"There's no other way of life I've found that can stimulate me. I'm never bored." Face to Face with director Charles Henri Belleville

Admittedly it's taken him the best part of a decade and a couple of false starts to get here. "It's like the second album, isn't it? Always troublesome."

I first met Belleville back in 2007 in a café opposite the V&A in London to talk about his film debut, a micro-budget Scottish road movie called The Inheritance, which he'd made in 11 days for £5000 on a holiday from his day job. The sheer brazenness of that got him attention, as did the fact that he managed to get up-and-coming actor Tom Hardy to take a small role in it.

Back then he was an eager beaver twenty-something full of grand plans and thrilled that years of working in the film industry, albeit at the lowest levels, had come good.

Robert Sheehan stars in Jet Trash

Now he's a positively ancient 32-year-old. But he has retained his youthful energy and enthusiasm despite the fact that between then and now he's seen two movies he was set to direct – Away, which also played at the film festival this year and The Anomaly, which showed at the festival in 2014 – made by others. He has never even watched the latter. "It's a little bit like your girlfriend getting married," he admits. "You still love her a little bit but you don't want to go to the wedding."

Never mind, he's got a new "girlfriend" now. He's in Edinburgh with his film called Jet Trash. That means a lot. He was a regular visitor to the festival in his teens. He remembers meeting some of his film making idols here, including Guillermo del Toro. Now it is his turn to be the centre of attention. "With this," he tells me as we sit in the basement of the Traverse surrounded by film festival delegates, "my parents can believe I'm a film director."

Jet Trash is a youth movie. Think beautiful young things in peril on an island paradise. Filmed in 40 degree heat on the Indian island of Goa it's easy on the eye. So are its stars, most notably Robert Sheehan, the breakout star of the Channel 4 sci-fi drama Misfits, and Algerian actress Sofia Boutella who, since filming Jet Trash, has become something of a Hollywood rising star thanks to her role in the most recent Star Trek movie.

Next year he's lined up to shoot Blue Mauritius, a Hitchcockian style heist thriller, in South Africa. When I catch up with him again in November he tells me Gerard Depardieu has just signed up. Belleville, the son of a blacksmith, who saved money from his paper round when he was 15 to buy a film camera, would appear to have arrived.

Jet Trash seems to have been just as eventful a shoot off-screen as it is on. For a start Sheehan and Boutella became an item at the latter's audition. "It was the scene where they kiss for the first time and obviously for the audition they're supposed to stop before they kiss," Belleville recalls. "I'm filming it and they get to that point and they lean over and kiss. And not a little kiss. They're kissing for two minutes. That was when I realised there's a little bit more to this than meets the eye. And a little over two years later they're still together."

Not all of Sheehan's encounters in the film were quite so fortunate. On one of the first days of shooting he came off a motorbike and required stitches. And then there was the time, Belleville recalls, a crew member nearly strangled Sheehan.

Come again Charlie? "I won't say which crew member it was but one of our crew members had a bad reaction to malaria tablets which we'd all had to take," Belleville explains. "We were onset and the crew member got more and more agitated and then – basically as a result of the malaria tablets – believed he was the antagonist in the film and proceeded to take Rob by the neck in front of everyone on set.

"He came out with this line as he was choking Rob. "I can see the evil in your eyes," which was both terrifying and funny. Eventually security came and calmed it all down and he got taken off to hospital.

"In his psychotic state he thought he was being taken to the hospital to be killed. He escaped from the car three times on the way to the hospital. Three days later he was back on set and finished the film. That's testament to Robert. He was fine with the guy coming back onto set."

All of which is likely to test your directorial control, I imagine. Belleville himself stopped drinking to make the movie. "Just to commit every fibre of my being to making this film a success. Just so I would have no regrets. Hung over I know I'm not 100 per cent."

So on Goa, party central after all, you were the only one not partying? "Worse. I was partying sober. Doing conga lines with the Indian crew when everyone's having great fun. I'm not the best dancer in the world drunk, but sober … That was literally the hardest part of the film."

He points out he gave up alcohol during the making of The Inheritance too. "It's a kind of tradition now."

Belleville has been working his way to this point since that teenage milk round. Maybe before. He talks of falling in love with film at the age of five while watching Disney's Treasure Island at the old Odeon cinema in Edinburgh's Clerk Street. Watching Goodfellas at the age of 12 was when he began to realise what a director did. (Let's gloss over the fact that it's an 18 certificate. Parents these days).

After university in Newcastle (where among other things he studied film theory) he worked for years as a runner, making contacts as well as making tea. The Inheritance began to open doors for him but it's taken a while for him to be able to capitalise on it. In between, he directed the odd documentary and music video. But it's taken the best part of a decade to make his second film. Was he ever tempted to walk away?

What else would he do, he says? "My whole life is a disaster zone apart from film making. Film making is the one consistent thing I've found that I'm not bad at. Everything else is a disaster."

I suspect we should take that with a pinch of salt. He has been with his partner Cat, a production designer from Minnesota, for five years now after all. "She's a real rock in our relationship."

It's clear that, as he says, film has its hooks in him. "You have to commit to it. There's no choice once it bites you. The first film I worked on as a runner there was this great line producer. And he said to me: 'The thing is Charlie now you've been on a film set you'll understand. It's like running away with the circus.'

"There's not many jobs that allow you to have an adventure. Going to Goa is an adventure. There's no other way of life I've found that can stimulate me so much. I'm never bored."

Are things beginning to get easier? "Francis Ford Coppola said in the nineties that in the future film making will become an art form when children can sit in their bedrooms and edit their film. And with Jet Trash I was doing that."

There has been a real democratisation of information, he says. "You can go on YouTube and learn about lighting." As a result, he adds, "I genuinely think it's the best possible time to be making films. You can make a film on a mobile phone now. Which is great. There's no excuse. It's easier to make a film than ever. But what is hard is to stand out because there is so much more competition."

Jet Trash screens exclusively with Vue at Glasgow Fort, Aberdeen and Edinburgh Ocean Terminal from Friday.