A life of Anger | Interviews | Guardian Unlimited Film

"Time is all we have and every second that ticks away is one less second we're alive. The sands of time are going through the hourglass but it doesn't frighten me." This kind of half-poetic, half-freaky non sequitur is typical, and dropped within three minutes of our meeting in Anger's clothing-strewn Toronto hotel room.

Even sleepless and 77 or 79 years old (whether the subject is his age or Bette Davis's smoking habits, there is no such thing as a straight answer from Kenneth Anger), the film-maker looks good. His face is uncannily smooth, and as preternaturally-tanned as George Hamilton's, just as one might expect of a man born and bred in Beverly Hills. For over a half century, Anger has been straddling the fence between high and low culture.

In film circles, he is revered as a director of groundbreaking 16mm experimental shorts, dialogue-free and filled with disorienting jump cuts and occult symbols, invariably capped with a homoerotic wink. Martin Scorsese has cited Anger's 1963 film Scorpio Rising, a hepcat 29-minutes about masochistic bikers, as a major influence. Says Anger, with typical modesty: "Martin Scorsese learned about soundtracks from me.

" Barely out of his teens, he took a boat to Paris and hung out with the Cahiers du Cinema crowd. He worked as an assistant to archivist Henri Langlois at the Cinematheque Francaise, meeting artists like Jean Genet and Anais Nin (Nin walks mournfully - arthritically, even - through his 1954 film Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome.) "Everyone was nice to me in Paris except [Jean Luc] Goddard," says Anger.

"He felt it necessary to make fun of my French, you see. When I saw Breathless, I thought: how could such a mean little man make that?" But outside cineaste circles, Anger is known for peddling Hollywood's dirty secrets in the best-selling books Hollywood Babylon and Hollywood Babylon II, artfully written tales of Tinseltown scandals from Fatty Arbuckle's rape charges the the death of Jayne Mansfield.

Hollywood Babylon III is completed - watch out Hugh Grant and O.J. Simpson - but sits in a drawer (along with his fantastically-titled autobiography, Look Back Ken Anger), still waiting to be published.

"Everyone is afraid of it because [the Church of Scientology] is so litigious," says Anger. "I studied very carefully this small group of stars that have been sucked into the brainwashing: Karen Black, John Travolta, Tom Cruise. The Scientologists tried with Nicole Kidman, but she got sick of it and sick of Tom.

" His voice booms: "Tom! I don't care if he's a sexy guy, I can see why any woman would get a little fed up, to put it mildly." Hollywood Babylon was first published in France in 1959 (it came out in the US in 1974) because Anger needed money to fund his filmmaking.

All totaled, his oeuvre amounts to less than three hours of footage, and his films can be hard to find, but UCLA Film and Television Archive recently completed 35mm restorations of four Anger shorts, set to screen at the London film festival. Fireworks, shot in 1947 when Anger was 17 (or 20), is a black and white trance-like film that shows the director, his young torso beautifully sculpted, traveling into a world of hidden sex and violence: an erection turns out to be an African statue; fireworks explode from a sailor's pants. Typically, the images create a dream reverie linked by mood more than narrative.

In fact, Fireworks was based on a dream the filmmaker had about the California Zoot Suit riots that took place during the second world war when sailors on leave clashed with local Mexican youths. "I was an eye witness to these riots," Anger expplains. "I saw where sailors pounced on these zoot-suited Mexican Americans, ripped their zoot suits and left them stark naked.

This became a dream, and the dream became the film. It's a film about fear and desire, desiring something that could harm you. Dr.

Alfred Kinsey called it 'a perfect dream remembered' and he bought the first print." Anger shot Fireworks over one weekend in his parents' house while the family was attending the funeral of an uncle in Philadelphia, and they never found out. He says his father, an engineer at an aircraft company who left him one dollar in his will, had wanted his son to go into aviation.

But the son was more attracted to works by mystic Aleister Crowley than airplanes. The books on "the dark arts" belonged to Anger's adored Austrian grandmother. "Big Bertha," as he called her, was a friend of Austrian theatre director Max Reinhardt, who cast the infant Anger in the 1935 version of A Midsummer Night's Dream.

"James Cagney played Bottom in that film, but I was too young to care," he says. "I had no lines and I loved every minute of it." Anger attended Beverly Hills High School and grew up in close proximity to fame.

He remembers meeting Walt Disney as a kid, calling him "A dirty old man with kiddies in his lap". But his tastes were high end for Hollywood, and he spent time at the Museum of Modern Art watching films by the French avant-garde. In 1950 Jean Cocteau noticed Fireworks at a French film festival and invited Anger to Paris, where he spent years (four or thirteen) readying himself for a career as an underground filmmaker.

Not that Anger appreciates this label. "I reject this term underground. I don't live underground.

What am I, a gopher? These labels! Avant-garde - do you know what that is?

It's a military term for soldiers who are sacrificed, who die for the risks they take going first. Basically what I am is independent. I have never worked for another company, never had a boss my whole life.

I am not beholden to anybody. Call me independent." And influential, maybe?

The hooded figures and ritualistic, demonic imagery in 1960s films like Lucifer Rising and Invocation of my Demon Brother - the latter scored by Mick Jagger with one interminable moog synth moan - are the building blocks of self-styled bad boy rockers from the Rolling Stones (Anger claims he inspired the song Sympathy for the Devil) to Marilyn Manson. Director Elio Gelmini has made a documentary portrait of Kenneth Anger called Anger Me, and he notes that his subject's work is everywhere in popular culture. "He was a genuine pioneer, and he's very good at advertising himself.

People are influenced by him who don't even know they're influenced by him. When David Lynch uses the song Blue Velvet, Kenneth did that in Scorpio Rising. Kenneth was the first person to use pop music instead of a score.

" He laughs. "Or at least he'll say he was first." Scorpio Rising framed its leather-and-denim clad biker in blue light, playing up the ironic gender bending in the line, "She wore blue velvet.

.." In the three-minute film Kustom Kar Commandos, Anger shows tough guys tenderly buffing their engines; they look like modern leather bar clich?

s. Still, the phrase "gay icon" doesn't exactly please him either. "If [the gay community] wants to make me an icon, fine, but for years, I've never got any help from them.

Oh yes - wait. I received an award from something called 'Outfest' - that's a 'gay' festival, gay in quotes. I never use that word like they do.

I like the original meaning better - joyful," he says. "Anyway, it's a life achievement award, a hunk of plastic. You could kill someone with it.

I use it as a doorstop. I don't need a piece of plastic. I need money.

I need some raw film. I need anything that will help me make movies." Getting money for the next project is key for Anger, who lives in a Los Angeles hotel.

He has been working on a film about the late singer Elliott Smith (I spy a Smith CD amidst the Cat in the Hat chaos of the room). But one wonders if the small output of such a large life may also have something to do with his mental state. In 1950 Anger attempted suicide in Paris, which became the subject of the film Rabbit's Moon.

At a recent lecture in Montreal, he said: "You know Francis Ford Coppola is bipolar, and so am I. I refused to take lithium. He took lithium and I said, 'Well, look what it's turned you into Francis.

It's turned you into a fucking wine grower!'" But as Anger digresses, and apologizes for doing so, his tea abandoned, he is not as angry as his image (or his name) suggests. In one breath, he says he's a proud outsider to Hollywood, and in another, he almost gushes: "I loved the young John Wayne.

I wish I could have worked with him." As he winds up a long story about Vera Rhuba Ralston, a bit player figure skater and girlfriend of a studio head, he says: "That's a little slice of history. I love the things that have gone by the wayside.

" Anger Me screens October 27 and 29 as part of the Times BFI London film festival.