Snow White & The Huntsman director Rupert Sanders is living the fairy tale

It is the morning after a quite colossal night before for director Rupert Sanders. There is an empty glass bottle of Coke on the coffee table in front of him. A full one is brought in to replace it, almost immediately. He inspects the window, the lamps, the doorway, desperately looking for any way to get light and air into our muted hotel room. Today's hangover is the sort of broken-headed hell that might usually render a person defeated. But if anyone had a reason to celebrate, it was Sanders.

The previous night saw the premiere of his first film, Snow White & The Huntsman. There was the red carpet, which he walked with his cast (Charlize Theron, Kristen Stewart, Chris Hemsworth, Toby Jones, Ray Winstone, Lovejoy etc). Then there was the party at the Royal Courts Of Justice. And then, when that ended at 1am, he and his cast headed to a friend's bar in Soho for a nightcap. Until 5am.

"Our wrap party was the same," he says, rubbing his head ruefully. "Wrap parties are usually awful but ours went til 9pm the next day. The whole cast and crew came to a warehouse in Scrubs Lane and we had transvestite DJs playing acid house."

He doesn't really do things by halves, Rupert Sanders. Before Snow White, he made adverts. Really expensive adverts. Adverts for Nike, Adidas, Xbox, Guinness. Adverts that won him awards and allowed him to move from London to LA, where he now lives with his wife of seven years, the model Liberty Ross (who he cast as Snow White's mother in his film) and their two children Skyla and Tennyson (extras in the film's final scene). His ads got him noticed, and won him a meeting with producer Joe Roth (Alice In Wonderland, Knight And Day), who would then give him the biggest break of his career.

"I went to America with a very specific idea of what I wanted to do," Sanders says. "I read every screenplay that was being sent to the other directors. None were being sent to me, but I was reading what others were choosing and what the best writers were writing. So when it was my turn to start developing projects, I knew the writers I wanted to work with, and I had met every head of studio, every executive and a lot of producers. I started finding things, little crumbs off other people's tables that I would make my own ."

That's pretty much how the fairytale went down with Snow White, too. After his meeting with Roth, Sanders made a trailer for the film that he would make, given the chance. He shot a three-minute piece, featuring a poem written by his brother-in-law's girlfriend, his friend doing the voiceover, his 17-year-old nephew dressed in Y-fronts pretending to be a fairy and various other acquaintances battling it out in leathers. He showed it to producers, talked them through what he wanted, and perhaps more importantly, what he didn't want.

'Ours is not a formulaic blockbuster, but it occupies the space. I think the studio feel it can be financially successful but with a bit more emotional resonance'

"It's a strange beast, the blockbuster," he says, clinging on to his Coke. "I think Chris Nolan does it very well, between The Dark Knight and Inception – two films that grossed a billion dollars, which are also intelligent and articulate and visually artistic. But there aren't many. I don't like the popcorn, the 'world's going to end tomorrow' kind of nonsense. Ours is not a formulaic blockbuster, but it occupies the space. I think the studio feel it can be as financially successful as those kind of films, but with a bit more emotional resonance."

Sanders's Snow White draws more from the original Brothers Grimm tale than either Disney or Tarsem Singh's recent Mirror Mirror. It is equal parts dark (a particularly gruesome evil Queen, played by Charlize Theron, plucking hearts and sucking lives) and light (medieval sewer humour from Ray Winstone and his dwarves), with influences ranging from artist Gustave Doré to illustrator Arthur Rackham via footage of the Arab Spring.

"Our story is a 'once upon a time', but it's not a 'happy ever after'," he says. "It's a young woman who is reclaiming her kingdom and the only means to do that, really, is war. I stole a line I saw during the Libya uprising, which was 'I'm everything you're not', which someone shouted at Gaddafi. I apologise for stealing his line, but I gave it to Kristen because their paths are so similar that it seemed to resonate. There's something in the film that I hope stays with people, either visually or emotionally."

Sanders was given three months to film Snow White and just under four months to edit his film. It's obvious from the scale of his premiere and from the marketing campaign surrounding it that the studio has a lot riding on his success. It's been a baptism of fire, but one that you get the sense that Sanders might thrive on.

"It wasn't just a big undertaking as a first film," he confirmns, "it was a big undertaking as a big film to finish in a ridiculous time scale. I don't think anyone thought we could do it. It was a big gamble. I knew that if I came in and didn't set a tone on day one, I'd have difficulty down the line. We set a very hard pace, about 50 set-ups every day for the first three days. Luckily, it was stuff that I knew how to do. I think people saw, 'OK, he knows what he's doing'."

Rupert Sanders grew up in London. His mother ran a doll's house shop in Fulham, and his father was a neuro-ophthalmic surgeon, perhaps explaining his acute attention to detail. A foundation course at Kingston Poly led to a degree in graphic design from Central St Martins. "I remember going to the basement," he says of his time there, "where Joe Wright [who later directed Pride And Prejudice and Atonement] would be in this dark little hovel with all these spools of 35mm film. I was like, 'Joe, what the fuck are you doing?' It wasn't till a couple of years later, when I met Tony Kaye [director of American History X] out in America on a wild road trip I was taking with a friend from college that I even thought of film as a viable option. He put me in the art department on a commercial he was making for Tag Heuer and at the end said, 'Go back to London and be a director'."

It's a typical Sanders story. While there is almost certainly an element of right place, right time, and most likely, right connections, there is also a steely determination that runs through every decision he makes. Aside from his first ventures with a Super 8 camera – "Me and four friends doing ecstasy in the snow with Laurel & Hardy masks on" – it was an uncommissioned ad he made for Sony that got him his break.

'I did a big Guinness job and I was expecting this magical doorway to unlock but it didn't really go anywhere. So I went to America, luckily at the time of the videogame explosion'

"I knew that I needed a commercial," he says of starting out in the industry. "So, with very little money, I made one for Sony Walkman. I had no idea what I was doing but I took it to an agency. A week later, they called and said they'd sold it to Sony for £35,000. You do little jobs to start and then you have these breakthroughs every couple of years. I did a big Guinness job and I was expecting this magical doorway to unlock then it didn't really go anywhere, so I went to America, luckily at the time of the videogame explosion."

The videogame boom gave him a chance to make a name for himself (his ad for Halo 3 won two gold lions at the Cannes International Advertising Festival). He chose to stay in LA, a city he describes as "very intoxicating".

"I actually love California," he says. "It's beautiful weather and the kids can run wild and run free. It's like living in the countryside, but the centre of the film industry is 30 minutes away. I'd rather be raising my kids in England, but it's hard to get upset about it."

When Sanders first met Ross, she was the 17-year-old little sister of his best friend Milo. "We were at a party one night, and this beautiful girl walked in the room," he grins. "I just knew I was going to marry her. It took a while. I didn't propose to her for seven years because I felt that she was too young and she'd resent me if she hadn't lived. But it was good because I was off making commercials and she was modelling, so we had quite a free – not sexually free, we weren't swinging or having other relationships … I hope! – but we both lived very independent lives, then we'd meet up. It kept the fire burning. She's been very supportive and she's been a strong single mother for the last year-and-a-half, because I haven't been around."

Asked what's next, Sanders says, "I'm actually ready to get back", and talks of a Snow White sequel which he's already been offered. "I've got an interesting theme in mind, so we'll see … if it's right, we'll do it, if it's not, we won't. And I'm working on a story about the beginnings of the Drug Enforcement Administration in New York. Then there's another thing I wrote, kind of a science fiction version of the battle of Algiers …"

With the backing of the Hollywood machine, it seems Sanders has plenty of options. As he takes a second to contemplate his charmed life, his hangover magically begins to recede.