Milos Forman: The envy and the ecstasy

Milos Forman has never had it easy, and, if anything, life's got tougher. Currently promoting a director's cut of his 1984 hit Amadeus, he openly admits that his new projects are in limbo. Matthew Sweet asks him what went wrong

Milos Forman is standing where Mozart stood on the first night of Don Giovanni, and can hardly hold back the tears. Around him, waiters got up in New Romantic approximations of 18th-century costume dole out celebratory champagne; a chorus of invited hacks recce the towers of nibbles; the Czech minister of culture and Sean Connery toast what the director achieved when he was last on the stage of the Tyl Theatre, nearly 20 years ago. Amadeus: its eight Oscars and $35m of US box-office profit; the sudden transformation of a composer named Antonio Salieri from obscurity to household name; and reviews hailing one of the best American films of the decade.

In 1983, the scene was rather different. The auditorium – illuminated by 6,000 candles – was peopled with costumed extras, 30 of whom were members of the Czech secret police. Forty firemen were on standby at 15ft intervals around the building, fearing that Forman and his crew were going to accidentally incinerate one of the oldest opera houses in Europe. Tom Hulce – that funny little actor with the Toyah Wilcox wig and shrieky cackle – was conducting like it was October 1787. On the stage, the cowled figure of the Commendatore summoned Don Giovanni to his doom. Then the director heard a similarly portentous voice in his ear: "Mr Forman, do you know that one of your actors is on fire?"

Amadeus is one of those films with a back story. It has the vindication angle – Forman and his producer Saul Zaentz were turned down by the major Hollywood studios, shot the film in Prague on the comparatively modest budget of $16m, and, after its release, found themselves belaboured with acclaim and little golden men. It has a rich stock of behind-the-scenes gossip. There's the story of how Meg Tilly was booked for the part of Constanze Mozart, and – after three days in Czechoslovakia – was robbed of the part by a footballing injury, and replaced with an unknown named Elizabeth Berridge, because the rival candidates were "too pretty". (Constanze was a landlady's daughter, and Berridge found herself congratulated for looking like a perfect specimen of the type.)

There are the tales about F Murray Abraham, the stentorian Broadway star who won the Best Actor Oscar for his portrayal of Salieri: how his offhand manner drove the make-up man to distraction; how the cast stopped inviting him to their parties, and how that suited him just fine – what better preparation for the part of a vainglorious malcontent? And then there are the missing 20 minutes of footage, material excised from what was meant to be the final cut, finally restored after a two-decade wait. Like the line on the poster said, everything you've heard is true.

"Do you mind if I smoke?" asks Forman, relighting a cigar as big as a baby's arm. Years of living in America have not altered his accent, which is as thick and mittel-European as pork stew, but they have made him cautious about inflicting his pleasures on others. "Do you know that in Minneapolis," he says, as he fills the room with an acrid miasma, "if on the street somebody asks you to stop smoking, and you don't do it, they can call the police?"

Forman has led a 20th-century life: he was born in 1932 in Caslav, a small town in Bohemia, from which his parents – Jewish father, Protestant mother – were dispatched to their deaths in Auschwitz. He was educated in Prague, where he studied film, explored his liking for American silent comedies, worked at the Lanterna Magika multimedia theatre, and watched the regime freeze, thaw and refreeze. He was part of that cabal of directors usually identified as the Czech New Wave, and by the late 1960s, had made several pictures, two of which – A Blonde in Love and The Firemen's Ball – attracted enough international attention to assure him a relatively smooth defection to the United States.

He considered himself an exile, and expected never to be allowed to return to his homeland, but in 1982, the Prague authorities granted him permission to film Amadeus on their streets. By that time, he was the celebrated talent behind One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), had won five Oscars and developed a predilection for cigars. "They didn't let me come back because they suddenly started liking me," he notes, "but because they wanted the dollars I could bring." The opposite may now be true: the teary jamboree at the Tyl Theatre was preceded by a red-carpet premiere of the restored version of Amadeus.

So, if this is the director's cut of Amadeus, whose was the first? "Awwww..." he rumbles. "Mine, too. Test screenings and screenings for your friends, they don't tell you anything. Before the first paying audience comes, you never know if a film will work. And we were afraid that we were asking the audience too much to sit there for three hours and watch this film about classical composers, with no stars.

"I liked the scenes that we cut out, but it felt the right thing to do in those times, when young people were overwhelmed by pop music, and MTV had just started up."

Jeffrey Jones, the softly spoken actor who played the Emperor Joseph II, suggests that outside influences were also to blame: "I believe that the exhibitors didn't want a three-hour film. They couldn't get in the number of shows they needed in a day." He sums up the situation by alluding to his character's response to the opening night of Seraglio: "Too many notes."

Did Forman restore his original cut for posterity? "I don't know what posterity is," he retorts. "You always have a desire that you will not be forgotten by future generations. Like Salieri. All of us have these bouts of jealousy and envy. The question is, how can you control them?" Perhaps, sometimes, he doesn't. The commentary on the DVD features the voices of Forman and Peter Shaffer, screenwriter and author of the original play. In the opening scene, we see one of Forman's favourite actors, Vincent Schiavelli – the insomniac-eyed Frederickson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, the ABC exec in Man on the Moon – attempting to coax Salieri from his locked chambers with a promise of pudding. For three or so seconds, a ginger, four-legged shape walks through the frame. On the commentary track, Forman's voice becomes animated.

"Watch Peter, watch, do you see the cat?" "The gap?" responds Shaffer, confused. "What?" "The cat!" repeats Forman. "Oh yes," blusters Shaffer. "The cat." "Not one critic noticed that," says Forman. "That's the superficiality of critics..."

Since Amadeus, however, critics have been more deeply engaged by Forman's work than the public. Valmont (1989) was ignored in the wake of Dangerous Liaisons, though it was recognised as the superior film. The People vs Larry Flynt (1996) failed to find an audience, despite good reviews. Only Man on the Moon (1999) was greeted with bafflement by reviewers and public alike. Maybe these experiences explain Forman's cautious attitude to the future. Ask Saul Zaentz what's happening next, and he'll enthuse about a Goya biopic on which he and Forman are collaborating – it will incorporate "torture, dinners, picnics", and they want Javier Bardem to play Goya.

Ask Forman himself, and he'll give you two answers, neither of which he is ready to puff. The first project is Bad News, based on a thriller by Donald Westlake. "It's in a limbo," he says, ruefully. "A script exists, but I can't reach agreement with the studios about the cast." The other is an adaptation of Sandor Marai's novel Embers, "but it's too early to tell because we don't even know how the screenplay will turn out." As for the Goya film, he says: "We tried, but we just couldn't develop the screenplay."

If making the pictures he wants to make is becoming increasingly difficult for Milos Forman, he can console himself with the fact that it was never particularly easy. In 1983, no studio would touch Amadeus with a baroque bargepole. Today, he says, it could only be done "if I cast Robert Redford as Salieri and Tom Cruise as Mozart" – something that he would not be prepared to countenance. But that doesn't mean that his career has gone up in smoke. Like the Tyl Theatre, he's still standing.

'Amadeus: The Director's Cut' is released this week by Warner Home Video