IF CARAVAGGIO were alive today, he would have loved the cinema; his paintings take a cinematic approach. We film-makers became aware of his work in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and he certainly was an influence on us.

I was in California in the early 1970s, and I think what influenced me most — and other directors, particularly Paul Schrader — was the extraordinary use of light and shadow. We felt a great influence by Edward Hopper, too, but the light and shadow there deals with buildings and rooms and objects, whereas in Caravaggio, it’s the people.

And though his light seems to be coming from a single source, it’s not a real light, it’s a dramatic light: it just lights the scene from one mysterious burst. It’s like a flashbulb that just happened to pick up these extraordinary looks on the faces of the models.

What hit us about his work was the extraordinary power of what seemed to be realism in that, say, you’ve got Judith beheading Holofernes, which is a difficult job, and you could see that in her face.

The best part for us was that in many cases he painted religious subject-matter but the models were obviously people from the streets; he had prostitutes playing saints. There’s something in Caravaggio that shows a real street knowledge of the sinner; his sacred paintings are profane.

There are touches of Caravaggio in The Age of Innocence, and in The Last Temptation of Christ. Michael Ballhaus (the cinematographer) and I had copies of paintings and books on Caravaggio. We at least tried to replicate his colour palette, particularly in a sequence which begins with Jesus’s Passion before he’s crucified.

Caravaggio is there in the bar scenes in Mean Streets, where the cameraman, Kent Wakeford, and I tried to get a dramatic use of bursts of light, and in the two oracle sequences in Kundun. In Gangs of New York, we tried as much as possible to recreate in the Satan’s Circus sequences with Bill the Butcher (Daniel Day-Lewis’s character) what it must have been like in that section of Rome where Caravaggio lived.

In The Aviator, there’s a scene with Leo [DiCaprio] as Howard Hughes in 1946-47 pretty much having a nervous breakdown in his screening room: the walls are a reddish colour, and there’s one beam of light from the projector. And particularly one shot that Bob [cameraman Robert Richardson] did of Leo sitting in his white leather chair with his beard and fingernails growing, and 75 per cent of his body is covered with burns from a plane crash, and there’s a beam of light behind his head. To me these scenes are right out of Caravaggio.

• From an interview with Matt Wolf in the current issue of the Royal Academy Magazine