Jim Mickle is experienc-ing some serious deja vu.

We meet on the rooftop terrace of the Marriott Hotel, on a cool Monday evening midway through the Cannes Film Festival. Several floors below, his new movie Cold In July is screening in the festival's Director's Fortnight strand to a packed audience. It's exactly where he was, almost to the day, a year ago when he arrived with his last film, We Are What We Are.

Moreover, it was in Cannes twelve months back that he finally locked down Cold In July, a film based on the novel by Joe R. Lansdale that he's been trying to make for virtually his whole career. "It all came together here," he says, noting that it was during Cannes that he managed to Skype with Michael C. Hall, the American actor famed for playing the serial killer in Dexter, who committed to playing the lead.

You can almost sense the relief in his voice. Having made his debut with the 2006 virus thriller Mulberry St, Mickle was keen to follow it with an adaptation of Lansdale's book, a genre-twisting thriller set in 1980s Texas. Everywhere he took the script, "people liked it but they didn't want to commit"; he and co-writer Nick Damici kept tweaking. "It got to the point where the script had nothing to do with the book I fell in love with."

So much so, in 2010, he returned to Pottstown, Pennsylvania, where he grew up, to make the vampire movie Stakeland with Damici. "We were frustrated because we couldn't make this movie, so we said, 'Let's just do things we can shoot at weekends'." Winning the People's Choice Award at the Toronto Film Festival, Mickle felt convinced it would give him the necessary traction to make his pet project. "Three years later, we still hadn't made Cold In July."

Thankfully, out of the blue, he was offered the chance to remake Jorge Michel Grau's 2010 cannibal movie We Are What We Are - and off the back of that, Cold In July finally became a reality. Happily the wait has been worth it, with Mickle turning in a superior slice of pulp fiction that recalls steamy "southern thrillers" like Blood Simple, Red Rock West and One False Move, as well as 1990's The Hot Spot, starring one of Mickle's key cast, Don Johnson.

Set in East Texas in 1989, Cold In July sees Hall play Richard Dane, a store owner who, one night, kills an intruder in his home. So begins an increasingly twisted yarn that sees Dane stalked by the burglar's vengeful father, an ex-con played with steely menace by veteran playwright/actor Sam Shepard. Johnson's character Jim Bob - a private detective and, believe it or not, pig-farmer - doesn't even come into it until halfway, when Dane is forced to make an uneasy alliance with both men.

An everyman who gets the chance to play action hero, "I kept saying that it reminded me of my Dad," laughs Mickle, "if my Dad was mowing the lawn and Lee Marvin and Charles Bronson showed up in the driveway and said, 'Hey, man, we need you to go on a mission with us.' I loved that idea! And that's what kept me going back to it. The charm of that; that it wasn't [The Hunger Games hunk] Liam Hemsworth or something."

Ironically, the film arrives in the UK in the wake of the excellent Blue Ruin, another lean, low-budget thriller that deals with an ordinary man drawn into a violent web of revenge and reprisals. It played in Cannes last year, in the same strand as Mickle's We Are What We Are.

Mickle even befriended its director Jeremy Saulnier, who in turn read the script for Cold In July, then came to the first screening and gave him some notes. "He was a good cheerleader."

While two films hardly make a trend, it's refreshing to see what Mickle calls an "old fashioned meat-and-potatoes" approach to the thriller coming back into vogue. Mickle was also adamant that he didn't want to pastiche the Eighties (even if there is a very funny scene with Johnson carrying a brick-sized mobile phone). "I kept saying 'We don't want to do The Wedding Singer. We don't want to pop on a Flock of Seagulls song.' We want to acknowledge it. We want it to take place then. But we don't want to make fun of it."

Born in 1977, Mickle grew up in the decade, but he wouldn't start his film career until years later, after graduating from New York University's film programme, when he worked in the camera department on indies like Transamerica, Shortbus and Pride and Glory. Even now, despite offers, he's still reluctant to go to Hollywood to work on formulaic scripts. "A lot of the studio stuff is stuff that…it's all the things I didn't want this [Cold In July] to be. So it's a matter of finding that one that's right."

Instead, he's developing a television pilot based on Lansdale's series of books, Hap and Leonard, with the Sundance Channel. "In a lot of ways, it's a continuation of Cold In July. Same author, same town, same time-period, same tone." What he doesn't have is a new film yet. "After every movie, we always had Cold In July. Now we've finally done it, we're like, 'What the hell do we do now'?"

At least he's got rid of that feeling of déjà vu.

Cold In July opens on June 27.