Tony Kaye has spent three decades being difficult, brilliant, and unemployable in roughly equal measure. Now the British director who gave us the searing white-supremacist drama American History X — and then publicly disowned it after losing final cut — is turning his camera on something altogether stranger: the giant monster sculptures that dot Leicester's urban landscape.

The short, titled Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?, runs just five minutes and promises to blend documentary with what the production describes as "reality drama." It is, by any measure, a peculiar creative choice for a filmmaker whose previous work includes harrowing examinations of racism, addiction, and institutional failure. But Kaye has never been interested in meeting expectations.

The Leicester connection

Leicester's monster sculptures — oversized, slightly unsettling public artworks scattered across the East Midlands city — have become unlikely local landmarks. They exist in that particular British tradition of municipal art that nobody asked for but everyone eventually grows fond of, the kind of thing that appears on postcards sold to tourists who wandered in looking for Richard III's grave.

Kaye, who grew up in London before decamping to Los Angeles, has long shown an interest in the overlooked and the grotesque. His documentary work, including Lake of Fire, his three-hour examination of the American abortion debate, demonstrated a willingness to sit with uncomfortable subjects. Giant fibreglass monsters are considerably less fraught territory, though one suspects Kaye will find the darkness somewhere.

A career of brilliant chaos

The director's filmography reads like a cautionary tale about what happens when genuine talent meets an inability to compromise. American History X earned Edward Norton an Oscar nomination and became a cultural touchstone, but Kaye's battles with New Line Cinema over the final edit became industry legend. He tried to have his name removed from the film. He took out trade paper advertisements attacking the studio. He proposed the director credit go to "Humpty Dumpty."

Subsequent features — Detachment with Adrien Brody, the little-seen The Sound and the Fury adaptation — arrived sporadically, each carrying the weight of a filmmaker who seemed constitutionally incapable of playing the game. A five-minute short about municipal sculpture suggests either a mellowing or a strategic retreat to territory where no studio executive can interfere.

Our take

There is something almost touching about Tony Kaye, enfant terrible of 1990s cinema, finding his way to a project this small and this strange. The man who once compared himself to Orson Welles is now making micro-budget work about public art in the English Midlands. Whether Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? amounts to anything beyond a curiosity remains to be seen, but Kaye at his most unhinged has always been more interesting than most directors at their most polished. Leicester's monsters could do worse than have him as their chronicler.