Quebec is on a roll at Cannes. Last year it was Xavier Dolan, a young director who came with Mommy, an edgy family drama that was nominated for the Palme d’or and that won a world audience. This year it’s Denis Villeneuve, 21 years Dolan’s senior, up for the top prize for a Hollywood action thriller, his Tex-Mex drug war film Sicario. The last Quebec feature to compete for the Palme d’Or was The Barbarian Invasions, by Denys Arcand, in 2003.

The night before the announcement that Villeneuve was getting the nod, he and Dolan got together at the younger director’s place in Montreal to toast the nomination with champagne. The evening marked a transition of sorts – in reverse. Usually the older generation hands off the baton to the younger one, but this time the veteran was the new man in the race. “Everything comes to he who waits,” the 47-year-old filmmaker said last week when his nomination was revealed.

“Cannes is the oldest film festival in the world, and I’ve long dreamed of having one of my films there in competition. It’s a dream that lay dormant for a long time; I stopped believing in it. So I’m extremely touched to be part of the festival this year. I didn’t think the film would be selected. Most of the time, at the last minute, they call you and say, ‘Sorry, we aren’t taking your movie.’ Then you cry. I’ve been through that process a few times.”

This time, in late March, he was woken by an early morning message of congratulation. “I was totally surprised. To me, Cannes was out of reach. My mind is more in America than Europe right now.”

By America, he means Hollywood. Though he broke into the big time in 2010 with Incendies, an Oscar-nominated drama about the legacy of civil war in Lebanon for a Montreal immigrant family, Villeneuve now works mostly on Tinseltown’s dime.

A still from Incendies, Denis Villeneuve’s 2010 breakthrough movie Photograph: PR

His back catalogue includes 2013’s Prisoners, a child-kidnap drama starring Hugh Jackman and Jake Gyllenhaal, produced in the US and set in Pennsylvania. Also released that year was Enemy, a doppelganger drama adapted from a José Saramago novel which was set and shot in Toronto and Mississauga, and which also starred Gyllenhaal.

Sicario, which stars Emily Blunt, Benicio Del Toro and Josh Brolin, was shot for $32m in New Mexico and is a mostly all-American movie. So, too, is Story of Your Life,a $50m science-fiction drama that Villeneuve will start shooting in Montreal in June, again with an all-American cast (Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, Forest Whitaker) and an American script.

After that, it’s back to Hollywood, where Villeneuve will direct his biggest project yet: the sequel to Blade Runner. Harrison Ford has been booked to reprise his role, assuming he has recovered from injuries sustained in a recent plane accident. Ryan Gosling will co-star and Ridley Scott will return to produce.

In all of his films, that quintessential American obsession – violence – is something Villeneuve likes to explore. That, and the quest for some kind of spiritual redemption. Polytechnique, a black-and-white feature that screened at the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes in 2009, dramatised the infamous mass shooting at a Montreal university in 1989 that left over a dozen women dead. His 2008 short Next Floor, winner of the best short prize at Cannes, sent an orgiastic cult of gourmet carnivores to their crashing doom. Maelström (2000) revolved around a fatal hit-and-run accident and attempted suicide by a troubled young woman (Marie-Josée Croze). And a car accident also presaged the recovery of another young woman (Pascale Bussières) in August 32nd on Earth (1998), Villeneuve’s feature debut.

Now the director is back on menacing American ground. In Latino slang, Sicario means hitman, and Villeneuve is the first to admit that his new film is intense – “a very dark film, a dark poem, quite violent.”

Benicio Del Toro plays a hired assassin in Sicario Photograph: Richard Foreman/Lionsgate

Blunt plays an idealistic FBI agent who ventures onto the mean streets of Ciudad Juárez, just across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas, in search of a vicious drug lord. Brolin plays the CIA official who leads the charge and Del Toro the assassin hired to do the dirty deed.

“It’s about the alienation of the cycles of violence, how at one point we are in those spirals of violence and ask ourselves, ‘Is there a solution?’” Villeneuve said. “My movie raises the question; it doesn’t give any answer.”

Like previous Hollywood indictments of the “war on drugs,” especially Steven Soderbergh’s 2000 multiple-Oscar winner Traffic (which earned Del Toro best supporting actor), Sicario deals with some heavy and intractable issues. “The drug problem on the Mexican border, the violence there, has been explored in the past by great filmmakers,” Villeneuve noted. “But we shouldn’t stop. It’s important to talk about it, because it still exists ... What’s happening there is really ugly.”

Villeneuve takes pieces of everyone’s mind to influence his own vision Jake Gyllenhaal

But, he insists, his film is not just about drug cartels. “The movie is about America ... how America fantasises that it can solve problems beyond its borders, and about the collateral damage that results ... and the legality and moral issues around that ... It’s a movie that deals with idealism and realism and the tension between both ... It takes place on the Mexican border, but it could have just as easily have been set in Afghanistan or the Middle East or various countries in Africa. In North America, we allow ourselves to do things that other countries can’t afford to.”

Unusually for a Canadian director in Hollywood, Villeneuve – a disciple of this year’s Cannes jury presidents, filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen, whose venerated British cinematographer, Roger Deakins, they share – gets full creative control on his films. “I’m very aggressive about my freedom,” he said. He has director’s cut and choice of casting, latitude to employ Montreal crew members, and is encouraged to use his “Quebecer’s sensibility” to give an outsider’s take on America.

He used to have reputation as an arrogant defender of his unique viewpoint, especially for his Canadian films. Hollywood taught him to listen to actors and make the process more collaborative. “People’s misconception of auteurs is that they control everything, that they tell you exactly what to do, that you’re supposed to follow their lead in every way,” Gyllenhaal commented during the Enemy shoot. But Villeneuve is “a true collaborator,” he said. “He takes pieces of everyone’s mind to influence his own vision.”

Paul Dano and Jake Gyllenhaal in Prisoners (2013), directed by Denis Villeneuve Allstar/Warner Bros Photograph: Allstar/Warner Bros

He also stands up for women. At first, Sicario’s backers wanted Blunt’s role to be rewritten for a man. Villeneuve and his first-time screenwriter, Taylor Sheridan, refused. “It isn’t easy to get a film made where the protagonist is a woman – there’s less money, people are afraid, and it’s really sad that it’s still like that today,” Villeneuve said. “It’s ludicrous, and this film shows that attitude is dépassé.”

At Cannes, Sicario will be among some 20 films in official competition. Last year, the Palme d’Or went to Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan for Winter Sleep. This year, there’s some buzz already that Villeneuve could take a movie that he said was “too big to shoot in Canada” and walk away with the big prize.

Besides the Coen brothers, Gyllenhaal and Dolan are now on the jury this year. There’s also a Mexican director, Guillermo del Toro. Up against works by Gus Van Sant, Todd Haynes and Jacques Audiard, Sicario’s chances look good.

“It’s for the general public, more than any other film I’ve done, and it’s the kind of cinema I want to do,” he said of Sicario, which is set for general release from September. Accessibility doesn’t mean sell-out, he added. “Film is pop art; It’s not whether it’s auteur cinema or not; that’s a false distinction. Cinema is cinema.”

And these days, he said with a grin, “as a filmmaker, I’m a spoiled kid.”

Jeff Heinrich is a freelance journalist based in Montreal

This article appeared in the Guardian Weekly. It was amended on 26 May 2015 to correct inaccuracies in the opening paragraph