Raoul Ruiz: Songs of innocence and experience

The Chilean director Raoul Ruiz has a highbrow reputation that attracts big names, from the sex symbol Salma Hayek to Salman Rushdie. But, as Ruiz tells Roger Clarke, sometimes he just has to say no...

Raoul Ruiz looks like a sad station master from a Buster Keaton film as I sit across the table from him in the lobby of a Paris hotel. I'm only here after three plans for an interview were variously abandoned, the first because he'd simply forgotten to turn up in London for a press junket for Comédie de l'Innocence, an exquisite and lingering psychodrama starring Isabelle Huppert. Looking at his face, you imagine the thick moustache lightly dusted from the winds off some Mexican hinterland, the dark reflexive eyes mournfully scanning the signals post for signs of the weekly train before returning to another story in his well-thumbed Borges anthology. He is a man whose countenance is suffused with a special type of Latin melancholy, or saudade as he prefers to call it ("my melancholy is happy sadness"), using the unique Portuguese word.

Not that he has much to be sad about, at least from a professional point of view. Just before Christmas the newspapers were full of pre-production stories of his Salman Rushdie project Ground Beneath Her Feet, which gained much attention simply because Hollywood hottie Salma Hayek was going to edge her booty into it. For British audiences there was a moment of bafflement: surely this was the director who recently filmed the last volume of Proust's Time Regained? Ruiz is the supreme intellectual of contemporary cinema, known for his versions of work by Calderon, Kafka and Klossowski. What was he doing with the foxy chick from Desperado?

"I lost the whole of last year developing Ground Beneath her Feet," he tells me with a well-tempered sigh. It may not sound like much, but to the director with no less than 84 films to his name in the Internet Movie Database, and with five films currently in pre-production, to lose a year is more like losing seven years of his life. I asked him why he chose a book by Rushdie in the first place, a vulgar author I assumed to be altogether too crude and canaille for him. "It's my generation," he says of this particular novel. "The main character is my age and I like that period, the Sixties. Anyhow, I wrote a script and it was accepted, and then Salman Rushdie also wrote his own script, but that has absolutely nothing to do with the film being delayed."

I'm intrigued. So Rushdie came up with a rival script? "No, no I had the rights for the book, but Rushdie decided to write his own version. He wasn't paid for it. He sent me the script but my script had already been accepted by the producers, and in France you have to go with the script that has been accepted at the point of commission. There are some problems with this system, since you can't make alterations while in production. However, I have to say that one of the reasons Ground Beneath Her Feet stalled was because the production company Canal Plus decided to succumb to the usual globalisation fantasy and merge with Universal Studios. It's become a Trojan Horse situation. The French way of making films is exactly the opposite of the American way; film in France is an artistic medium. Or was. It now has the [Luc] Besson system. And all filmmaking that was in pre-production with Canal Plus has been cancelled."

Ruiz seems sanguine about the whole business. He shrugs amicably. "I never did much work with Canal Plus," he says. And surely there are advantages in the US system, especially since, as he mentioned, in France he cannot continue working on his scripts while shooting? "No, the American system is a nightmare," he insists. I push him a little more about the Rushdie script, since I can't work out why on earth the writer would spend weeks writing a script that had no chance of being made. Was Rushdie even familiar with his films? "He saw Time Regained," admits Ruiz. "We had some meetings in London, since his script had some fantastic dialogue, but the script was just too commercial. I don't know how to make commercial movies."

Salma Hayek, keen to ginger up her serious thespian profile in recent years, had apparently accepted the Ruiz script despite contrary advice from baffled Hollywood agents. He didn't have any direct contact with her, however. Ruiz is "not sure" whether Ground Beneath Her Feet will now be made at all. "Certainly not this year," he says. Instead, he's busy developing a biopic of the 18th-century magician and charlatan, Caglisotro ("I'm immersing myself in Masonic music") finishing the middle section of a massive 10-hour autobiographical project (he does this on his time off, flying to Chile for a break) and preparing for travel to England to begin shooting his project with Gilbert Adair based on one of Adair's novels.

Ruiz stirs his café latte. He's been talking for some time about his theories of cinema, which are hugely complex, with such self-evident pleasure that he's startled when I interrupt his flow as if he's rather forgotten that I'm sitting at a table with him. He has this air: the easily abstracted theoretician. I cheer him up, however, by talking about children and games. Comédie de l'Innocence involves a cute but disturbing nine-year-old boy in the lead role. "Normally I'm not very fond of boys," Ruiz says ruefully as he drinks his latte. "I'm like WC Fields. But in maybe two thirds of my films there is a boy." He chuckles. "I study the children of friends that I know. The face of a boy is a natural mystery, an enigma."

I ask him if he has children of his own. He doesn't. Does he have godchildren? I can tell from the expression on his face he hasn't thought about his godchildren for some time. "I have never counted my godchildren," he states slowly. "About 10, mainly in Chile and Portugal." That's a lot to keep up with, I say. "Well, they disappear," he says hopefully. "It's good to be in Paris: in France this concept of godchildren in not very important." He'd rather see them as adults, he adds.

That wistful melancholy again – Comédie de l'Innocence seems suffused with it as we follow Isabelle Huppert, the mother of the nine-year-old Camille, in her struggle to understand what her angelically clever son is playing at. There's a gothic sense of loss to it. Why is the boy insisting that a woman she has never met is henceforth his mother, and that he Camille is now Paul, the very same Paul who drowned in a canal some years earlier?

I say to Ruiz that some US critics have found it hard to read the impassive Huppert character. "She is simply not American," he counters. "She has that coldness and courtesy of the French and English."

Perhaps, I say, his melancholy comes from being forced to flee Chile after the fascist coup of 1973? Perhaps he suffers from the disjointed identity of the eternal exile. Why doesn't he go back there to live? "There are Old Chileans and New Chileans. I am an old Chilean: I spend too much money, I am always with friends, and I drink too much wine. The New Chilean works all the time and drinks Diet Coke." Aren't the Chileans offering him money to go back and make movies there, now he is an international figure? "No, no, the opposite. They are expecting me to come back with the money, and I have tried, many times, but for the moment without results."

He refuses to be maudlin. As the interview ends, he says: "I like to play." I decide to play with him by asking why he hasn't ever cast Johnny Depp, that significant US expatriate (pace John Malkovich, star of Time Regained), now living in Paris. "I asked a couple of times, but he's never available or not interested or etc." He says "et cetera" like Yul Brynner in The King and I. "I don't think he sees movies – he only ever reads scripts, I think."

A dismissal, then. Johnny Depp may be moody and tortured, and his idea of saudade might run to some interesting corners in the commercial movie. But sparkly Salma Hayek (especially after wrapping her Frida Kahlo biopic) could prove a much more interesting foil to Ruiz, and his glum relish of the world of the mind.

'Comédie de l'Innocence' opens 8 March