Jamie Thraves: Life is bittersweet

In the living room of his London home, film-maker Jamie Thraves is attempting to return to its cage a china-blue budgerigar named Sparky, which has taken up residence on the frame of a mirror. Three-year-old Harvey watches nonchalantly from the sofa as his father coaxes Sparky on to a quivering forefinger and moves gingerly across the room. But the bird takes flight when he gets within pecking distance of the cage; this happens three or four times before Thraves gives up and hands bird-rescuing duties to his wife. It is, it has to be said, a pretty unbeatable metaphor for the 42-year-old's directorial career, which has been dogged by false starts, precariousness and disappointment.

Eleven years ago, Thraves was at the forefront of a modest revolution in British cinema, along with contemporaries including Jonathan Glazer, Lynne Ramsay and Pawel Pawlikowski – our low-key answer to the New Hollywood. Thraves's debut feature, The Low Down, was a playful, funny and obliquely unsettling story of twentysomething Londoners stumbling through fraught friendships and amorphous love affairs. It harked back to the French and American new waves, and was shot through with a languidness which has led to it being seen subsequently as a progenitor of the US mumblecore movement. But although the reviews were glowing, The Low Down was scarcely seen, and Thraves dropped off the map almost entirely for a decade.

That he returns this month with his third feature, the odd-couple comedy Treacle Jr, is cause for quiet celebration, even if the intervening years have brought him little creative satisfaction. Treacle Jr boasts a daredevil performance from The Low Down's leading man Aidan Gillen, who has become best known in the interim as Mayor Carcetti from HBO's The Wire. Gillen plays Aidan, a garrulous Irish misfit who attaches himself to a homeless man he meets in A&E. Tom (Tom Fisher) has recently walked out on his wife and child; Aidan is stuck in an abusive relationship. From these grim beginnings, the comedy that flows from their burgeoning bonhomie is rich, daft and true.

"We start out treating Tom as if he's in this very grave Dardenne brothers movie," says the Romford-born, stubble-headed Thraves as he pads around his kitchen making lunch in shirt, shorts and Crocs. "Then when he meets Aidan you realise it's not that film at all. You can almost feel Tom thinking: 'I'm supposed to be in an arthouse movie with no dialogue! What the fuck is going on?'"

The picture hinges on the viewer's response to the manic, ebullient Aidan. "We knew some people would find him annoying. Someone described him as a live-action version of Donkey from Shrek. I had this desire to see a guy who comes up laughing when he's punched in the face. The whole film came out of my yearning for the most optimistic character I could think of. I felt there was a vogue for melancholia in indie movies, and I was getting depressed by that. Weirdly, as I was writing Treacle Jr, Happy-Go-Lucky came out, so Mike Leigh must have had the same feeling."

Although Thraves sounds relieved and excited to be back in the fray, he winces visibly when he discusses the decision to stump up the budget himself by remortgaging his home. "There's no way I'd fund a film that way again," he says. "It has caused so much stress in my life, and put so much pressure on my family."

Anyone who admired The Low Down and recognised in it a unique voice that could help reinvigorate British cinema might be forgiven for asking at this point: where did it all go wrong?

It all seemed to go well at first. Prior to The Low Down, Thraves had graduated from the Royal College of Art and gone on to make sparky short films and innovative music videos. One of his earliest efforts was the promo for Radiohead's Just: it was unusual for telling a story using subtitled dialogue and pivoting on a narrative enigma. (Namely: what exactly did that man say to make everyone lie down despairingly in the street?).

"After the Radiohead one, I felt I'd achieved what I wanted to with pop videos – I'd basically made a short film where you had to watch it all the way through. I said at the time I'd be happy if I never made another promo again."

Over the years, Thraves has done plenty, crafting Hitchcockian suspense for Mansun (Negative) and Lynchian surrealism for Death Cab for Cutie (I Will Follow You Into the Dark), enhancing Coldplay immeasurably with a backwards car crash (The Scientist), and sending Dizzee Rascal to a village hall shindig (Dirtee Disco).

Cinema was always his passion, though, and in 1998 he began searching for a subject for his first film. "The Low Down came out of my emotions rather than my brain: I tried to show things I disliked about myself, things I was embarrassed by." For all its warmth and wit, the movie has a latent abrasiveness which eventually comes out in a Thravesian trademark: the eruption of unforeseeable violence. "I'm interested in examining bullying, the abuse of good nature. I've always looked at what moves me in real life and tried to convey that in films, rather than simply reproducing what moves me about cinema."

The Low Down had many passionate defenders, but it never really found its audience, a fate that can hardly have been helped by its distributor's decision to strike only a handful of prints and go easy on the publicity. Another project Thraves was setting up at FilmFour became a casualty of its closure in 2002; a third screenplay was rejected. Several years had gone by, and he was increasingly using money from pop videos to fund his screenwriting, rather than applying for development money. "I was stuck in the wilderness," he admits.

Eventually he lobbied BBC Films for the chance to direct their adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's novel The Cry of the Owl, which the company had been trying to make for more than a decade. "It annoyed me that people had criticised The Low Down for having no story, so I wanted to shake that off and do something genre-based, while also playing around with that genre. I was trying to make the most commercial arthouse film possible." The film is an unnerving oddity, shot in an elegantly classical style, with Paddy Considine giving a brilliant performance as a man drawn to stalking a young woman (Julia Stiles) who turns out to have psychological problems of her own.

"It was a much bigger film than I was used to, and I definitely wanted to make something that got seen because almost no one had seen The Low Down." The irony of that remark hangs in the air. With all its funding problems, The Cry of the Owl took five years out of Thraves's life, but never even managed a cinema release.

"We were on a tight schedule to deliver it for the Toronto film festival, and it all just ran away from me. I was locking the edit when I wasn't happy with it. The music wasn't even properly finished." The next blow was a rejection from Toronto – particularly galling since the movie was shot in Canada.

"That's when we thought: 'Oh shit.' Then you get bad word of mouth. If you're turned down by one festival, all the others get wind of it. I began to feel really depressed about it all. Not only had my first film not been the huge debut I'd wanted it to be, my second didn't even make it into cinemas. I'd had success in short films, success in pop videos, but success in features was eluding me."

Thraves says now that Treacle Jr has had a restorative effect on his confidence. It was shot quickly, near his home, with no outside interference, and benefits immensely from an unpredictable energy and a crackling wit. Among its supporters is Shane Meadows, who has championed the film after seeing it at Dinard, where it won the festival's top prize. Although its initial release will be small, it will trickle out across the country's independent cinemas as part of the NBCQ (New British Cinema Quarterly) initiative.

"I'm hoping the film will be loved," says Thraves. "I think I can do even better, so my ambition is to keep going until I make something that everyone thinks is an absolute classic."

Treacle Jr is released 15 July.