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With Smoking Causes Coughing, it's best to expect the unexpected.

What starts as an offbeat superhero comedy fractures into an absurdist anthology movie when the Tobacco Force, "the coolest avengers in the world", are sent on a team-building getaway by their puppet-rat boss, Chief Didier. As the off-duty heroes trade stories, a picture of a "sick planet" comes into focus.

It's all just part of the crazy world-view – see Rubber (2010), Deerskin (2019) – created by prolific editor-cinematographer- writer-director, Quentin Dupieux... 

The film brings to mind so many different reference points across pop culture: comic books, tokusatsu, horror... Did you have any of these in mind while making the film? 

I didn't know it while I was writing, but now that the movie is done, I can see that it's basically a mix of every TV show I watched when I was a kid: superhero and Japanese series, cartoons and other programmes. 

Were you inspired by films, too? 

There's one really obvious one. It's a movie called Meet The Feebles, from Peter Jackson. I loved the movie so much because it was so mean and nasty. Badly shot, but in a good way. It's a great movie, and if you look at the rat in my movie, it's almost exactly the same rat from Meet The Feebles. 

A sequence in this film, with a man stuck in an industrial wood chipper, which is played as a gory farce, has a similar shocking energy. 

We premiered in Cannes last year, and it was amazing. That section of the film was a blast because it's horrible but it's so much fun to watch. My goal is always to please the audience in a good way. I want the audience to laugh. 

Smoking Causes Coughing almost defies description. How would you pitch it to an audience?

Come and have fun watching humanity being stupid, while the world is burning. I started writing a stupid comedy with superheroes... but, even though I was trying to make something weird and goofy, all the important subjects came in without even thinking about it. It's impossible today to write something that doesn't talk about the world. 

There's a loving attention to detail to the costume and production design. How involved are you on that side? 

My wife [Joan Le Boru] does art direction for all my movies and we're heavily connected on this. When you watch the Power Rangers, for example, the costumes are really bad, they are really cheap, but we wanted something a little bit more upscale, if I can say that. We did tons of tests. We took time to choose the material, the fabric, to make the costumes look nice and not just cheap, because I was not trying to make a parody, I was trying to make my own vision.   Michael Leader

Smoking Causes Coughing is released on 7 July — Book Now