Mark Romenak: What are you hiding?

The director Mark Romanek considers 'One Hour Photo' to be his debut film. Ryan Gilbey, who knows it's not, asks why

Mark Romanek has just made his first film at the age of 43 – or so he would have you believe. That movie, a distressing psychological drama called One Hour Photo, is many things. It is the most convincing of Robin Williams' recent attempts to persuade us that there are vampire fangs behind his crumpled smile and porcupine needles beneath his all-over body fur. It is one of the few mainstream American films to suggest that the modern family might be something to run from rather than to. And it's also the picture most likely to ruin any date. What it isn't, though, is Mark Romanek's debut.

Personally, I was rather fond of Mark Romanek's debut. One Hour Photo is poised and polished. But Static, which Romanek made nearly 20 years ago, had qualities – spirit, tenderness – that are either absent from the newer work, or else buried beneath its self-consciously Kubrickian crust. If you haven't heard of Static, that's no surprise. Romanek doesn't want you to remember it. The film isn't mentioned in the press notes for One Hour Photo and there's no trace of it at markromanek.com, where the majority of space is given over to an inventory of the billions of MTV doorstops won for the pop promos (Madonna, Michael Jackson, REM) he's been making in the 18 years between features.

I'm curious, I tell him. Have you disowned your first film? "I think that's extreme," he sniffs. He has unblinking eyes, and a beard so severely trimmed it almost looks painted on. "I'll admit I don't overemphasise the movie. London is the only place where it's spoken about with any affection; in New York, it played one crappy screen. I think of it as a juvenile piece. I had it in my head that in order to be a great director you had to make a film before you were 25. I had this yuppie friend who became an investment banker. He said, 'I think I can get an unsecured loan if you wanna make a movie.' It's not that I disown it now. I just don't think it's any good. One Hour Photo feels to me like my first real movie. In some ways, it might even be the same movie, only this time I knew what I was doing."

The similarities between the two pictures are indeed striking. Static focuses on Ernie, an orphaned oddball sacked from his job at a crucifix factory after stealing production line aberrations (a warped Christ, an upside-down Christ, two Christs squashed on to a single Cross) which he proudly displays in his pokey bedsit. In One Hour Photo, "Sy the Photo Guy" (Williams) secretly makes copies of snaps brought in by a couple with a young son, and plasters their glossy faces on his living room walls. Like Ernie, the quietly demented Sy loses his job after the boss cottons on to the missing stock.

It's disappointing that Romanek reveals a psychological scapegoat for Sy's breakdown, when all along the film has carefully implicated consumerism in its protagonist's unhealthy behaviour. The pristine supermarket aisles along which Sy strides are indistinguishable from the blinding white walls of the police interrogation room; a sinister sign in the store canteen reminds employees that "Our customers are everything. Without them, nothing else matters." In the final analysis it seems that, like David Fincher with Fight Club, this film-maker who has profited from the rewards of salesmanship withdrew at the last moment from biting the hand which had fed him so plentifully.

Romanek claims it's more complicated than that. "When it comes to hardcore advertising, I've tried to only do things that I consider humanistic. I did a Michael Jordan commercial for Nike in which he talked about all the shots he had missed. I found that very subversive. Of course, it is about product. But somehow I persuade myself at night, when I have to go to sleep, that it isn't just selling, selling, selling."

I think he's ribbing me here. I don't think he has trouble sleeping at night – at least not since Static. Music videos were initially a means of staying afloat; then he found he was actually quite brilliant at making them. Still it smarted that he couldn't get a film off the ground. Among the Romanek-films-that-never-were was an adaptation of Crash to which he devoted three years. "Robert Redford seemed to dig the script at Sundance. And it nearly got made. David Puttnam was head of Columbia, and he was very interested in doing it. Then he got the boot." He manages to discuss David Cronenberg's version without once mentioning Cronenberg's name. "It wasn't how I would have approached it. I think he took something inaccessible and made it even more inaccessible."

Accessibility is Mark Romanek's watchword, as it might be for anyone who has spent two decades hearing the word "no" from the mouths of studio executives. The knock-backs taught him to pitch projects that were more appealing to a studio's instincts. "Honestly, I'd tell you if it was deliberate," he says earnestly, "but I look back now and see that, subconsciously, I had come up with a contemporary, marketable genre piece. There was nothing in it for the studio to object to." So making a film is as much about removing what the studio doesn't like as delivering what it does? "In a way that's not wrong. If something's too esoteric, it's not going to attract large numbers of people." There is in his words a lingering memory of that paltry cinema at which Static briefly played. "The things we fear the most," coos Sy in One Hour Photo, "have already happened to us."

Romanek seems offended when I ask if he's only interested in making films for large numbers of people. "What does that mean?" he scoffs. "I know I don't want to work on something 18 hours a day for two years, and then have six people come see it. That doesn't mean I want to make Spiderman 2." Anyway, I think he has got what he wanted. One Hour Photo has been sold as a hot debut. And the film appears to be roundly admired. "I'm hoping the term 'Sy the Photo Guy' will enter the vernacular," he beams. "One critic said the movie will do for photos what Psycho did for showers." For a second his clear head has gone foggy with praise. I wonder if he realises that's exactly the sort of thing that people will say to get their names on film posters. It isn't only Mark Romanek who dreads becoming that overlooked movie playing on a deserted flea pit screen.

'One Hour Photo' is released on 4 October