By fictionalising the life of France's greatest playwright, director Laurent Tirard has set tongues wagging in his homeland with his daring new comedy Moliere.

"I didn't realise how iconoclastic I was being or how big a subject I was tackling," says amiable and outspoken director Laurent Tirard. "I felt very free about taking someone so famous and reinventing his life. There's been a backlash in France with people saying, 'Who are you to do this? You can't do that!' Some people feel that they own Moliere, some people feel that they own culture, and some people feel that they own taste and decide what's tasteful."

With his unconventional not-quite-biopic Moliere, Tirard gleefully and entertainingly kicks against the pricks. A snub of the nose at the aforementioned arbiters of French culture, Tirard (who says that he "wanted to be a director from the time I was fourteen") has made a proprietary comedy about one of France's greatest literary figures, and in so doing has created a few ripples in his country's artistic pond. Despite its monolithic title, Moliere is actually a jaunty romp, taking advantage of a famous "gap" in the recorded history of Jean-Baptiste Poquelin (better known by his pen name of Moliere, and one of the defining figures of French theatre), who temporarily disappeared from view in 1644. Already pegged as the Gallic answer to Shakespeare In Love, Moliere posits fictional stories and situations that serve as inspirations for the playwright's famous works The Bourgeois Gentleman and Tartuffe. It's the kind of cinematic tussle welcomed in the less precious US and Britain (Becoming Jane was another similar construct), but in France - where art and culture are tantamount - Moliere has been bailed up as a piece of celluloid sacrilege.

But for Tirard (who previously tasted success with the romantic comedy The Story Of My Life after working extensively in TV and studying at NYU's famous film school), it's this exact reverence that so often hobbles films based on real life figures. "Sometimes movies about famous people are not successful because the filmmakers can't free themselves from the weight of their subject," Tirard says, happily doing press duties in a Paris hotel. "There's too much admiration. For instance, if someone is adapting a Dostoyevsky novel, and they're so in awe of the book that they can't free themselves to make the best movie possible, it becomes contrived. It has to be your point of view on that subject, and you have to be free. You can't feel like Moliere, for instance, is looking over your shoulder."

Like most accomplished filmmakers, Tirard likes to infuse all of his projects with personal elements, though he balks at strict autobiography, instead preferring to weave his own concerns throughout the fabric of other stories. "A period film is a great way to talk about today in an indirect manner," the director says of Moliere. "I like to talk about myself - my worries, my questions - but in an indirect manner. If I'm just talking about myself, it's narcissistic! That's why I like comedy, because you can hide it. And a period film is another layer of disguise."

Though a noted fan of international filmmaking ("I connected with the films of Spielberg, Lucas, Coppola and Scorsese"), Tirard disparages the myth-making of master director Alfred Hitchcock, who claimed that he had the whole film mapped out in his head before he started shooting. "David Cronenberg once said how boring that would be, and he's right," Tirard frowns. "Nothing is as fascinating as when you've prepared as much as you can and you get on the set and an actor says, 'No, I don't want to sit there, I want to sit by the window'. So you relight everything, and then you get into the editing room and you realise that he was right. It would have been so dull if he wasn't by the window. Some people get annoyed unless they control everything. But the movie is bigger than me, and I'm just one of the tools. When something like that happens, the movie is trying to tell me something. Sometimes you disagree, but other times you try it, and that's the magic."

Moliere is showing now.