Funny business, being Austrian.

“We are world champions at sweeping things under the carpet,” says Michael Haneke. “Writers and artists have to work to be heard, and this is, of course, why what they produce is so depressing.” He chortles. He does that a lot. For an Austrian. This is surprising. So is his appearance. I’d painted a picture of him in my head on the basis of his films. He would look something like John Hurt in Alien, just before the monster bursts out of his chest. In fact, Haneke looks like the good uncle in a fairy tale, or an unusually optimistic psychiatrist. He has longish, thick grey hair, black eyebrows, the right kind of beard, glasses and an instant smile. He has a rich, pleasant voice. He chortles all the time.

So, having seen his latest, The White Ribbon, a harrowing presentiment of the horrors of the 20th century, set in a German village in 1914, I ask him about his next film. “It’s going to be filmed in France, starring Jean-Louis Trintignant and Isabelle Huppert. It’s about the decompositions and humiliations of the body in old age. Another jolly film.”

Big chortle.

The White Ribbon — it won the Palme d’Or at Cannes — establishes Haneke as one of a generation of two. The other is Pedro Almodovar. They are grand European auteurs, directors with a unique signature and highly distinctive style. Once, there were many of them: Godard, Bergman, Antonioni, Pasolini, Fellini, Rossellini. Now there are only two. Why? “The problem is the aesthetic education of young people. Their education is TV and the US mainstream.”

Haneke doesn’t watch television. He says the only thing you can believe is the weather forecast. I point out that this makes him naively credulous. Anyway... “As a result of this, young people don’t have the interest or the knowledge of what’s out there.

When students apply to the college where I teach film, I ask a question to find out what they know. I mention the name ‘Rossellini’. They usually ask, ‘Is it a pizzeria, perhaps?’ But you might as well ask them about the Pizzeria Medici — they wouldn’t know about that, either.

“Cinema has metamorphosed into individual films, rather than a whole art form, as it was in the 1960s and 1970s, when there was a much broader audience. Now it’s down to individuals, who are allowed to produce these things as a kind of cultural alibi.”

Haneke and Almodovar are alibis. They are also chalk and cheese. The latter is Mediterranean baroque; the former is bleak, Mitteleuropean expressionist. But they are both up there.

Born in 1942, Haneke was formed by the Hitler disruption. He was the only child of actors. Feeling psychoanalytic, I raise my eyebrows at the “only child” thing. “I can’t imagine it any other way,” he says. “I’m

not sure if it affects me, but I do notice

how much trouble brothers and sisters have with their siblings, so I am quite happy about it.” His early childhood — the war years — was spent with his mother and his grandmother on a large country estate. Then an aunt replaced his mother, who returned to Vienna. This aunt was to kill herself at 93, unable to face the further “decompositions and humiliations” of age. She inspired his next film.

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