It's All About Love, a gorgeous headscratcher with big stars, is a stunning volte-face for Thomas Vinterberg, who helped formulate the puritanical dogma of Dogme. Donald Clarke talks to the Danish director about breaking the rules and dealing with rejection

It's All About Love imagines a future where the world's citizens start keeling over in the street and dying from an acute lack of love. Claire Danes plays a figure skater (and that skater's clone) who must rely on the help of her estranged husband, Joaquin Phoenix, to save her from the malign influence of a sinister cabal led by Alun Armstrong. Meanwhile, Sean Penn circles the earth by jet and gravity stops functioning in sections of Uganda.

The film is directed by Thomas Vinterberg, co-founder of the Danish Dogme movement, as a gorgeous, lush riposte to his own 1998 masterpiece Festen. So one might reasonably assume that It's All About Love is destined for cult status. Well it hasn't quite worked out that way. Finished in 2002, the film struggled to get a limited theatrical release in Britain and arrives in Ireland on DVD without having troubled cinemagoers beyond its single screening at the Dublin International Film Festival.

"It is a bit of a troubled child, this film," the neat, annoyingly good-looking Vinterberg says. "There are quite a few people who don't get it. And I understand that. But the reactions I get from people who do like it are stronger than to anything I've done. People burst into tears in front of me. I get letters from people talking about the problems of existence." Well, lunatics are like that, I suppose.

Born in 1969 and raised in a Danish hippie colony ("I really recommend it for kids"), Vinterberg has not had much to do with failure up to this point. Last Round, his graduation project from the Danish Film Academy, won many awards and brought the young director to the attention of his endlessly controversial compatriot, Lars von Trier. It was Vinterberg and von Trier who drew up the Dogme Rules, a hilariously anal set of dicta aimed at ensuring cinematic integrity. The hugely praised Festen was the first film made to their specifications.

Vinterberg must have felt humbled when It's All About Love was rejected by the 2002 Cannes Film Festival. "It was a bruise," he says. "But that was not really this film. I did another year of post-production after Cannes. But that was the first realisation that It's All About Love was not a film that everybody would get. Then, later, some horrible reviews came. It was a huge bruise in terms of vanity. It was not nice to realise that you are not a member of the club anymore. But at the same time it gives you back your life."

So in some odd way he is happy to have taken such a fall? "Well, yes. I was madly celebrated for Festen and it just wasn't real. I felt myself suddenly under a fair bit of pressure from all that success. I felt confusion about where to go."

Listening to this, and considering just how relentlessly eccentric It's All About Love turned out, one begins, mischievously, to suspect that Vinterberg may have sabotaged his career on purpose. But the film is far too beautifully made for that. And would he really have tried to get Ingmar Bergman involved if he were intent on self-destruction?

"I asked him specifically if he wanted to write the script," Vinterberg explains. "And he replied, 'Are you kidding? I am sitting here on my island reading my books, having a good time. Why would I write your script for you?' But we had a very joyful, pleasurable phone conversation."

It's often the case that when articulate directors discuss work you don't quite get, the movie they describe sounds much more interesting than the one you've just seen. Vinterberg talks about the way modern society encourages an oddly nomadic life style - executives working in hotel lobbies and airport lounges, never at home long enough to settle in - and how that makes serious relationships harder to manage. He talks about the odd games he found himself playing: "We created New York in Copenhagen and then went to New York, but used stand-ins for Claire and Joaquin, who actually live there."

But the most interesting thing about the picture is the way its promiscuous artificiality blows raspberries at the austerity of the Dogme principles. "People take it very seriously still," he laughs. "I was in The Groucho Club the other day and this British producer began screaming at me, 'Dogme's crap. It's shit. It's all fake'."

Dogme '95, as it is properly known, was launched at the Cannes film festival when von Trier distributed a series of leaflets listing 10 criteria - shooting must be carried out on location, optical filters are forbidden, no genre pictures, etc - for defining decent, chaste cinema. It was, somewhat to Vinterberg's distress, a hit with the audience. "The moment 1,400 people stood up and clapped at Cannes, there was no risk any more. It was over."

So how difficult did they make life for themselves with those rules? Were there any that he immediately regretted including in the list? "Yeah the ones about no predictable storylines and that thing about no genre pictures. All storytelling is a slippery business. In some way all movies are genre pictures of some sort. But some of the rules were like doctrines in Catholicism: there as a statement to the world rather than to be actually observed."

Vinterberg goes on to explain that Dogme has now turned into a brand. "You can buy Dogme furniture in Denmark." Yet he still believes there is some future in the movement. If that's really the case, will his new film, a drama named Dear Wendy starring young Jamie Bell, see him returning to the rulebook?

Vinterberg places his Coke can and his ballpoint pen about two feet apart on the table. "Well, if It's All About Love is the pen and the can is Festen, I'd say Dear Wendy would be here." He places his hand right next to the can, then thinks and moves it a few inches back towards the centre. I think Dogme might be dead after all.

• It's All About Love is on DVD and VHS release