First-time director Tom Ford has surprised the critics by making one of the year's best films. Can he take all the credit – or is great cinema always a team effort?

The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Monday 1 March 2010

Homophone corner: "The fact is, there aren't too many directors who know anything about light metres or camera lenses".

Tom Ford wanted to be a ­director so much, he bought a movie. He obtained the rights to a Christopher ­Isherwood novel, lifted the cast from his contacts book and the budget from his bank balance. Ford made his ­millions in the rag trade; first as the creative director of Gucci and then as the creator of the Tom Ford fashion label. He freely admits that, ­until ­recently, he had no film-making ­experience whatsoever.

It would be nice, then, to dismiss A Single Man as a bungled vanity project, a hubristic folly from a man with more dollars than sense. ­Annoyingly, the shoe won't fit. A ­Single Man boasts a deft, Oscar-­nominated performance from Colin Firth as a bereaved academic facing stark life choices in sun-splashed, early-60s California. It is a film that confidently marries style with substance; a seductive drama that lightly references Hitchcock, Douglas Sirk and Luchino Visconti. Already the critics are dubbing it Death in Venice Beach.

But here's the thing. A Single Man is a superb first film from a man who, by his own admission, knew next to nothing about the nuts and bolts of making a movie. So I'm confused. Does this make Ford some kind of ­genius savant? Or does it say something about the art of directing, wherein the dreams of one person are built on the backs of others? Just look at the credits. All those cast members; all that crew. In what sense is this "a film by Tom Ford", exactly?

I blame the auteur theory, which ­elevated the director to a God-like ­status and allowed him (and it usually is a him) to hog all the credit. Hitchcock was an auteur, we are assured, and so was Orson Welles. And yet, in later years, the titles designer Saul Bass ­insisted that it was he and not Hitchcock who had engineered the shower scene in Psycho (surely the most purely Hitchcockian scene of them all), while US critic Pauline Kael made a case for the writer (Herman ­Mankiewicz) and the cinematographer (Gregg Toland) as the real driving forces behind Citizen Kane. It has been said that the end credits of Titanic last longer than the real Titanic took to sink (the ones on Avatar achieve a ­similar level of transcendental ­longevity). But don't mention that to director James Cameron, the self-crowned "king of the world".

A Single Man, as it happens, is just one of a recent run of acclaimed films from first-time film-makers with a track record outside the industry. They include the artists Steve McQueen (Hunger) and Sam Taylor-Wood ­(Nowhere Boy), as well as TV comedy writer Armando Iannucci (In the Loop). Nowhere Boy and In the Loop share the same producer: Kevin Loader. ­Debut directors of any stripe, Loader tells me, typically need more reassurance than those who have been in the business a while. "They need help ­getting the relationships in place; ­figuring out how to work best with the crew around them. Then there is the politics of the cutting room. First-time directors might not be sure just how much ­freedom they've got, and how much they're going to get busted by other producers and those who have invested in the film. That's where the help comes in. Certainly there was a bit of head-butting with certain people on Nowhere Boy."

When von Trier went awol

So, OK, directors need help in order to realise their vision. But where does the help stop and the heavy ­lifting begin? It's fair to say that some film-makers are in command of all ­aspects of the process, while others have only the foggiest notion of what a camera actually does. On top of that, some directors are hands-on, others can be conspicuous by their absence. Late last year, I sat in the auditorium at the European film awards and saw the cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle pick up a prize for his work on Lars von Trier's Antichrist. "Lars, it was great when you were there," Dod Mantle said. "But you weren't there very ­often." Or take the case of The ­Wolfman, a forthcoming horror ­blockbuster that found itself shuttled between directors. Certain portions, it is whispered, were shot without ­anyone officially in charge.

Theoretically, says Loader, it is ­entirely possible for a film to direct ­itself. A solid cast and crew can be ­relied on to fill in the gaps left by a ­director who is either inept or awol. "Oh, it happens all the time," he says. "Directors come through the machine and barely register on the seismograph. That's especially common in TV. ­Perhaps it's harder on a feature film, because I'm not sure the actors would let you get away with it. But yes, it still happens. If you have a good team around you, they could probably make a film without direction."

Nick James, who edits film magazine Sight & Sound, would go along with that. If it's the case that anyone can direct a film, then it's also the case that anyone can not direct a film. "I know stories about very well-known figures who are revered for directing films and who basically do nothing," he tells me. "They just put their name on it at the end." Is this a problem? ­According to James, there is a simple formula for making a film. "There are two things to get right at the start: the casting and the shot-list. After that you can basically sit back. The fact is, there aren't too many ­directors who know anything about light metres or camera lenses. But that's not ­necessarily a bad thing."

Nor does he have any problem with describing Ford as an ­auteur. A Single Man, he says, reflects its ­director's background in that it is "art-directed to death". Moreover, Ford has the wealth and prestige to ­ensure that his film was tailored to fit his exact specifications. "Independent wealth has never hurt anybody who wanted to make films," James says ruefully. "It's no ­accident that a lot of the great ­independent directors of European ­cinema – like Visconti, for instance – were independently wealthy."

British director Peter Strickland is not a millionaire. Like Ford, however, he decided to finance his first feature from his own pocket. The award-winning Katalin Varga is a haunting, poetic revenge saga set in the wilds of Romania. It was shot for a paltry £25,000 with a skeletal, 11-strong crew. This involved Strickland pitching in on everything from sorting parking permits to arranging the catering. Yet even here there were limitations. "I could never ­operate a 16mm camera," he confesses. "And I know nothing about sound."

'Directing is not rocket science'

But that's all right, he assures me. That's how a film set works. "The cameraman doesn't have a clue what's ­going on with the sound, and the sound man won't know one end of a camera from the other, and the director might not know much about either. But ­directing is not rocket science. It's about working with the departments and keeping an eye on the bigger picture." I ask whether Katalin Varga is credited as "a film by Peter Strickland" and he admits, slightly sheepishly, that it is. "That's what marketing people do; it's a branding thing," he explains. "Not that I'm complaining or anything."

Actually, I'm not either. Strickland wrote the script and called the shots. He cooked for the crew and paid for the food, so he is surely entitled to claim the end product as his own. No doubt the same is true for Ford, whose film is similarly bought and paid for, like a patented fashion design runup elsewhere by professional tailors. Even so, I can't help feeling for all those unsung heroes – the lighting technicians, sound engineers and editors who have the power to make or break a motion picture, only to find ­themselves relegated to the wings, like the elves in Santa's workshop. "I'd like to think that Katalin Varga is my film," says Strickland. "But you're right: it's not as though I'm the author of a novel. Film is a team ­effort. Without the cast and crew, it's nothing."

A Single Man is out tomorrow. Katalin Varga is out on DVD on 22 February.