Tran Anh Hung enters Norwegian Wood – and emerges to tell the tale

Tran Anh Hung says he wants to be less interested in films. He wants to be less steeped in the knowledge of music, art and literature; free of the cultural baggage most people spend a lifetime accumulating. Despite a career quietly racking up prizes at Cannes, Venice and the Césars, as well as an Oscar nomination, he'd rather not think about the fuss and ceremony of awards, either. Truth be told, the softly spoken 48-year-old Vietnamese-born film-maker wants to be shot of any external pressure that might interfere with him making his meticulously composed films.

It's a tough challenge: Tran's latest work is an adaptation of Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood. To describe the novel as a coming-of-age cult classic is something of an understatement; it is by far Murakami's biggest success, feverishly adored by its fans and translated into 40 languages. The melancholic love story of Toru Watanabe, his best friend Kazuki and Kazuki's – and later, Watanabe's – fragile, enigmatic girlfriend Naoko, has all the awkward fumblings of first love, first grief and tragic longing. As timeless resonance goes, it's up there with Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye. In short: not an undaunting prospect.

"During the very long prep for the movie, I had time to see blogs. 'Oh no! You cannot do this movie! You cannot adapt this book! It is impossible, it is horrible!'" Tran says. "You have to be faithful to the book, but the language of cinema is already difficult, so why take on this [extra pressure]? I know what I wanted to do without knowing how to do it – that's already stressful enough."

Born in Da Nang, Vietnam, Tran moved to Laos when he was five. In 1975, after the fall of Saigon, the family migrated to the Paris suburbs. His parents are tailors. "When we came here, the next day they started to work making clothes for the French army."

Tran was studying for a philosophy degree in Paris when he saw a film by a Vietnamese director "that showed me it wasn't impossible". He quit the course and enrolled in film school, where he stayed two years. Perversely, he dropped out again when his finals were taking place. "I didn't want to have a diploma," he says, almost embarrassed. "Because I knew that if I had it, my parents would ask me to work. And then I would be a cameraman for TV, then I would earn a lot of money and have an apartment, a girlfriend …" He shrugs. As it was, rebellion took him to a job at the Musée d'Orsay bookshop, where he worked for four years while writing five scripts.

"I met my wife on my first short movie in Paris. I met her … and we stayed together!" Tran Nu Ten Khe has, in fact, appeared in all of her husband's films bar Norwegian Wood. (She takes credit for its set design instead.) She has played everything from a kinky prostitute in Cyclo to the heroin-addicted girlfriend of Josh Hartnett in I Come With the Rain. For Norwegian Wood, however, Tran cast the Oscar-nominated Rinko Kikuchi for the part of teenage lead Naoko.

"In the case of Rinko, I saw her in Babel, but I didn't think she could be Naoko. When I heard that she wanted to audition for the role, I said no." Tran smiles, but he doesn't think it's unusual to have turned down one of Japan's most famous acting exports. He has an aversion to what he calls "too expressive" acting, particularly in American films. Tran's casts are uniformly expressive, but in unconventional ways. They're incredibly still, as if all their usual quirks and tics are laden down with weights. It's a subtle, complex effect and obviously a stylistic calling card for Tran. "I said no to Rinko, not only once but several times – and she insisted. At the end of the casting process, I had some options, but I was not completely happy. So, I said: 'OK, let her audition for the role.' Then I saw the DVD." And was convinced straight away? "Absolutely. I had to fit everyone around her and change the choices I had already made."

The line between reportage photography and film-making isn't a particularly fuzzy one when it comes to studying the way Tran works: the composition is pretty much always exquisite. The Scent of Green Papaya, his first feature-length film, set in Saigon in 1951 but filmed entirely on a soundstage in Paris (thanks to the mistake of not factoring in Vietnam's monsoon season), contains almost no dialogue. Yet it's a delicate, evocative portrait of a family and their 10-year-old servant Mui, captured in two periods of her life, led entirely by the visually seductive skill of Tran's eye.

In Norwegian Wood, the colours – all rich, golden amber tones when Naoko, Toru and Kizuki are together in high school and harsher, bluer hues when the story takes a harsher turn – are little short of beautiful. Naoko's sanitorium, where she battles for her fragile mental health but eventually retreats into its snowy, misty landscape, provides some of the film's most striking scenes.

To complicate matters further, Norwegian Wood is set in Japan, but Tran doesn't speak the language it's filmed in. "I wrote it in French. Then translated to English, then it was translated to Japanese." How did he convince the reclusive Murakami to get on board? "He's a very practical man," says Tran. "He just wants to see things. When I met with him [five years ago], he said: 'I need to see the script.'" Tran spent a year writing while his producer crunched numbers for a budget to show the author – who, at that point, still could have said no. "That has happened before, of course. I have made one film, a project that is dead, three times in my head."

I suggest that, like his heroes Robert Bresson and Terrence Malick, Tran is averse to storyboarding his scenes. He seems horrified. "No, no, I never storyboard. For me, a picture is very precious, and you have to discover it at the last moment, so it will be fresh. During shooting, I try to forget the script and only read it if I need to check something."

Doesn't that present intimidating risks? "At that time, the actors know the script better than me," he says. "I'm telling myself: 'I have to learn how to speak this language in the most sophisticated way'. You discover together with the crew, the actors, the location. It's only then I try to find the frame."