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After quietly working in small behind-the-scenes roles for the last decade, Minghella is now making his full-length directorial debut, Teen Spirit, for which he also wrote the script. The neon-tinged flick stars Elle Fanning as an unsmiling teen stuck in the dismal Isle of Wight who enters a glossy TV singing competition—a fictional fusion of American Idoland Eurovision—in an attempt to leave her farm-girl life behind.

“What I like about making movies is that there is a lack of anxiety or nervousness that is different to performing,” Minghella says, of his own new life, by phone from Los Angeles. “I love them both, but I’ve been acting for 16 years and I still find it a bridge to cross, whereas directing—which is not to say that I’m good at it at all—it’s organic to me and my personality.”

That personal connection to directing doesn’t mean the movie came together easily. Minghella, who was raised in North London, got a history degree from Columbia and now lives in L.A., began writing the first draft of the movie a decade ago. He went through round after round of rewrites, he says, in part inspired by watching some friends make the surprisingly unflinching 2012 tour documentary Katy Perry: Part of Me, he says. (One iconic scene shows Perry forcing a perky onstage smile for her fans only minutes after recovering from a divorce-related emotional breakdown.) And as he wrote real-life radio hits into the film, he secured Interscope Records as a production partner, which helped smooth over a lot of the film’s musical needs: By happy coincidence, he says, he was able to use every song he’d originally chosen.

As a first-time director, Minghella says that meeting his own expectations was the challenge—he wanted the drama of a big-budget popcorn flick with the soul of a smaller indie. “We made the movie for no money and we had no time,” he says. “It’s a movie that is extremely large in scope and has big set pieces and lots of set pieces. Lots of extras. It’s a movie that should cost six times what we made it for. It was just a challenge in efficiency.” The film’s star, Fanning, did a lot of the heavy lifting for him: She sings, dances, speaks Polish and milks a goat during the course of the film. Minghella praised the nuance of Fanning’s performance and her ability to make audiences warm up to her unconventional protagonist.

Over email, Fanning shared her adoration for her director’s abilities. “From the very first meeting with Max,” she says, “I realized what an extremely hard worker he is. I do not know how he has time to sleep. He is a director who is involved in every single aspect of the filmmaking process. I truly feel that if he needed to, he would be able to run each department on set.” Before Fanning filmed her climactic final performance, Minghella set up extra rehearsal time for her, which she says helped her feel more at ease.

Minghella says he practiced directing privately a lot, directing and editing personal films for the majority of his life. As for the influence of his father, Max says that he wishes he had been more observant while on set in his younger days. “I was such a kid when I was there that I didn’t pay much attention to what lenses he was using, where he was putting the camera, and I would now be fascinated and be more perceptive,” he says. Still, he feels grateful for the long hours of his childhood where he would be forced to sit and watch the particular part of the filmmaking craft that he now finds most helpful: “I love editing—it’s been the lens through which I approach the whole process of writing and making the film on the day. It’s all to get to that part of the process.”

This summer, Minghella will be back as Nick in the third season of Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale. “None of us had any clue when we signed up for this show that it would exist for any amount of time,” he says. “It was for a network that had a questionable future, the optics of the show are not particularly glamorous, but it was material that we all loved. The fact that it has resonated in the way it has, has been a complete shock to everybody. I didn’t sign on to it thinking I would be playing this character for a very long time.” (Still, he was mum on providing any specific details—“I’ll get shot, I think.”)