FOR film-maker Jack Bond, following former 1980s icon Adam Ant as he returned from exile was a win-win situation.

“I saw it could go one of two ways: he could try to come back and fail, which would still be an interesting story for a film, or he could come back and succeed – and that would be just as good.”

Famed for his classic 1965 documentary Dali In New York and his years with ITV’S The South Bank Show profiling the likes of Werner Herzog and Roald Dahl, Bond has spent almost five decades making films “with and about monsters”.

“There is so much of Adam Ant that reminds me of [Salvador] Dali,” says Bond, whose document of the famous surrealist included a scene involving a coffin, an ocelot, half a million dollars in cash and a swan’s egg filled with black ants.

“When you’re making a film with a subject, it’s like getting married. You’re inextricably linked forever with that person.

“The films of these heavyweight characters survive – look at Bob Dylan’s Don’t Look Back, which was made at the same time as my Dali film.

“You can’t take your eyes off Adam Ant – he’s unbelievably mesmerising. He is a true artist, like Picasso. All his thinking is original and his personal presentation of himself is original. He doesn’t look like anyone else, and nobody else is like him.

“He has come back from this terrifying exile – what he went through would have killed most people stone dead. But he’s full of guts and courage, an amazing bloke.”

Bond was tipped off about Ant, real name Stuart Goddard, by his co-producer, who caught the musician playing a show at the Islington Chapel in London.

Ant had enjoyed enormous success in the 1980s with a string of hits, including the number ones Prince Charming, Stand And Deliver and Goody Two Shoes between 1980 and 1984.

But changing tastes, a move into acting and an increasingly tough struggle with bipolar disorder meant he dropped out of public view, aside from a series of lurid tabloid stories.

He relaunched his music career in 2011 – which included a pair of sold-out shows at Brighton’s Concorde 2 – and the same year announced his first album of new material in more than 15 years would be called Adam Ant Is The Blueblack Hussar In Marrying The Gunner’s Daughter.

This was the year that Bond has captured, although their relationship didn’t start auspiciously.

“I got a phone number for him and arranged to go and see him,” says Bond.

“He had a flat in South Kensington but unfortunately he gave me the wrong directions.

“I was outside this enormous house and thought he must have kept all his money to afford this £10 million house.

“All the windows were shuttered and nobody was answering the bell, so I stopped a taxi driver who told me I was outside Kylie Minogue’s house!”

When the pair finally met, Bond heard some of the music Ant was working on and instantly knew he wanted to do something with him.

“With this kind of film, you can’t run at it like a scripted film,” he says. “You’re making it up together as you go along.

“This beautiful arc comes out of nowhere and doesn’t appear until you start editing. We had thousands of feet of rushes but didn’t attempt to cut it until we got to the end of the year.”

Bond is not a fan of talking-head interviews or narration – only using 27 seconds of narration at the start of the documentary to set the scene for Ant’s comeback.

Similarly, he hasn’t trawled the archives for old material. He used just two short shots from Ant’s past.

“There’s the Prince Charming video if you want to see the old stuff,” says Bond. “I didn’t want to lumber him with the past – it would be like throwing a weight on his shoulders. He was something then, and now he’s something else.”

The documentary follows Ant as he spends time in London and Paris, culminating with a Hyde Park show in front of 55,000 people.

Bond says the musician took to the French capital like a duck to water.

“He wore his Napoleonic hat, so any Parisian would be knocked off their feet,” says Bond. “He was this guy striding out of the pages of the history books coming straight towards them.

“It was a wonderful time. He found this wonderful analogue studio in the basement of a French chateau in the Marais district where he did some work. He was endlessly experimenting.

“There is a really nice part of the film where [Bond’s long-time friend] Charlotte Rampling turned up to sit in and watch him for a while. She was part of his inspiration – the name of his first album, Dirk Wears White Sox, came from her movie with Dirk Bogarde, The Night Porter.”

It was also in Paris that Ant talked about his past to the camera, when he dropped in on the film-maker on his first night in the city.

“He just sat down and opened up,” says Bond. “There was no interview. I wasn’t going to push anything. He started to talk while the camera was standing in the corner, so I told him to hang about and put it together quickly!”

Bond is a great fan of the old one-camera-style of film-making, although he used a seven camera set-up to capture Ant’s live show – and inadvertently a near disaster at London’s IndigO2.

“He had put his foot on the monitor – which is a habit of his – and was staring at the audience,” recalls Bond. “Only the monitor wasn’t fastened down or secured in any way. It went and he fell down after it about 8ft to the floor.

“It really hurt him. We had all these cameras covering his retrieval from the ground and bringing him back onstage. We were all thinking, ‘That’s it, the show’s over for tonight’.

“They started to carry him off across the stage but suddenly he spun around, put his hat on, grabbed the mic and carried on as if nothing had happened.

“The audience went wild. It was the showman in him – he’s in his 50s but the British showman is there – the idea that the show must go on even when the bombs are falling.”

Although filming is over, Bond has kept in touch with Ant – as he did with Dali up until his death in 1983.

“He’s just got back from touring the US and will be going to Germany next,” says Bond. “He did a 42-city tour of the US. Not many people can do that.

“It’s amazing, I can’t think of anybody else who has come back from oblivion like that.”

The Blueblack Hussar will be screened at The Basement, Kensington Street, Brighton, Saturday, November 23.

Starts 3.30pm, tickets £5, visit cine-city.co.uk