Alan Parker, from Nice One Cyril to Midnight Express. "I started making commercials. That was my film school."

November 2003: Recently, Alan Parker was asked to name his five favourite films. He thought about this, felt the reflex twitch towards Citizen Kane, then realised he didn’t have an open mind when he first met Charles Foster Kane in Orson Welles’s masterpiece. Before encountering the wonders of Xanadu, he had read about Kane and understood it to be the best film ever made.

So he thought again and tried to recall without prejudice the movies that had made the greatest impression. He came up with The Godfather 2, "for its wonderful storytelling", One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and Bertolucci’s 1900 ("another kind of poetry of the cinema"). There was Raging Bull. And, because he felt he should include a British film, The Third Man. 

The Third Man is interesting, Parker says, because it has such a long prologue. "It’s a really bad construction, actually. Why do you need all that? When did you put that in? The whole thing of Graham Greene writing it on the back of an envelope, I find interesting. A man goes to his own funeral ..." 

Students of Parker’s work may have noticed the reference to The Third Man in his 1978 film, Midnight Express, in which Brad Davis played an American drug smuggler in a Turkish jail. 

"The end of Midnight Express is him coming out of prison. You see him walk away and suddenly you see the Jeep coming, and you think ‘oh, he’s gonna get caught’, and then the Jeep goes past him and then he runs, and that’s the end. In The Third Man you see Alida Valli walking in the cemetery and she walks towards you, and the Jeep is here, and he’s waiting for her, and you think they’ll get together, and she walks on. 

"It’s not really the same scene. It’s the same moment." 

He recalls, too, the feeling he had when he first saw Scorsese’s boxing epic. "When I came out of Raging Bull, I thought: ‘I will never make a film as good as that’. And I thought, I might not make a film as good as that, but that’s why I want to keep doing it, because maybe one day I will." 

One of problems of characterising Parker’s work is his adaptability. A director who has spent half a lifetime trying to work the Hollywood system, his work seems to hover between public acclaim and critical acceptability. His direction of Pink Floyd’s The Wall continues to inform the tyros of MTV. Midnight Express is 25 years old, but there is nothing dated about its theme of American arrogance in the Middle East. Birdy has its moments, as does Mississippi Burning. Angel Heart remains an enjoyably gothic exercise in Southern voodoo, capturing Mickey Rourke and the egg-eating devil Robert De Niro at their most hucksterish. And, if Evita and Angela’s Ashes failed to fully subdue the reputations of their source material, the director showed wit and restraint in another adaptation, of Roddy Doyle’s The Commitments. 

Parker’s last film, The Life of David Gale, received a mauling, though its crime seems to have been the fact that it was a thriller with a conscience in a time when meaning has been eschewed in favour of knowingness and special effects. David Gale had stars - Kevin Spacey, Kate Winslet - suspense and points to make about capital punishment, but the tenor of the criticism found an echo in David Thomson’s assessment of Parker’s work in The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: "He grabs attention, but he has no sustained grip. And sometimes, as with grabbers, there is an undue stress on suspense and intimidation." The director Alex Cox was more succinct, writing that Parker’s work was: "straightforwardly detestable: dishonest, propagandistic, authority-loving crap". 

"I’d be much richer than I am if I’d made the films that they wanted me to make," says Parker flintily. He stands by David Gale. "It’s a really great movie about a very important subject. You try getting that kind of film made, even. Then you get it made and it gets criticised. And every criticism of that film is another nail in the coffin for anyone attempting a serious subject, because the studios go: ‘No way, the critics will kill it’." 

Parker has long been the subject of snobbery, as he came to film-making via a career in advertising. He directed the Leonard Rossitter/Joan Collins commercials for Cinzano and the Wonderloaf commercial, which coined the phrase "Nice one, Cyril". 

"I started making commercials," Parker says, "that was my film school. There was no film industry, so where would you go?" Parker worked at the same agency as David (now Lord) Puttnam and Ridley Scott (director of Alien, Blade Runner and Gladiator). 

"They said we were not qualified to make feature films, because we came from the world of advertising, of selling things. They were so cruel to Ridley and me. And if you look at the history of cinema of this last 25 years, Ridley is the greatest visual influence on an entire generation of film-makers. The people who wrote about films in those days said he was a vulgarian, because he had done a Radiant commercial. 

"The snobbery in this country is disgusting. From a visual point of view there is no greater film-maker in the world than Ridley. They couldn’t see it. To everyone else, it was obvious. And do you know what? It was so obvious to the f***ing audience and yet, all those snotheads, like Philip French or Alexander Walker, they couldn’t see it. It’s very British." 

Despite making 14 films in 28 years, Parker does not find the process any easier. The area he works in, the medium-budget feature, has almost disappeared. "The middle ground, which is where Raging Bull, and Godfather and Cuckoo’s Nest came from, that whole area has fallen away, because it’s too expensive and it’s too risky." 

Parker says he feels sorry for the first-time film-maker working in Hollywood, going into a meeting "with 20 Rottweiler editors, ready to rip apart your movie". 

"It’s almost like you wanna go: ‘Well, why do you wanna make the f***ing film?’ They miss the whole point." 

The process, he says, has grown progressively more difficult, as the studios excise their memory of the auteurs of the 1970s. "Their argument is, the final cut director, the auteur, has let them down, because they’re not allowed to interfere. So it’s infinitely more fun for them to employ someone new who they can utterly dominate. And they insist that all their ideas are in the film, because they want to go home at night and feel good about what they’ve done. Because they hate to be thought of as bankers. 

"I come from a generation of film-makers who only think of them as bankers. I said to one studio, I don’t want your notes. All I want is your cheque." 

Recently, Parker has had cause to reflect on the collaborative, combative process of film-making. He has just published his first novel, The Sucker’s Kiss, which he wrote while David Gale was "on hiatus", as Hollywood prepared for a screenwriters’ strike. He found publishing people to be more gracious than the studio Rottweilers. But, compared to film, the marketing of books is "amateurish" and the business of publishing is, he says, a bastion of snobbiness. "In London, it’s the last hold-out of people with plummy English accents. Outside of the royal family, publishing is the only place where you hear these people speak this way." 

Creatively, Parker found freedom in the novel. "If I’m writing a screenplay, I keep it as simple as possible. It isn’t a literary work. It’s gotta be succinct and there’s gotta be enough information for all the departments involved to know what they should be doing. The worst kind of screenplay - if you read a William Goldman screenplay, you’d go, ‘Oh, f*** off!’" 

The novel is the finished product. 

"The screenplay is just directions towards the ultimate creative work, which is the finished film. It’s better when it is sparse. 

"I remember reading the first drafts of Shoot the Moon. Bo Goldman had done Cuckoo’s Nest and he’d won a couple of Oscars. Melvin and Howard was the other one, a Jonathan Demme film. But Bo would literally write. ‘A room. Full stop. A chair. Full stop. A man would be very comfortable in this chair. Full stop.’ Not, ‘The evening light trickles through the wooden screen’, but ‘It’s evening’. 

"That’s really what you need. Anything else is patronising to everybody on the film crew from the cinematographer to the costume designer, in what they actually contribute. The great screenplays are very simple." 

The way he describes it is almost Hemingwayesque. "A bit," he says. "Take away all the nonsense." 

In which case, what was it like writing a novel and leaving the adjectives in? 

"I found it such a liberating pleasure, not to think that some - I’m trying to think of a nice word for arsehole - some person in a film studio would be saying ‘Nah. That’s too piss elegant, don’t use that.’ It was nice to get back to the beauty of words." 

Parker has also courted opprobrium by taking on an administrative role as chairman of the UK film council, which distributes lottery cash to British productions. This puts him almost in the position of being a studio banker, telling British film-makers what they should do in order to attract funding. 

"For many years there was a sense that everybody in the whole country had the right to make a movie and they didn’t care if anybody went to see it," he says. "That’s an indulgent notion, particularly when you’re asking for large sums of public money." 

Art movies, which are expected to be less commercial, are catered for by the new cinema fund: "The budgets are much lower. You could perhaps be more indulgent. You don’t have to find an audience but you can be creative. It’s somewhere between the multiplex movie and some video installation at an art gallery. There is a middle world that should be encouraged and catered for, and you can express yourself however you want in that area. That’s of cultural significance and should be funded." 

Parker has, however, been critical of directors whose work was not lucrative. 

"It was when people finished a movie and they’d say: ‘I want the money for my next movie’. You’d go, ‘Hang on a minute, Lynne, or whatever your name might be, you should maybe try and find an audience next time, if you’re gonna ask, not for a hundred grand, but millions of pounds. Don’t you think? And if you really don’t agree with that, then write a novel.’" Referring to Lynne (Ramsay) was, Parker says, "a sarcastic Scottish joke". Back-pedalling, he says he "loved" Ramsay’s Morvern Callar. 

"She’s a great, great talent. It’d be nicer if she found a bigger audience, but she thinks that too. When you’ve got all of the creative accolades, what’s left is to keep your creativity intact and still find a big audience. Now, that’s hard." 

Ramsay, he says, "struggles with being truthful to the language of her country. Maybe audiences elsewhere find that tough to understand, even if their first language is English." He also suggests that a film need not be crass in order to find an audience. "The personal film that is so beautiful, that is so immaculately mine as a film-maker, that no-one else in the world has any interest in it at all - is that valid? Well it is valid for a certain type of film that costs a certain amount of money. To find an audience, but keep the creative integrity intact, like Raging Bull, that’s a much more difficult film to make." 

Sir Alan Parker, we may assume, is still trying.