Much maligned and misunderstood, he's been branded both a 'savage messiah', and 'the oldest enfant terrible in the business'. In actuality, he's Ken Russell - one of England's most imaginative, important and visionary cinematic innovators. Responsible for such classics as The Music Lovers, The Devils, Mahler, Altered States, Gothic and Lair Of The White Worm, while never consciously courting controversy, via the strange, powerful, and often deranged imagery that proliferates his films, Russell has become the most controversial British film director of all time... He dares to venture where others fear to tread, and to hell with the consequences...

Can you remember any events that, in retrospect, you consider indications of who you would become, doing what you are doing?

I don't think there was any one incident. I used to spend my childhood more or less by myself... Except that my mother - she was a film fan, and I was born the day sound movies were invented in 1927 - would go to the pictures every day in the 1930s, and take me with her. So I was exposed to a great variety of imagery from Busby Berkeley to Old Mother Riley. We had a big conker tree in our garden and, after a Robin Hood film, it would become the Sheriff of Nottingham's castle; after The Seahawk, it would be a galleon... I was pretty inventive as a kid.

Then the great breakthrough came when I was about 11. My parents bought me a projector and some very small snippets of Charlie Chaplin, Felix The Cat, and Betty Boop for Christmas. When I discovered that you could get extension arms to screw on to the projector and run 300' reels, I went to the local library to get films. All they had were German expressionist films. So I was seeing Metropolis, The Spy and all the pre-Cabinet Of Dr Caligari Fritz Lang movies. It was a gradual exposure to a great variety of subjects.

Do you regard Fritz Lang as a great role model?

Well he was from that particular kind of expressionist cinema and Jean Cocteau was the other. In fact, the first little film I made that was any good, called Amelia And The Angel, is very heavily indebted to Cocteau's imagery. That was the film that got me onto BBC TV's Monitor programme, where I was allowed to experiment. We didn't have much money, but were encouraged by Sir Huw Wheldon to express ourselves cinematically, as long as it wasn't just a jerk-off and we were throwing fresh and imaginative light on our subjects. I was very fond of music, so I did Bartok, Elgar, Prokofiev, Richard Strauss... and, since I was in a sense very influenced by silent films, when I used to give film shows in dad's garage, I also gave a musical accompaniment with a hand-crank gramophone and a couple of records. I sometimes found that, just by accident, the right music with the right image could create a tremendous effect. So music and imagery have always been top priority with me, sort of a second nature. It's a powerful combination.

Have you ever seen what you would regard as an angel?

I don't know about an angel, but when I had a stroke - about three years ago - I fancied I saw the Virgin Mary, mother and child, sort of floating somewhere in the corner of the sitting room.

What is your earliest memory?

I suppose, sitting on the pavement outside my house, looking in the gutter at the clouds reflected in rain water, and thinking: "Wouldn't it be good if I could get down there." Because it seemed to be a richer, darker variation of what was going on above my head. It seemed like another world. If only you could step carefully though the surface of the puddle, you'd be able to walk on those clouds.

A lot of milestones in your life are connected to film. Is that true of your first sexual experience?

Yes, I was at the cinema watching Pinocchio and I suppose I was sitting next to a scout master and didn't realise it. He had shorts and knobbly knees and, as I watched Pinocchio's nose grow longer and longer, so my little willie extended a couple of centimetres. The dirty old man had a hand on it.

Did you leg it?

I legged it fast, yes. I could never understand why, but my mother was always legging it too. There was one cinema in Southampton that we used to frequent which seemed to be a hotbed of hot hands - but they were always on my mum and not me. I would often say (adopts squeaky voice): "Oh, why do we have to move again, mum?"

Weren't you a dancer before breaking into films?

Yeah, I discovered music and ballet at more or less the same time. When I was at RAF camp, there were a lot of Royal Navy sailors there on this electricity course and I ran the music circle with one who happened to be a ballet dancer. We used to play the music in one room, and people would listen to it in another. One day he suddenly got up and did the 'Prince's Variation' from Swan Lake. I said, "What's that?" And he said (adopts rough costermongerly accent), "Ballet, mate. 'Ave-a-go." After I tried unsuccessfully to get into the movies, I tried ballet because I loved it. And I was totally awful.

Were you ostracised for that because of your working class background?

No, but my father thought ballet was a bit odd... "All those men in silk stockings," he used to say. "What will the people down St. Mary's Street think?" That's where he had his shop, and it was a rough area.

What kind of shop did he have?

A boot and shoe shop, he worked for his dad. And there's something that I wish I'd known earlier... Next door to his shop, there was a surgical goods shop. I was always looking in the window wondering what all those funny things were hanging up, and what people actually did with them. Then, just the other day I discovered that it was, in fact, Benny Hill's dad's shop.

You pretty much rescued the late, great, Oliver Reed from virtual B-movie oblivion... what's this story about him challenging you to a duel?

Ollie had written a film script on the murder of Thomas à Becket by three knights - called The King's Man - and he wanted to play one of them. He had a couple of swords, and said: "Look, it would be a marvellous thing... you could be standing on the altar, I'll come at you with my sword, and you try to drive me off." I'd known Oliver for few years by then, so I knew there was a serious side to him and, if I'd chickened out and said, "Oh, don't be daft," I'd have gone down in his estimation. He came at me, and this sword was about very heavy and about 5' long - it was a real broadsword - so I just tried to kill him. The end of the blade cut through his shirt, cut his skin, and blood poured all over the place. It was only a flesh wound, but it stopped him in his tracks. He tore off the torn shirt, rubbed the blood off. There was a Victorian glass dome on the fireplace with a parrot in it. He took off the dome, threw the parrot into the blazing fire, and put the shirt under the glass dome as a great memento, where it stayed for many years.

A truly bonding moment, then?

Indeed, yes. I was scared shitless. I wondered what the hell I'd done to him.

You're also renowned for your stage work. Considering the live element of the experience, what's the funniest or most disastrous moment you can recall?

I've done a couple of operas in Italy, and the Italians will never say they can't do something. In Boito's opera, Mefistofele, I had the devil in this little model spaceship which was going to fly across the stage on invisible wires. It was going to be very effective. The Italians were always promising this amazing motor to give out this fabulous jet as it shot across the stage. It was always coming, always coming... it was always going to be ready. That's the thing with them, they never produce what you've asked them for until the dress rehearsal, or the first night in this case.

I was sitting in the audience watching, the spaceship appeared, and it was powered by one sparkler stuck up its arse. It was worse than any old Flash Gordon movie of the 1930s.

Another funny thing in that programme, was that the heroine kills her mother. I updated it, and wanted her mother cut up and put in the fridge in transparent packaging. Again, the people who were gonna make it were always saying: "Yeah, it's coming." But this time, when it did, it was terribly realistic. What had happened, I discovered, was that they'd waited for the girl's mother to die and then taken a cast of her dead body as soon as she'd passed on. So it was the cast of the dead mother in the ice-box.

There was another funny episode with Derek Jarman. We were doing Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress in Florence. We had a sex doll which was to be auctioned in one scene. There aren't any sex dolls in Italy - well, they've got the real thing - so we had one flown over. It was blown up, and we had it in the dress rehearsal, and the boss of the theatre said, "No, we can't possibly have that." All the Italians were
terribly embarrassed by it. In the end they said: "You can have it on one condition. - we put a pair of knickers on her." So he did and, of course, it looked more lewd than ever. But to them it was OK, justice had been done.

That kind of censorship is not dissimilar to what occasionally happens in the film world, where the actions of censors make scenes they find objectionable take on a different, much more severe meaning.

That's what they did with Women In Love in Argentina. They showed the two men just about to go into the nude wrestling and locking the door and then they cut to them panting on the floor. It became known as 'the great buggery scene' and everyone went to see it. They all imagined they'd been at it.

You're no stranger to the horror genre. Have you ever had any supernatural experiences?

There was one thing that really frightened me. I live in this cottage in the country and, under the thatch, there's all sorts of rats, mice, squirrels and birds, so there's a lot of scuttling about above my head in my bedroom. There was a time which was a bit worrying, when the sounds seemed to be coming from the foot of the stairs outside my bedroom. It was as though there was a thing with claws and broken wings, that I'd imagine must be about 3 or 4ft long and quite wide and making a heck of a scrabbling, scratching sound trying to get up the stairs. I've got two little doors that are latched very ineffectively, and it was rattling at the door - or, at least, it seemed to be. I'd get really freaked out of my mind, because this would happen at three in the morning. Then one night, I thought, 'This has gone on too long, it's turning me into a basketcase'. So I switched on the bedroom light, got up - and as I sleep naked - I just threw both doors open at once, and stood there... a terrifying, plump, naked, jelly-like, shaking figure. And it must have scared it to death, because it never came back. It works both ways obviously, we can scare the shit out of them.

Being a great lover of music, what do you want played at your funeral?

At a wedding or a christening I went to years ago, the organist was incapacitated, so there was this schoolboy who was a brilliant organist, playing 'Little Red Monkey' as people came in. It goes (sings): "Little red monkey, funny monkey, de, de, de, de, diddly, diddly de..." So I think something to make people laugh, whatever the equivalent of that ('Little Red Monkey') is.

Do you have any regrets?

I have regrets about everything.