Making A Big Splash.(Biography)

Francois Ozon has made six films in the past five years, each completely different from the last. Yet his imprint is unmistakable. Eschewing the typical navel-gazing style of French auteurs, Ozon makes movies the old- fashioned way: with well-written stories and compelling femmes fatales. His last picture, the Oscar-nominated "8 Women," was a clever musical whodunit with an all-female cast including Catherine Deneuve, Fanny Ardant and Emmanuelle Beart. His latest, "Swimming Pool," which is opening around Europe and America this summer after wowing crowds at Cannes, is an elegant English-language murder mystery set in Provence, starring Charlotte Rampling and French ingenue Ludivine Sagnier. Taken together, Ozon's movies make up a sophisticated oeuvre that recalls such legendary Hollywood directors as George Cukor and Howard Hawks. Yet Ozon has never played to the crowds. "I make films instinctively, for my own pleasure," he says. "I know it sounds selfish, but filmmaking is the best way for me to express myself."

Ozon has always taken his time. Raised on the Left Bank in Paris, where his mother was a professor of literature and his father a biologist, the young Ozon spent most of his free time catching classic Hollywood films in Latin Quarter rep houses. At 18, he enrolled in France's national film school--where he studied with one of his idols, New Wave patriarch Eric Rohmer--then spent his 20s making short films that mostly played the festival circuit. "I wasn't in a hurry," Ozon says.

His career began to gel in 1998, when he turned 30. He directed his first feature, "Sitcom," a perverse comedy about a dysfunctional French family that deftly handled suicide and sadomasochism. His second film, "Criminal Lovers," about a pair of teens who embark on a murderous rampage after watching Oliver Stone's "Natural Born Killers," sparked such public outrage that Ozon had trouble getting financing for future projects. For his third feature, "Water Drops on Burning Rocks," about a girl whose boyfriend leaves her for a 50-year-old man, Ozon cast Sagnier, then an unknown teenage actress he saw in a short film called "Acide Anime." "She burned up the screen," Ozon remembers. "There are a lot of young French actresses, but they all resemble each other. Ludivine has a strong personality and is capable of doing completely different characters each time."

With 2000's "Under the Sand," his rich creative relationship with the British Rampling was born. It began simply enough: Ozon needed a fiftyish French-speaking actress who would appear in a bathing suit. "Charlotte was the only one," he recalls. The timing was propitious; after a long hiatus from acting, Rampling was ready to get back to work. "I wanted to be found," Rampling told NEWSWEEK. "And Francois found me." In "Under the Sand," Rampling plays a woman grieving the mysterious disappearance of her husband. Her subtle, profound performance triggered a soaring comeback. "In life you have ups and downs," she says. "Right now I'm on the crest of the wave. My meeting with Francois came when I had the strength to go back on this crest. And we were able to do the kind of work ...