconnected, when we are the last guy picked for the team. I wanted to make the film non-judgmental. I didn't want to indicate how you are supposed to feel. I want you to engage and make up your own mind. People are sympathetic towards him at one point, then creeped out by him the next; sometimes both at the same time."

On a limited American release, One Hour Photo has received excellent notices and Williams is a good outside bet for an Oscar nomination. Now that he has a reputation to play around with, one hopes that Romanek will not wait so long before giving us his third feature. "Well, I hope it's not another 17 years like before," he says. "Maybe it will be, I don't know. I'm working on a few original scripts and adapting a few projects. I'm reading other people's screenplays. Making a movie is an enormous amount of work and if you're not in love with the script it's hard to get up at four or five in the morning for 20 weeks in a row. So, I'm just waiting to fall in love again."