PARIS — After charming Broadway and the West End, the French playwright and director Florian Zeller may be about to repeat the trick with Hollywood.

“The Father,” Zeller’s film adaptation of his most successful play to date, has emerged as an awards season contender, with four nominations at the Golden Globes on Sunday. In addition to acting nods for the film’s two stars, Anthony Hopkins and Olivia Colman, “The Father” is in the running for best screenplay and best drama — a significant achievement for a directorial debut.

Inspired in part by the cognitive decline of Zeller’s grandmother when the director was a teenager, “The Father” portrays a man (Hopkins) coming undone as dementia skews his understanding of reality. The story is told from his perspective, and viewers are left to grapple with a blurred timeline and unsettling inconsistencies. His apartment morphs into another; his daughter, played by Colman, sometimes appears to mislead him, even as she cares for him.

Zeller, 43, first rose to prominence as a budding novelist in the early 2000s before pivoting to theater. “The Father,” first staged in 2012, was part of a trilogy of plays about family trauma — alongside “The Mother” and “The Son” — that cemented his status as one of the most successful French playwrights of his generation.

“The Father” has been performed in dozens of productions internationally, and in 2016, earned Frank Langella a Tony Award for his Broadway performance in the title role. For the film adaptation, Zeller changed the character’s name from André to Anthony, because the script was written with Hopkins in mind. (Luckily, the actor said yes.)

Like many Golden Globes contenders, “The Father” had its release delayed several times because of the pandemic. In the United States, it opens in limited theaters on Friday.

Ten days before the Globes ceremony, Zeller spoke via Zoom from his second home in Normandy, northern France. The conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

How different is the film’s script from the play that inspired it?

My obsession was to do more than film a play. I worked on the script with Christopher Hampton, who has translated most of my works into English. I tried to take what was original about the play — the way the story is told from inside someone’s mind — and put viewers in the same position.

When you adapt a play for the screen, you’re immediately tempted to write new outdoor scenes, so it feels more cinematic. I didn’t want to do that: We stuck to one location, the apartment, which acts as a mental space. The main character has lost his bearings due to old age, and I wanted the audience to start doubting reality, too — to understand what it feels like when the world around you ceases to be trustworthy.

What did cinema allow that wasn’t necessarily possible onstage?

I found we could go much further in conveying disorientation and making it immersive. One of my greatest film memories is David Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive,” and similarly, I wanted the viewer to be in charge of making sense of what happens. We worked hard with the set designer, Peter Francis, to create a kind of maze. That’s why there are so many doors, hallways and symmetrical effects.

The film was shot in a studio in London, so we could completely transform the apartment: Slowly, the furniture becomes different, the proportions, sometimes even the colors. Only cinema can make it this unsettling, like a puzzle where a piece is constantly missing.

How did Anthony Hopkins react to getting a script in which the lead character is named after him?

I wrote the script with him in mind, stubbornly, even though I knew it was a somewhat unrealistic dream. I sent it to his agent, and one day, I got a phone call. Anthony wanted to meet me, so I got on a plane to have breakfast with him in Los Angeles.

He immediately understood why the character was named Anthony, but he asked me whether it really made sense to keep the name and his real date of birth in the film. I told him it was important to me, in order to blur the lines between reality and fiction, and so it could act as a door to his own self, which he could open at any point.

It shaped the entire process: I didn’t want us to craft a character and fall back on clichés. What mattered was for him to connect with his own mortality, which was courageous on his part. It involved confronting the part of his mind that might be scared, at 83, of what’s to come, and tapping into this sense of fear.

Were there hard days on set?

The final scene was the hardest one to shoot, emotionally speaking, but I will never forget that day. At that point, Anthony’s character is regressing and reconnecting with childhood emotions. It was difficult to get it right at first, and then — Anthony told me later — he spotted a pair of glasses on set, and it brought back the memory of his own father’s glasses, as well as a song his mother used to sing to him when he was little. And that song broke him: I saw him mentally travel 80 years back. It was miraculous.

He and Olivia Colman, who is a kind of emotional genius, served the story with such humility and generosity. They let me do the film I wanted to do.

What was it like for you to direct in English?

It happened mainly because I wanted to do the film with Anthony. When you’re not entirely fluent in a language, you can only use it to say exactly what you need to say, and nothing else. It forces you to clarify your intentions and wishes to an extreme degree. In the end, I think it helped me be really precise with what I wanted.

The film’s release was delayed in most countries. Did you consider showing it directly on streaming services?

Yes, but we decided not to, in order to support movie theaters when they reopen. Perhaps because I come from theater, the idea of sharing an experience with others in a physical space is part of what fascinates me about cinema. Still, so much work has gone into this film that it’s nerve-racking how complicated it’s been for it to reach audiences.

What has the past year looked like for you, between lockdowns and other restrictions in France?

I found it hard to work at first, even though I had the time. In order to write, I need to dream about something, to project it into the future, and we’re currently in a world where any projection is very difficult.

But “The Father” was such an intense, happy adventure, that I came away with a strong desire to make another film. I want to adapt another one of my plays, “The Son.” My hope is to film it in New York, as soon as it becomes possible.