Strokes director Warren Fu trained at Star Wars to go back to the future

Turning up on the set for his 11th Dimension video for Julian Casablancas last year, Warren Fu thought he was in the wrong place. "It was huge. I was hiding in my car finishing the storyboards like a kid who didn't do his homework," he remembers. "I knew it was the big time when I went to the bathroom and heard the intern say, 'I have eyes on Warren.'"

Fu might have to get used to such attention. In London for a month, the 34-year-old LA native is just off the back of directing two new promos – Mark Ronson's The Bike Song and the Ting Tings' comeback single, Hands, shot straight off the red eye. A self-confessed late starter (his first effort was in 2006), he has recently become a buzz name, largely thanks to his frankly amazing video for Mark Ronson & The Business Intl's Bang Bang Bang, with its Japanese talk show introduction and red, black and neon Knight Rider-inspired look. Still, when complimented on it, he says, wide-eyed: "It's so good to hear people like it. I never know how they're going to respond."

Such a shy-guy type of comment makes more sense when you know Fu's history. Growing up in LA, he dabbled in graffiti as a teenager, then did the sensible thing and studied economics. "I was miserable," he admits, "then I bumped into a friend from high school who believed I should be doing art. She told me about an internship at Lucasfilm." Fu applied and ended up staying with the production company for five years. "It was an 80s kid's dream, basically," he says. "There was a Stormtrooper in the doorway, Slimer was in reception, the Hoverboard from Back To The Future II …"

Starting out cleaning monitors and making coffee, Fu picked things up along the way. "I would ask questions. I worked in the model shop with the old-school guys and the graphics department on the logos," he says. "I saw how George Lucas would come up with some idea in a meeting and a week later we'd made it. That was really cool." Present for AI, Pirates Of The Caribbean and Star Wars, he became the envy of every thirtysomething male when he got to design a Star Wars character: General Grievous, the evil droid in Revenge Of The Sith.

'It was crazy, I was sneaking out during my lunch breaks while they were making Star Wars'

After a moonlighting job designing the art for Aaliyah's last album – "It was crazy, I was sneaking out during my lunch breaks while they were making Star Wars" – Fu reached a point where he wanted to come up with the ideas himself. An avid music fan, he heard the Strokes' You Only Live Once and "a picture of a graphic equaliser came into my head". Taking the title of the song to heart perhaps, he cobbled together a 30-second clip of his vision and, with zero previous connection to the Strokes, emailed it to their manager. A message from Casablancas's wife came back, asking Fu (ever the polymath) to design the Strokes' website. He then met Casablancas himself "and we hit it off. He watched the clip and I got a phone call at 3am saying, 'We have to make this.'"

The rest is digitally recorded history. Fu's video for You Only Live Once – all spaceships, neon graphics and those 80s sci-fi references – introduced his "retro-futuristic" style. "I love the past's vision of the future, there's something so charming about it," he says. After two videos for Casablancas's solo project (not to mention his album artwork, and that of Brandon Flowers), as well as Ronson and the Ting Tings under his belt, Fu's now a busy man, with a double all-nighter pencilled in to complete his latest videos in time for release. "I'm such a control freak, I have to have my hands on the final film," he says. "I badly need an assistant; please put that in."

The way things are going, there might be room for a few applicants. This is, Fu says, only the beginning. "There's so many sides of my aesthetic that I can't wait to show. I don't want to get stuck with the Tron, sci-fi thing," he says. "The Ting Tings' and Mark's videos are very different; one is very charming and French New Wave, the other is dark and industrial."

As to the real, rather than retro, future, a film beckons – although possibly in a galaxy far, far away. "That's down the line," Fu says. "This is like making mini films. That's enough for me right now."