My first impression of director Jacques Audiard is that he's almost as wired as the street-punk hero of his film "The Beat That My Heart Skipped," fidgeting in his chair, desperate for a smoke, jumping in mid-translation to clarify a point. Entering his sixth decade, Audiard shows no signs of slowing down, and if anything his films just keep getting better. "Rust and Bone," only his sixth film in a 20-year directing career, is opening wide in Japan — thanks in part to his locally popular star Marion Cotillard — and may finally move the director well beyond his art-house fan base.

After finishing his last film, the prison-gang drama "A Prophet" — which won the Jury prize at Cannes in 2009 — Audiard spent the next three years working on an adaptation of two short narratives from Craig Davidson's book "Rust and Bone: Stories," a long but rather typical commitment by the director/screenwriter. When asked whether he suffers from perfectionism, Audiard replies, "No, nothing is perfect, ever. But that sort of interval between films is important to me. Every time I set out to make a film, it feels like I'm doing it for the first time. I'd love to make more films, actually, but for me, it just takes time, and the thing that takes the longest is the script."

That's not surprising to anyone who's seen the precise way in which Audiard (who also pens the screenplays with his partner, Thomas Bidegain) advances his stories. Unlike the explain-everything-always linearity of Hollywood storytelling, Audiard's films feel more like a collection of moments, impressionistic fragments that coalesce perfectly as the story progresses.