You expect the man who created the fantastic world in which His Dark Materials trilogy is set to be driving something a bit more – well, extraordinary.

We drive the few miles out of the city to his sprawling listed house, filled with books and newspapers, pictures and all sorts of interesting trinkets – a didgeridoo hangs above the open fire place and a model of Iorek Byrnison, the giant polar bear who appears in His Dark Materials, sits on a windowsill.

He is keen to show off an old-fashioned rocking horse which sits proudly in the middle of the library, which, from the tools lying around, appears to double as a carpentry workshop. It turns out Pullman has carved the rocking horse by hand and "made the whole thing, every part, myself". Other worlds are not the only thing Pullman can create.

After leaving Oxford with "a very bad degree", Pullman, 63, spent more than a decade teaching in three different schools in the city – each with its own set of problems. By the time he left education he was more than happy to go; he has since been a vocal critic of the introduction of league tables, the curriculum and the like.

However, the time he spent teaching the young and the insight he gained from working in a classroom was handsomely rewarded when he created the trilogy His Dark Materials.

The books tell the story of Lyra, a young girl who lives in an Oxford of a parallel universe. The books, set in an imaginary world, where everyone has a daemon – the soul of a person in animal form – were a worldwide success and launched Pullman into a stratosphere previously occupied only by JK Rowling. His stories were compared to Harry Potter, but His Dark Materials had a much greater underlying intellectual content. The name of the trilogy was taken from Milton's Paradise Lost.

"I started with an image, not an idea. Ideas are very dangerous things," he says. "This story began with a little girl going into a place where she's not supposed to be and having to hide and stay there because other people come in. While she's there, she overhears something. I didn't know what she was going to overhear, but that was where the story began."

It might have begun with a simple image, but Pullman went on to create a fantastical landscape that takes in the Arctic, giant polar bears and even God. It is the last of these that has caused considerable controversy. Religious groups have taken offence at the books, describing them as an attack on organised religion. Pullman is a committed atheist, but denies he set out to court controversy.

"I don't mind if controversy arises, but I didn't seek it. I didn't think of it at all. Any writer is in a position of the old storyteller in the market place who doesn't know who will stop and listen – his only interest really is in getting as many as possible to stay to the end and put a penny in the hat. The more who stop and listen, the more happy I am. If the audience includes children – great. If it's adults, great.

"I'm not writing for an exclusive few, I'm writing for everyone who is prepared to make a little bit of effort to stop and listen to a story and pay attention. And people will. The youngest child will do that if you start telling them a story – but it's got to be a good one and you've got to tell it well.

"I don't know who's going to stop and nor do I know if they're going to be annoyed by it. If someone is so annoyed as to get upset, the answer is don't read it – put it down, read something else."

This all sounds reasonable – until Pullman, who is doing the interview ahead of the opening of His Dark Materials at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds today, reveals what he is currently working on.

"I'm fascinated by theology," he says. "The book I'm writing at the minute is about Jesus. I did a talk at the National Theatre with the Archbishop of Canter-bury, we were talking about the theology in the books and he said: 'You don't mention Jesus at all', so I put him in the next book, The Scarecrow and his Servant. Nobody noticed, so I thought I better make it clearer."

All of which explains why there are several copies of the Bible on his writing desk. He is taking the four gospels from the New Testament and writing what appears to be his own version. Is this the gospel according to Philip Pullman?

"No, I wouldn't be so foolish," he says. "The book is difficult to describe and I'd rather not go into it at this stage. It's just that I'm writing about this very interesting character called Jesus, who is very different from the character Paul calls Christ. I've been reading the gospels and reading around them. It's fascinating – and I've also realised it can't all be true."

You can't help but wonder if this baiting of religious types is deliberate. Pullman has reason to not be kind to them.

When Northern Lights, the first in the trilogy, was turned into the movie The Golden Compass, it was not a success.

Pullman says: "The studio didn't want to commit from the beginning to make all three books. It was never going to be easy because it's not a straightforward fantasy story.

"After the boycott by the religious right in America, the US box office was quite badly hit. The movie made enormous money overseas, but the studio had sold the foreign distribution rights, so it didn't make any money. The upshot is that it doesn't look very likely there will be a second or third film.

"In the fullness of time, if the rights revert to me I shall go over there (he points into his library) and cut out some cardboard figures and make it myself."

Fortunately for the author, even if the film studio didn't get it right, those behind the stage version categorically did.

When the stage play was premiered at the National Theatre, it was a huge success. The new production also sees actors working with the magic of theatre, Pullman says, to create the world in which his story exists.

"We have learnt over a century or so that reading a book and then seeing the film can be a disappointment.

"With theatre, the experience is different because in the cinema you sit back and let the film wash over you. Theatre isn't like that because the audience has to play a much more active part. To take one obvious example, the daemons.

"In the cinema, they can have them there in apparent real life – it's been made on a computer but it passes for real. You can't do that in the theatre so the audience has got to pretend, they've got to pretend that there isn't an actor there holding a puppet and speaking for it. So there's an active engagement with the audience's imagination.

"I'm used to hearing people who have read the book and were disappointed in the film, but much preferred the play because they are engaging with it in that way which is so special and peculiar to an audience in the theatre.

He says: "There's a curious moment 30 seconds in when we see the two young actors playing Lyra and Will. They're grown up and they start talking and the audience think are they talking to each other. The strange thing is that they don't seem to be looking at each other – they are talking across each other because they're in a different world. Then Lyra's daemon appears and there's a frisson and the audience go:"Oh I get it", and that's a wonderful moment.

"From then on they're pretending that he's a daemon and there's not an actor doing it."

Atheist, baiter of the religious, well-read academic – Pullman says he is one simple thing.

"I always was a storyteller. I told stories to my little brother, my friends at school... yes, I'm a storyteller, that's all I am."



His Dark Materials opens at West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, today and runs until June 20.