The film was called Hell, and it duly became hell. But this 1964 flop by Henri-Georges Clouzot shouldn’t blind us to his genius

Brigitte Bardot called him “a negative being, for ever at odds with himself and the world around him”. Another actor described him as “an interfering man who wanted every actor under his control”. The man they are both describing is Henri-Georges Clouzot, one of France’s greatest film directors, whose work plumbed the depths of misanthropy, paranoia and revenge so unremittingly that it was hard not to believe he was exploring his own psyche in public.

Clouzot was hated and feted in equal measure. One of his first masterpieces, the 1943 film Le Corbeau, is now hailed by critics, but on release it united the French left and the pro-Nazi Vichy regime in an unlikely alliance against Clouzot’s vision of pettiness and self-loathing in a small French wartime town divided by a poison-pen letter scandal. It was brave story to tell in a France torn apart by war; Le Corbeau was pulled from cinemas, Clouzot was fired from the Nazi-owned Continental studios and, after the war, received a lifetime ban (rescinded in 1947) from the French film industry for working with the Nazis.

Today he is largely forgotten, or at best mistaken for the bumbling inspector in the Pink Panther franchise. But now the disgracefully neglected Clouzot is being brought to new audiences with a documentary about his doomed 1964 project concerning a jealous husband’s mental collapse into paranoid fantasy. Called L’Enfer (Hell), the film became a real hell for the director and everyone on set.

One of L’Enfer’s problems was that Clouzot had by then become notorious as a director with a taste for violence and betrayal – and not just in his films. During the filming of La Vérité (The Truth) in 1960, he wanted Brigitte Bardot to fall asleep and drool for one scene. As you do. So he gave her some pills saying they were painkillers. They turned out to be sleeping pills. Bardot had to have her stomach pumped. Her subsequent verbal attack on him was understandable. But she was not the only actress he made suffer. Suzy Delair, who starred in the 1947 film Quai des Orfèvres, disclosed that he slapped her on set. “So what?” Delair told one interviewer. “He slapped others as well … He was tough but I’m not about to complain.”

In terms of violence to his female stars, Clouzot was a monstre sacré akin to his contemporary, Alfred Hitchcock, whom he admired and whose psychological thrillers of the 1950s and 60s bear close comparison with Clouzot’s greatest films – The Wages of Fear (1953), starring Yves Montand, and Les Diaboliques (1955), with Véra Clouzot as a wronged wife who conspires with his mistress, Simone Signoret, to murder her husband. Four years after La Vérité, Clouzot set about making L’Enfer. It was about a man driven mad by the supposed infidelities of his beautiful wife.

Clouzot cast 26-year-old Romy Schneider, who, though Austrian, was then one of France’s leading film stars. French cinema was a-tremble with expectation: could L’Enfer repeat the success of his earlier, great films? And what on-set tortures did Clouzot have in store for Schneider?

Moreover, French cinema had been revolutionised by the nouvelle vague since his last film, and the likes of Godard and Truffaut had arguably eclipsed Clouzot. Could he now show those young pups he was still the greatest French exponent of the seventh art? The director Costa-Gavras, who worked as production assistant on L’Enfer, said: “He was criticised by the nouvelle vague for planning out everything in the script. The big word of the epoch was ‘improvise’. He had a nice line about that: ‘I improvise on paper.’”

Clouzot was known as a forbiddingly meticulous metteur en scène, storyboarding his films so intensively that actors often felt thwarted. On L’Enfer, he sought to revolutionise cinema by meticulously creating a film using the experimental sounds of Pierre Boulez’s Ircam in Paris, and the then-voguish images of kinetic art to express his hero’s increasingly wild fantasy life. These lurid colour sequences would be juxtaposed with black-and-white footage shot on location.

But he never finished L’Enfer. After a few weeks of studio tests in Paris and 10 days on location, Clouzot abandoned it. Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea’s new documentary anatomises that cinematic nightmare– and it makes painful viewing, though it is filled with tantalising images of what might have been.

How did it come about? Thirty years after Clouzot’s death in 1977, his widow, Inès de Gonzalez, found herself trapped in a broken lift with a young film-maker. During their enforced intimacy, Inès told Bromberg that she had 185 cans of film (about 13 hours) of the unfinished penultimate film. She entrusted the footage to Bromberg to make a film containing interviews with the crew and newly dramatised scenes based on Clouzot’s script.

But we also have something extra: Claude Chabrol’s 1994 film based on Clouzot’s script, also called L’Enfer, starring Emmanuelle Béart as the flirtatious wife and François Cluzet as the paranoid husband. That is hardly enough, even if Chabrol inherited Clouzot’s mantle as the French Hitchcock. His treatment of the story is never as bravura as Clouzot’s promised to be. The test shots for Clouzot’s L’Enfer that appear in the new documentary show that he envisaged using kinetic art in a way that parallels how Hitchcock had used Salvador Dalí’s surrealist dream sequences almost 20 years earlier on Spellbound.

Maybe, though, it was in making these test shots that Clouzot’s ambition went beyond his capacity to realise a film. Film-maker Bernard Stora, then an intern on the film, worked on the tests. “I walked into something totally insane,” he recalls. “Clouzot had the best cameramen and the most seasoned technicians. It seemed clear from the beginning they didn’t know what they were doing.”

The producers, though, saw rushes of this stuff and loosened the purse strings: they saw genius where Stora saw insanity. Clouzot then had a virtually unlimited budget – but it only encouraged him to dream big and worry 24/7. Once on set, hell began in earnest. Clouzot started shooting at a lakeside hotel. But there was a difficulty. The lake, which figured in most scenes, was scheduled to be drained for a hydroelectric generating project. Clouzot had only 20 days to wrap the project. The shoot became as tense as a countdown Hollywood thriller.

L’Enfer’s key protagonists – Schneider, Serge Reggiani (who played the fantasising husband) and Clouzot – are all dead. But what we learn from the documentary is that Clouzot upset his leading man much more than his leading lady. After 10 days on set, Reggiani walked off, claiming to be suffering from Maltese fever, and threatening legal action. “Serge said he wasn’t there to be insulted by a schizophrenic maniac,” says Lan Nguyen, a junior member of the crew.

Reggiani, according to other crew members, had been steeling himself against being bullied on set by the notorious Clouzot and so was already in a highly strained state. How had Clouzot upset Reggiani? He had insisted that, in order to demonstrate the husband’s jealousy, Reggiani would have to run behind a camera car repeatedly, ostensibly following Schneider’s car. Reggiani found himself running for 10 miles a day up vertiginous mountain roads – great footage, but the ordeal took its toll.

After Reggiani quit, Clouzot needed a replacement. Jean-Louis Trintignant (male foil in the 1956 Bardot vehicle And God Created Woman, and soon to be a star of European art cinema) was invited to the set and was wooed by Clouzot into taking the part – but decided against it.

Clouzot now decided it was too late to hire a replacement. Notoriously insomniac at the best of times, he rewrote the film through the nights and shot new footage during the days. The idea was that he would later edit his way around the problem of not having his leading man on set. He became increasingly stressed, alienated and paranoid. Perhaps – and this is just a thought – he should have taken the role himself?

And then one day, while he was filming Romy Schneider and Dany Carel having a lesbian tryst on a boat on the lake, he had a heart attack. He was taken to hospital and was compelled to abandon the film. “It happened at the right moment,” says Stora. “Things weren’t going well.”

Clouzot would make only one more film before his death in 1977. In 1968′s La Prisonnière, he used some of those weirdo kinetic art shots he had filmed for L’Enfer. It didn’t revolutionise cinema, and was forgotten even in a France that cherishes its cinema. Clouzot had been consumed by the very hell he tried, and failed, to show on screen.

Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno is released next Friday

• This article was amended on Friday 30 October 2009. It originally said that Simone Signoret played the wronged wife in Les Diaboliques. This has been corrected.

Jeane Smith, 84, hasn’t been to the cinema for nearly 40 years. So where better to take her, and four friends, than the London film festival, to see An Education, a coming-of-age movie set in swinging 60s London?

The film was called Hell, and it duly became hell. But this 1964 flop by Henri-Georges Clouzot shouldn’t blind us to his genius

Brigitte Bardot called him “a negative being, for ever at odds with himself and the world around him”. Another actor described him as “an interfering man who wanted every actor under his control”. The man they are both describing is Henri-Georges Clouzot, one of France’s greatest film directors, whose work plumbed the depths of misanthropy, paranoia and revenge so unremittingly that it was hard not to believe he was exploring his own psyche in public.

Clouzot was hated and feted in equal measure. One of his first masterpieces, the 1943 film Le Corbeau, is now hailed by critics, but on release it united the French left and the pro-Nazi Vichy regime in an unlikely alliance against Clouzot’s vision of pettiness and self-loathing in a small French wartime town divided by a poison-pen letter scandal. It was brave story to tell in a France torn apart by war; Le Corbeau was pulled from cinemas, Clouzot was fired from the Nazi-owned Continental studios and, after the war, received a lifetime ban (rescinded in 1947) from the French film industry for working with the Nazis.

Today he is largely forgotten, or at best mistaken for the bumbling inspector in the Pink Panther franchise. But now the disgracefully neglected Clouzot is being brought to new audiences with a documentary about his doomed 1964 project concerning a jealous husband’s mental collapse into paranoid fantasy. Called L’Enfer (Hell), the film became a real hell for the director and everyone on set.

One of L’Enfer’s problems was that Clouzot had by then become notorious as a director with a taste for violence and betrayal – and not just in his films. During the filming of La Vérité (The Truth) in 1960, he wanted Brigitte Bardot to fall asleep and drool for one scene. As you do. So he gave her some pills saying they were painkillers. They turned out to be sleeping pills. Bardot had to have her stomach pumped. Her subsequent verbal attack on him was understandable. But she was not the only actress he made suffer. Suzy Delair, who starred in the 1947 film Quai des Orfèvres, disclosed that he slapped her on set. “So what?” Delair told one interviewer. “He slapped others as well … He was tough but I’m not about to complain.”

In terms of violence to his female stars, Clouzot was a monstre sacré akin to his contemporary, Alfred Hitchcock, whom he admired and whose psychological thrillers of the 1950s and 60s bear close comparison with Clouzot’s greatest films – The Wages of Fear (1953), starring Yves Montand, and Les Diaboliques (1955), with Simone Signoret as a wronged wife who conspires with his mistress to murder her husband. Four years after La Vérité, Clouzot set about making L’Enfer. It was about a man driven mad by the supposed infidelities of his beautiful wife.

Clouzot cast 26-year-old Romy Schneider, who, though Austrian, was then one of France’s leading film stars. French cinema was a-tremble with expectation: could L’Enfer repeat the success of his earlier, great films? And what on-set tortures did Clouzot have in store for Schneider?

Moreover, French cinema had been revolutionised by the nouvelle vague since his last film, and the likes of Godard and Truffaut had arguably eclipsed Clouzot. Could he now show those young pups he was still the greatest French exponent of the seventh art? The director Costa-Gavras, who worked as production assistant on L’Enfer, said: “He was criticised by the nouvelle vague for planning out everything in the script. The big word of the epoch was ‘improvise’. He had a nice line about that: ‘I improvise on paper.’”

Clouzot was known as a forbiddingly meticulous metteur en scène, storyboarding his films so intensively that actors often felt thwarted. On L’Enfer, he sought to revolutionise cinema by meticulously creating a film using the experimental sounds of Pierre Boulez’s Ircam in Paris, and the then-voguish images of kinetic art to express his hero’s increasingly wild fantasy life. These lurid colour sequences would be juxtaposed with black-and-white footage shot on location.

But he never finished L’Enfer. After a few weeks of studio tests in Paris and 10 days on location, Clouzot abandoned it. Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea’s new documentary anatomises that cinematic nightmare– and it makes painful viewing, though it is filled with tantalising images of what might have been.

How did it come about? Thirty years after Clouzot’s death in 1977, his widow, Inès de Gonzalez, found herself trapped in a broken lift with a young film-maker. During their enforced intimacy, Inès told Bromberg that she had 185 cans of film (about 13 hours) of the unfinished penultimate film. She entrusted the footage to Bromberg to make a film containing interviews with the crew and newly dramatised scenes based on Clouzot’s script.

But we also have something extra: Claude Chabrol’s 1994 film based on Clouzot’s script, also called L’Enfer, starring Emmanuelle Béart as the flirtatious wife and François Cluzet as the paranoid husband. That is hardly enough, even if Chabrol inherited Clouzot’s mantle as the French Hitchcock. His treatment of the story is never as bravura as Clouzot’s promised to be. The test shots for Clouzot’s L’Enfer that appear in the new documentary show that he envisaged using kinetic art in a way that parallels how Hitchcock had used Salvador Dalí’s surrealist dream sequences almost 20 years earlier on Spellbound.

Maybe, though, it was in making these test shots that Clouzot’s ambition went beyond his capacity to realise a film. Film-maker Bernard Stora, then an intern on the film, worked on the tests. “I walked into something totally insane,” he recalls. “Clouzot had the best cameramen and the most seasoned technicians. It seemed clear from the beginning they didn’t know what they were doing.”

The producers, though, saw rushes of this stuff and loosened the purse strings: they saw genius where Stora saw insanity. Clouzot then had a virtually unlimited budget – but it only encouraged him to dream big and worry 24/7. Once on set, hell began in earnest. Clouzot started shooting at a lakeside hotel. But there was a difficulty. The lake, which figured in most scenes, was scheduled to be drained for a hydroelectric generating project. Clouzot had only 20 days to wrap the project. The shoot became as tense as a countdown Hollywood thriller.

L’Enfer’s key protagonists – Schneider, Serge Reggiani (who played the fantasising husband) and Clouzot – are all dead. But what we learn from the documentary is that Clouzot upset his leading man much more than his leading lady. After 10 days on set, Reggiani walked off, claiming to be suffering from Maltese fever, and threatening legal action. “Serge said he wasn’t there to be insulted by a schizophrenic maniac,” says Lan Nguyen, a junior member of the crew.

Reggiani, according to other crew members, had been steeling himself against being bullied on set by the notorious Clouzot and so was already in a highly strained state. How had Clouzot upset Reggiani? He had insisted that, in order to demonstrate the husband’s jealousy, Reggiani would have to run behind a camera car repeatedly, ostensibly following Schneider’s car. Reggiani found himself running for 10 miles a day up vertiginous mountain roads – great footage, but the ordeal took its toll.

After Reggiani quit, Clouzot needed a replacement. Jean-Louis Trintignant (male foil in the 1956 Bardot vehicle And God Created Woman, and soon to be a star of European art cinema) was invited to the set and was wooed by Clouzot into taking the part – but decided against it.

Clouzot now decided it was too late to hire a replacement. Notoriously insomniac at the best of times, he rewrote the film through the nights and shot new footage during the days. The idea was that he would later edit his way around the problem of not having his leading man on set. He became increasingly stressed, alienated and paranoid. Perhaps – and this is just a thought – he should have taken the role himself?

And then one day, while he was filming Romy Schneider and Dany Carel having a lesbian tryst on a boat on the lake, he had a heart attack. He was taken to hospital and was compelled to abandon the film. “It happened at the right moment,” says Stora. “Things weren’t going well.”

Clouzot would make only one more film before his death in 1977. In 1968′s La Prisonnière, he used some of those weirdo kinetic art shots he had filmed for L’Enfer. It didn’t revolutionise cinema, and was forgotten even in a France that cherishes its cinema. Clouzot had been consumed by the very hell he tried, and failed, to show on screen.

Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno is released next Friday

Harmony Korine is the one-man awkward squad of indie cinema, and his new film Trash Humpers, a tale of delinquent seniors, looks to be his most off-putting yet

On stage during a Q&A after the London premiere of his new film Trash Humpers, it’s as if Harmony Korine has become a character in one of his movies: a bad-taste bar mitzvah comedian, perhaps. Someone in the audience asks how he cast the film’s trio of suburban prostitutes. Korine replies that one of them was his high-school girlfriend: “I admit she doesn’t look that great today.” Ba-boom. Where did he get the idea for the film? Well, there was this house in his neighbourhood when he was a kid where people would dump their elderly relatives for $90 a month. The old folks were fed undercooked meat and forced to listen to Herman’s Hermits. With a final flourish, answering who knows what question, Korine declares, “I’m the most American director making movies today.” He’s beaming wildly.

That last line has the audience in stitches, not least because the film they’ve just watched is Korine’s least accessible (some would say least watchable) to date. If you have seen his 1997 directing debut, Gummo, then imagine its glue-sniffing teenagers 50 years down the line. They’ve become gonzo OAPs, suburban winos who prowl Nashville back alleys at night, dry-humping dustbins and bridges, cackling insanely and committing the occasional murder. There’s no plot, little comprehensible dialogue and no suggestion of a world outside the humpers’ network of miscreant buddies (whose number includes a cross-dressing poet in a French maid’s outfit). What’s more, the actors aren’t even old people: Korine cast himself, his wife Rachel and a couple of buddies, all wearing masks and looking like retirement home Freddy Krugers. Filmed on crappy VHS in the style of a home movie, Trash Humpers is the cinematic equivalent of listening to black metal: most people hate it, some can stomach 10 minutes, only the devoted will go the full 78 minutes.

After the Q&A I bump into a friend of Korine’s who worked on the film. How much of what he said on stage was true? “Some of it,” he says laughing. “A lot of it was complete fantasy.” In the past newspaper features about Korine were littered with his self-mythologising tall tales (there was the one about the time he found a piece of a guy’s shoulder in a pillowcase). A mutual acquaintance who has known Korine since around the time Kids was released in 1995 (he wrote the script at 19) tells a good story of the director being in Los Angeles in the late 90s. This was around the time Werner Herzog was calling him “the future of American cinema”. A big Hollywood actor, hearing Korine was in town, summoned the young director to the studio where he was filming. Korine showed up in blackface and took off his trousers before being chased off by security. There’s a video of it somewhere, apparently. Or is it just one of the fibs that Korine likes to circulate?

But during our interview proper, the day before the premiere, American indie’s enfant terrible keeps his answers more or less straight. Now 36, with grey streaks in his beard, he’s a darn sight more sprightly than when he was a few years ago, when he lived in London and shuffled around looking twitchy. The only trace now of his once-distinctive jitters is the non-stop gum-chewing.

Others on Team Trash Humpers make up for Korine’s seeming lack of nerves; you get the impression they are uncertain how to plug the film. A publicist calls it his detox film (Korine is a former heroin user), a purging of all those nasty toxins. That would explain the paranoid tone, but in truth he has been clean for a few years. Korine says the film is more of a reaction to Mister Lonely, last year’s comeback. His first film in eight years, Mister Lonely was a rich and touchingly old-fashioned melodrama set in a commune of celebrity impersonators. But with an $8.2m budget, he says he found the backroom wrangling crippling: “The people involved, the logistics, the bureaucracy. So much energy is put into capitulating. It just chops your head off.” Korine thrusts himself into the back of his seat for effect. Trash Humpers was more of a wham-bam production. Shooting – practically on his doorstop – started four months ago and he was done editing in time for the Toronto film festival in September.

So far the film has divided opinion – nothing new for him there. Experimental art film or sub-Jackass goof-off? Korine seems to be hedging his bets ever so slightly on its place in his body of work. Maybe it’s not even a movie at all, he suggests: “I wanted to make something that replicated an artefact. Or a found object.” At one point there was talk of presenting it as a VHS tape that had been found in a ditch or in a box in someone’s attic.

In perhaps his only lapse into interview whimsy, Korine claims that when he was making the film he was convinced of its commercial appeal: “I was actually thinking it would be the kind of thing someone like Miley Cyrus might like.” What would Miley Cyrus like about it? The man fellating a twig? “I just thought it was so base and, in some ways, so on the surface, that it’s something that someone like her could identify with.” He’s beaming again. As usual, he doesn’t give a twig himself for criticism, or for the charge that Trash Humpers is nothing more than boring provocation: “I don’t give a fuck if people think that or not. I honestly don’t care.”

Korine refuses to be drawn on his private life. He spent a handful of self-destructive years between New York, London and Paris. Anyone familiar with his work probably has a fair idea of the rest of it: break-up with on-off muse and girlfriend Chloe Sevigny, teeth falling out, houses burning down, drugs, near homelessness. Then there was Fight Harm, the abandoned film in which he picked fights with strangers, filmed by David Blaine. “I was quite unhealthy,” he says with a rueful grin. He pauses. “You can imagine, it was hell.” He shrugs and gives the table in front of him a little bang for emphasis.

Today, Korine’s back in Nashville, Tennessee, where he grew up. He’s married with a baby, and when he talks about family life it’s with zeal of a reformed man. ”Living there, you have space,” he says of his hometown. “That was one of the things that was missing from my life for a long time.” And Southern hospitality was a boon during the filming of Trash Humpers: “It would be really late at night and one of the characters would be fucking a trash bin, like really fucking it hard. And then a guy would come out of the house and see it and ask if we wanted the porch lights on.”

As for right now, Korine’s just finished work on a comedy script, and he’s got back the drive that saw him through the youthful burst of Kids, Gummo and Julien Donkey-Boy. “At that time I was literally exploding. Internally I couldn’t contain my thoughts, my energy. At the same time, when I would close the door, I didn’t have much left. I was spent. Now I try to pace myself a little more.” Which reminds me of something said by Harmony Korine the quixotic wunderbrat, at the time of Gummo’s release: that great artists have 10 years in them at best. Was Korine’s decade back in the 90s? Or is it yet to come?

Harmony Korine is the one-man awkward squad of indie cinema, and his new film Trash Humpers, a tale of delinquent seniors, looks to be his most off-putting yet

On stage during a Q&A after the London premiere of his new film Trash Humpers, it’s as if Harmony Korine has become a character in one of his movies: a bad-taste bar mitzvah comedian, perhaps. Someone in the audience asks how he cast the film’s trio of suburban prostitutes. Korine replies that one of them was his high-school girlfriend: “I admit she doesn’t look that great today.” Ba-boom. Where did he get the idea for the film? Well, there was this house in his neighbourhood when he was a kid where people would dump their elderly relatives for $90 a month. The old folks were fed undercooked meat and forced to listen to Herman’s Hermits. With a final flourish, answering who knows what question, Korine declares, “I’m the most American director making movies today.” He’s beaming wildly.

That last line has the audience in stitches, not least because the film they’ve just watched is Korine’s least accessible (some would say least watchable) to date. If you have seen his 1997 directing debut, Gummo, then imagine its glue-sniffing teenagers 50 years down the line. They’ve become gonzo OAPs, suburban winos who prowl Nashville back alleys at night, dry-humping dustbins and bridges, cackling insanely and committing the occasional murder. There’s no plot, little comprehensible dialogue and no suggestion of a world outside the humpers’ network of miscreant buddies (whose number includes a cross-dressing poet in a French maid’s outfit). What’s more, the actors aren’t even old people: Korine cast himself, his wife Rachel and a couple of buddies, all wearing masks and looking like retirement home Freddy Krugers. Filmed on crappy VHS in the style of a home movie, Trash Humpers is the cinematic equivalent of listening to black metal: most people hate it, some can stomach 10 minutes, only the devoted will go the full 78 minutes.

After the Q&A I bump into a friend of Korine’s who worked on the film. How much of what he said on stage was true? “Some of it,” he says laughing. “A lot of it was complete fantasy.” In the past newspaper features about Korine were littered with his self-mythologising tall tales (there was the one about the time he found a piece of a guy’s shoulder in a pillowcase). A mutual acquaintance who has known Korine since around the time Kids was released in 1995 (he wrote the script at 19) tells a good story of the director being in Los Angeles in the late 90s. This was around the time Werner Herzog was calling him “the future of American cinema”. A big Hollywood actor, hearing Korine was in town, summoned the young director to the studio where he was filming. Korine showed up in blackface and took off his trousers before being chased off by security. There’s a video of it somewhere, apparently. Or is it just one of the fibs that Korine likes to circulate?

But during our interview proper, the day before the premiere, American indie’s enfant terrible keeps his answers more or less straight. Now 36, with grey streaks in his beard, he’s a darn sight more sprightly than when he was a few years ago, when he lived in London and shuffled around looking twitchy. The only trace now of his once-distinctive jitters is the non-stop gum-chewing.

Others on Team Trash Humpers make up for Korine’s seeming lack of nerves; you get the impression they are uncertain how to plug the film. A publicist calls it his detox film (Korine is a former heroin user), a purging of all those nasty toxins. That would explain the paranoid tone, but in truth he has been clean for a few years. Korine says the film is more of a reaction to Mister Lonely, last year’s comeback. His first film in eight years, Mister Lonely was a rich and touchingly old-fashioned melodrama set in a commune of celebrity impersonators. But with an $8.2m budget, he says he found the backroom wrangling crippling: “The people involved, the logistics, the bureaucracy. So much energy is put into capitulating. It just chops your head off.” Korine thrusts himself into the back of his seat for effect. Trash Humpers was more of a wham-bam production. Shooting – practically on his doorstop – started four months ago and he was done editing in time for the Toronto film festival in September.

So far the film has divided opinion – nothing new for him there. Experimental art film or sub-Jackass goof-off? Korine seems to be hedging his bets ever so slightly on its place in his body of work. Maybe it’s not even a movie at all, he suggests: “I wanted to make something that replicated an artefact. Or a found object.” At one point there was talk of presenting it as a VHS tape that had been found in a ditch or in a box in someone’s attic.

In perhaps his only lapse into interview whimsy, Korine claims that when he was making the film he was convinced of its commercial appeal: “I was actually thinking it would be the kind of thing someone like Miley Cyrus might like.” What would Miley Cyrus like about it? The man fellating a twig? “I just thought it was so base and, in some ways, so on the surface, that it’s something that someone like her could identify with.” He’s beaming again. As usual, he doesn’t give a twig himself for criticism, or for the charge that Trash Humpers is nothing more than boring provocation: “I don’t give a fuck if people think that or not. I honestly don’t care.”

Korine refuses to be drawn on his private life. He spent a handful of self-destructive years between New York, London and Paris. Anyone familiar with his work probably has a fair idea of the rest of it: break-up with on-off muse and girlfriend Chloe Sevigny, teeth falling out, houses burning down, drugs, near homelessness. Then there was Fight Harm, the abandoned film in which he picked fights with strangers, filmed by David Blaine. “I was quite unhealthy,” he says with a rueful grin. He pauses. “You can imagine, it was hell.” He shrugs and gives the table in front of him a little bang for emphasis.

Today, Korine’s back in Nashville, Tennessee, where he grew up. He’s married with a baby, and when he talks about family life it’s with zeal of a reformed man. ”Living there, you have space,” he says of his hometown. “That was one of the things that was missing from my life for a long time.” And Southern hospitality was a boon during the filming of Trash Humpers: “It would be really late at night and one of the characters would be fucking a trash bin, like really fucking it hard. And then a guy would come out of the house and see it and ask if we wanted the porch lights on.”

As for right now, Korine’s just finished work on a comedy script, and he’s got back the drive that saw him through the youthful burst of Kids, Gummo and Julien Donkey-Boy. “At that time I was literally exploding. Internally I couldn’t contain my thoughts, my energy. At the same time, when I would close the door, I didn’t have much left. I was spent. Now I try to pace myself a little more.” Which reminds me of something said by Harmony Korine the quixotic wunderbrat, at the time of Gummo’s release: that great artists have 10 years in them at best. Was Korine’s decade back in the 90s? Or is it yet to come?

No Orson. No zither. No masterful expressionism. Tobey Maguire instead of Joseph Cotten. Ageless ‘pod actors’ instead of worry-lined titans. Maybe you shouldn’t step in the Turd Man, Leo

Hold on to something firm and reliable, please this paper has no wish to cause accidents. Some stories hurt. Thus, there is a rumour going around that Leonardo DiCaprio is thinking of playing Harry Lime in a remake of The Third Man.

With Tobey Maguire as Holly Martins, the Joseph Cotten part.

For the moment, I thought, just concentrate on age to explode this nightmare. Yes, it’s true that Orson Welles’s Harry Lime was baby-faced in a way that was inescapable if Welles was involved. But Harry Lime, I thought to myself – he’s a villain who’s gone through the war in the black market; he’s a sewer rat in Vienna after the peace; he’s a trafficker in diluted penicillin and so he reduces children to madness and death. This man has lived. Whereas, Leonardo DiCaprio is a boy still. We realized that last year in Revolutionary Road, for as he and Kate Winslet were reunited after their hit in Titanic, it was plain to see and feel that she had grown older and sadder, while Leonardo was really no older or wiser than Tom Cruise managed between, say, Risky Business and Mission Impossible. Our actors these days don’t age much – and they certainly don’t mature. So how is Leonardo (so used to being lovable) going to find the nerve to be Lime without immense stupidity on his side?

That’s what I thought. But then I looked it up. In 1948, when Orson made The Third Man, he was thirty-three – DiCaprio is already thirty-five! What better proof could there be of my just-mentioned principle that we are in an age of pod actors, not subject to ordinary human processes like ageing, thinking and worrying? So Leonardo could say, “Come on, I’m ready!”

And Tobey Maguire is thirty-four – so that works!!!! Except that it begins to lose a very important undertone in the original movie: Joe Cotten was 10 years older than Welles, and thus Holly Martins was all the sadder – an older man who had apparently been infatuated with Lime’s poisoned charm. It made their relationship all the more poignant in that Martins had to learn to see Lime in the cruel light of day.

So the actors can easily think the casting is great! And maybe you do, too! Am I the only one out of my mind and desperate?

Let me go further: The Third Man relied on black-and-white photography by a master named Robert Krasker; and it grew out of the application of that imagery to the nocturnal streets and underground tunnels of war-torn Vienna.  In the minds of its makers – producer Alexander Korda, director Carol Reed, and author Graham Greene – it was a study in the physical and mortal wreckage left by the second world war. It needed the faces of supporting actors who had come close to starving; and it needed the refugee look of the heroine, played by Valli, a woman who had only just survived the war. It needed the brusque Trevor Howard as the policeman, and it needed people  like Bernard Lee, Wilfrid Hyde-White and Geoffrey Keen. It needed that music, played on the zither by Anton Karas; it needed the acuity of its several makers, their ability to look at their world and find a story that caught the shabby moment of 1948.

Now maybe some latter-day talents (at the level of Korda, Reed and Greene; Welles, Cotten and Howard) are going to place this new Turd Man in a modern equivalent of Vienna – in Baghdad, say, or New Orleans (some great city that has been given up). Maybe. Or maybe we need an organized early-warning system whereby thousands of us could email Leonardo and say, look, whatever you do, don’t go near The Third Man, because we are all of us ready to put a curse on you in which not going to see the Turd Man is just the first step. After that, we get nasty.

No Orson. No zither. No masterful expressionism. Tobey Maguire instead of Joseph Cotten. Ageless ‘pod actors’ instead of worry-lined titans. Maybe you shouldn’t step in the Turd Man, Leo

Hold on to something firm and reliable, please this paper has no wish to cause accidents. Some stories hurt. Thus, there is a rumour going around that Leonardo DiCaprio is thinking of playing Harry Lime in a remake of The Third Man.

With Tobey Maguire as Holly Martins, the Joseph Cotten part.

For the moment, I thought, just concentrate on age to explode this nightmare. Yes, it’s true that Orson Welles’s Harry Lime was baby-faced in a way that was inescapable if Welles was involved. But Harry Lime, I thought to myself – he’s a villain who’s gone through the war in the black market; he’s a sewer rat in Vienna after the peace; he’s a trafficker in diluted penicillin and so he reduces children to madness and death. This man has lived. Whereas, Leonardo DiCaprio is a boy still. We realized that last year in Revolutionary Road, for as he and Kate Winslet were reunited after their hit in Titanic, it was plain to see and feel that she had grown older and sadder, while Leonardo was really no older or wiser than Tom Cruise managed between, say, Risky Business and Mission Impossible. Our actors these days don’t age much – and they certainly don’t mature. So how is Leonardo (so used to being lovable) going to find the nerve to be Lime without immense stupidity on his side?

That’s what I thought. But then I looked it up. In 1948, when Orson made The Third Man, he was thirty-three – DiCaprio is already thirty-five! What better proof could there be of my just-mentioned principle that we are in an age of pod actors, not subject to ordinary human processes like ageing, thinking and worrying? So Leonardo could say, “Come on, I’m ready!”

And Tobey Maguire is thirty-four – so that works!!!! Except that it begins to lose a very important undertone in the original movie: Joe Cotten was 10 years older than Welles, and thus Holly Martins was all the sadder – an older man who had apparently been infatuated with Lime’s poisoned charm. It made their relationship all the more poignant in that Martins had to learn to see Lime in the cruel light of day.

So the actors can easily think the casting is great! And maybe you do, too! Am I the only one out of my mind and desperate?

Let me go further: The Third Man relied on black-and-white photography by a master named Robert Krasker; and it grew out of the application of that imagery to the nocturnal streets and underground tunnels of war-torn Vienna.  In the minds of its makers – producer Alexander Korda, director Carol Reed, and author Graham Greene – it was a study in the physical and mortal wreckage left by the second world war. It needed the faces of supporting actors who had come close to starving; and it needed the refugee look of the heroine, played by Valli, a woman who had only just survived the war. It needed the brusque Trevor Howard as the policeman, and it needed people  like Bernard Lee, Wilfrid Hyde-White and Geoffrey Keen. It needed that music, played on the zither by Anton Karas; it needed the acuity of its several makers, their ability to look at their world and find a story that caught the shabby moment of 1948.

Now maybe some latter-day talents (at the level of Korda, Reed and Greene; Welles, Cotten and Howard) are going to place this new Turd Man in a modern equivalent of Vienna – in Baghdad, say, or New Orleans (some great city that has been given up). Maybe. Or maybe we need an organized early-warning system whereby thousands of us could email Leonardo and say, look, whatever you do, don’t go near The Third Man, because we are all of us ready to put a curse on you in which not going to see the Turd Man is just the first step. After that, we get nasty.

Child actors can rely on cuteness and clever editing to emerge from action movies and comedy. But, as two films screening at the London film festival show, proper drama is no kindergarten

Kid in Action has it easy. Usually running, usually screaming – the child actor playing KiA is basically at bigger, louder nursery school. KiC (Kid in Comedy) doesn’t have too hard a run either – just look cute, supply sass and say the words. Let nice uncle editor take care of comic timing.

Kid in Drama (KiD) works in a scarier playpen. He/she needs to hold an audience through more than hollering and hamming it up. Especially since the last 20 years have seen a number of bar-raising performances from child stars in prominent roles – Natalie Portman in Leon, Haley Joel-Osment in The Sixth Sense and Keisha Castle-Hughes in Whale Rider, to name an obvious few.

If the child’s role is too big for the actor, the whole film feels baggy. It’s a problem that’s so far swamped two movies at this year’s London film festival – John Hillcoat’s adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Scott Hicks’s family drama The Boys Are Back. Both The Road (starring Kodi Smit-McPhee, alongside Viggo Mortensen) and The Boys Are Back (in which then six-year-old newcomer Nicholas McAnulty stars with Clive Owen) hinge on the death of a mother in the first act. Before this event Smit-McPhee and McAnulty are in their natural territory – bit-part players acting as another facet of their fictional parents’ relationship. With the mother gone, the weight of sustaining a believable family setup falls on the inexperienced child actors, and the responsibility is often too heavy for their small shoulders to bear. 

Smit-McPhee in The Road is cast as a famished nomad staggering through a world burnt to the brink of apocalypse. Of the few human survivors left, most have turned to cannibalism, as all plants and animals have died. The boy’s mother – horrified by the world she has brought her child into – has killed herself, leaving the boy to her husband (played by Mortensen). Now father and son (“The Man” and “The Boy”) trek a ruined highway, never sure if the next person they see will greet them, or eat them.

Smit-McPhee’s role asks a great deal – he must sustain the look of a starving, desperate, bewildered child through 119 minutes in which he’s rarely off camera. He manages bewildered, but looks as fit, healthy and alive as any normal child brought up in a secure, loving home. A key scene in which The Boy drinks his first can of fizzy drink is cut off from its poignancy by the fact that Smit-McPhee looks like he’s scoffed a Twinkie just before they called “Action!”.

In The Boys Are Back, Artie (Nicholas McAnulty) has been left alone with his sports writer father Joe (Clive Owen) after his mother suddenly dies of cancer. McAnulty and Owen share the screen for the first hour of the movie, with Owen as Bereaved Dad using the bored-looking McAnulty as a giant human tissue during scenes of Oscar-chasing hug and blub. Even Owen, normally an experienced and reliable draw, struggles with the ropey script. McAnulty, faced with lines such as “I want to die so I can be with mummy”, just hasn’t got a chance.

Some would say it’s unfair to ask a 13-year-old to starve himself for his art, or to expect a six-year-old to understand and master grief, anger, and oedipal rage in his debut film. But these movies live and die on their young stars – we need to believe them to believe the story. There’s a lot of competition out there, so they need to grow up and play the game. This is Hollywood KiDs. 

Brutal but thrilling, this is an astonishing insight into a conflict waged by feral children. By Peter Bradshaw

Child soldiers – just like adult soldiers, only better. They’re fitter, more agile, more fanatically ready to obey orders, as good if not better with weapons, only hazily subject to international law and crucially unencumbered with the adult’s fear or indeed understanding of death. This is the world of Africa’s infant warriors in Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire’s intestine-dissolvingly brutal and thrilling film, coproduced by Matthieu Kassovitz and based on the 2002 novel Johnny Chien Méchant by the US-based Congolese author Emmanuel Dongala. We see a group of boys, aged between 10 and 15, each carrying an assault rifle, being psyched up for their rebel faction’s glorious final assault on the capital, by being screamed at, by participating in the cult chanting ritual loosely copied from American war movies and finally by getting cocaine rubbed into their open wounds, so that its stimulant influence, directly ingested, will override the lack of food or sleep.

Until watching this, I had heard the words “child soldier” in a kind of Orla Guerin voice in my head, sorrowful and perplexed like everyone else by the image of tiny belligerents seen on the TV news, grotesquely tricked out with guns and attitude. They could not actually be like grownups on the field of battle, surely; it must be a case of propaganda posturing?

No. The power of this movie lies in persuading you that these children are entirely able to do the work of adults, including pillage and rape. Some of them have bizarre kiddy mannerisms: one has angel wings, another puts on the wedding dress of the woman whose husband he has just executed. But everything they do in the movie could easily be done by young men five or 10 years their senior. Cast adult actors in the roles, and it would not look like Dennis Potter’s famous adult-child play Blue Remembered Hills. It would look exactly the same. When the child-soldier unit snaps into action in one scene, with ferocious discipline and cohesion, I realised that the movie it looked like was Saving Private Ryan.

Sauvaire’s movie places the action specifically in 2003, in the dying weeks of the civil war in Liberia. Charles Taylor’s government is on the verge of collapsing and the rebels are advancing, victoriously if chaotically, on the capital, Monrovia. Johnny Mad Dog, played by Christopher Minie, is the 14-year-old leader of his irregulars; the others have names like Small Devil and Jungle Rocket. Johnny’s second-in-command is a bloodthirsty younger boy worryingly called No Good Advice, a name which he has presumably not earned by recommending endowment mortgages.

Their mission is to proceed through villages and towns, “holding positions” and terrifying the populace, pressganging all the children into their ranks and stealing food and money. They are tacitly permitted and even encouraged to execute civilians for weapon-practice and esprit de corps, and their other function is to draw the fire of snipers positioned by the retreating government army. They are beyond feral, kept in fighting mood by the propulsive rhythms of their chant, like a playground game in hell: “You don’t wanna die? – Don’t be born! – I make a face? – Stay away from me!” Yet they have teamwork and strategy.

Johnny’s story unfolds in parallel with that of a teenage girl called Laokole, played by Daisy Victoria Vandy, part of the fleeing mass of civilians, but destined to come into contact with Johnny.

Laokole transports her maimed father in a wheelbarrow and must look after her little brother, too. She fatefully witnesses Johnny’s unit brutally shooting a small boy. For a strange, subdued moment, Johnny and Laokole meet on a shattered staircase in a deserted building. They look into each other’s eyes. From then on, something appears to have changed inside Johnny. When his unit brings a wounded soldier to a UN hospital, and the blue-helmeted guards won’t let his heavily-armed crew inside, Johnny appears to lose his nerve, ordering a “tactical retreat” despite overwhelming superiority in numbers – to the astonished disgust of the other Lost Boys.

Is Laokole going to humanise Johnny? That would be too easy. Yet clearly something has happened, something to jolt Johnny out of the closed and murderously abusive world which has been his family since he was tiny. But jolt him where? Their final meeting, in the film’s concluding minute, is very striking and the performances of Vandy and Minie are something to wonder at. Its resolution was perhaps a little contrived, but the film’s sheer force is, however, unarguable. It packs a punch that goes right through your solar plexus and out through your shoulder blades. And it carries a nauseous message: child soldiers are horrible, but they are simply the evolutionary endpoint of war. They are the exception which is all but indistinguishable from the rule. War is brutalising, infantilising, dehumanising, requiring the unquestioning submission to authority. All soldiers are child soldiers: that is the bitterly cynical nightmare that Sauvaire’s film insists upon to the very end.

There are problems with Andy Kemp’s directorial debut but far more subtlety and pessimism than you would anticipate, writes Catherine Shoard

Andy Kemp’s directorial debut about a troubled teen negotiating the foster-care system is intended to show how well-intentioned people can do an awful lot of damage – with surprisingly successful, unsanctimonious results. Newcomer Keeki Bennetts, then elder sister Demi, plays Aimee, a spookily self-assured but self-harming girl removed from her mother’s iffy care and placed with Pauline McLynn and husband Connor Byrne, who try valiantly to give her a supportive home. There are problems: the ice-age pacing, the small-screen ambition, the endless flutes, but far more subtlety and pessimism than you would anticipate.