Paul Anderson is making a name for himself in science fiction and horror films. Steve Pratt meets the director who started with home movies and ended up with the leading lady.

Writer and director Paul Anderson remembers clearly the moment he decided he wanted to be a film-maker. The place was Jesmond Picture House and he was one of 200 screaming children "running around beating each other up and throwing popcorn about" at a Saturday morning picture show.

"Your parents could drop you off and go shopping. The cinema would show a Laurel and Hardy short and a John Wayne movie or something," he recalls.

Then it happened at the end of a Wayne western. He can't recall which one but can remember the effect watching the end credits had on his young mind. "For the first time I made the connection that John Wayne was not a cowboy but an actor," he says.

"I saw all the other things, like cameraman, and realised that movies were constructed, made artefacts. I thought, 'wow, people make those things - that's what I want to do with my life, I want to make movies'.

"I didn't know what the jobs were and what I wanted to do, but that was the industry I wanted to be in."

Anderson, 37, achieved his wish. Making Super 8 home movies with his friend Bharat Nalluri - a film and TV director himself now - has led him to Hollywood via a Tyne Tees short film called Speed. That was "a dry run" for his first British-made feature film Shopping which starred a then-unknown Jude Law. Since then, he's directed Mortal Kombat, Event Horizon, Soldier with Kurt Russell and Resident Evil, based on a popular video game series.

As well as a house in Hollywood and a beautiful girlfriend (Resident Evil's star Milla Jovovich), he's acquired an addition to his name. He's billed now as Paul W S Anderson to avoid confusion with Magnolia director Paul Thomas Anderson.

He's yet to make a movie in his native North-East, unless you count those early home movies, which are currently in Nalluri's safe keeping. Anderson, who returned most recently to the North-East to show Jovovich where he grew up, wants to film up here one day.

Originally, he wanted to make Shopping in Newcastle, but it would have proved too expensive and was filmed in London instead. Although he has no immediate plans to film on home ground, one of several projects in development has Newcastle connections - an adaptation of Driver, a video game of which he's a huge fan and which is made by local company Reflections.

"I'm developing a bunch of different things," he says. "I've never been in the position before where I have so many exciting possibilities."

He's preparing Death Race 3000 for Tom Cruise as well as talking to Fox about uniting two horror franchises on Alien vs Predator. "It's been talked about but never been cracked. I have a completely different take on it that they really like," he says.

He's also writing a Resident Evil sequel, which he'd like to start shooting next year.

Impact, the company he and producer Jeremy Bolt set up a decade ago, has London offices but Anderson's schedule dictates he moves around a lot. "I went to Los Angeles seven years ago and have a house in California that I've remodelled. I was in it two weeks, then moved to London for a year to make The Sight. I went back for another two weeks, then moved to Germany to shoot Resident Evil. So I've been there three or four weeks in three years."

The property is rarely empty as North-East film-making friends, including Nalluri and Richard Johns of Pilgrim Films, base themselves there during LA visits. "There are times if there was an earthquake in Venice Beach, where I live, a lot of the British film industry would get wiped out because they're more likely to be there than me."

Shopping was at the front of a new wave of British film-makers tagged "the multiplex generation", a term for which he has little affection. They were, he says. "a bunch of young film-makers that didn't want to make period movies or art house movies."

For him, Shopping was a statement of intent that they wanted to make commercial cinema in Britain. He remains hugely proud of the film, which was given a rough ride by critics. "It's a flawed film because I didn't know what I was doing. I was making my mistakes in an exposed way, but there's a lot of really cool stuff about that movie.

"We got critical abuse, like Jude Law is too pretty to be an actor. That's a ludicrous thing to say. There was criticism because we had a soundtrack album and pretty people. A lot of things we were doing were deeply unfashionable. But it was the first of many movies that led to a commercial British cinema.

"I was fortunate with Shopping that I went to the Sundance film festival and Americans loved it. That's why I went to Hollywood after that. I could either go back to Britain where no one liked me, or go to Hollywood where they did."

If his CV is dominated by horror and science fiction films, that's because those are the type of movies he's always liked. Lawrence Of Arabia director David Lean was the British film-maker he most admired when he was growing up. "He had an epic scope and sweep that's sadly lacking in a lot of British film-making," he says.

That's partly the result of low budgets and partly because of other people's perceptions of us. The French, he says, think of Britain as a small, grey country whose movies are small and grey. In America, there are huge, wide landscapes and that's reflected in their movies.

"I watched and liked a lot of French movies as well. So my influences tended to be America and Europe. Those were always going to be the kind of movies I'd make," says Anderson.

His latest, Resident Evil, is a European production shot in Germany and could hardly be less typical of the British film industry. "It's not a light, romantic comedy and doesn't have Hugh Grant or any American money in it," he says. "It was shot with a European crew and the special effects were done in London. The profits flow into the European film industry, unlike Notting Hill which looks like a British film but all the profits go back to America."

He was back home for the Resident Evil premiere, the first time he's undertaken a promotional tour for a movie. The good aspect is that he loves travelling and that Milla is "a fun person to travel with".

On the other hand, he misses working. "You become very aware it's a month since doing anything," he says. "I'm itching to return to work. I started as a writer-director and am getting back to doing that more and more."

* Resident Evil (15 certificate) is showing in cinemas now.