THEY live by night, the people in Abel Ferrara's films - the mobsters, maniacs, bad cops and philosophising vampires. It is a fair bet that the director himself lives mostly by night too, if his performance by day is anything to go by. In London in November he shambles into the room in the middle of the afternoon suffering from what you can only hope is an extreme case of jet lag.
"There's 24 hours in each day," he says. "I dunno why everybody gets hung up about nine to five, tripping over each other `cause they're afraid to stay up late."
But Ferrara is pretty much tripping over himself. He looks fit to drop, a bony frame hunched up in what may once have been an expensive jacket. He could be Piltdown Man's bohemian brother - wiry grey curls on a big jawed skull, the sort of face you see in films by Pasolini, his favourite director. He lowers himself into a chair, talking in a thick Bronx growl punctuated with yawns and sniffs. Every now and then, the eyes close, the head tolls and, to all intents and purposes, Mr Ferrara has left the building.
From his notorious essay in gore terrorism, The Driller Killer, through the Dostoevskian extremities of Bad Lieutenant, to his latest output, Ferrara has concentrated on a dark side of life farther out than even the most committed noir aesthetic will take you. His two latest films are his New York vampire story The Addiction, and The Funeral, about a family of 1930s mobsters.
Born in the Bronx in 1952, Ferrara says The Funeral is about the people he grew up among. "It's basically a folk tale about our relatives. These guys are no big time Mafiosi. Chez (played by Chris Penn) wanted to be a bartender. That's all he wanted to do - own a bar and sing. He wanted to be Dean Martin, y'know what I'm sayin'?" Ferrara is looking forward to seeing the new mob movie Donnie Brasco, because he knows the real life mobster that Al Pacino's character is based on "a fun lovin' guy".
From the Bronx, Fcrrara's family moved upstate to a district called Peekskill. There he attended high school with Nicholas St John, who went on to write several Ferrara films, including this latest pair. They started making films together on 8mm, and carried on into the 1970s, when they made their first feature, Nine Lives.
But the film officially listed as Ferrara's debut is The Driller Killer, a no budget nightmare of urban DIY gone too far. It became one of the best known titles to be banned in Britain at the height of the early 1980s "video nasties" scare, and established Ferrara's name here as synonymous with Beelzebub's - partly because he himself played the lead.
"We were young and wild, man. It was the punk age. I didn't seem that more wild than Sid Vicious. It's a documentary about a friend of mine, a great oil painter who had anger in him. You know what oil painters tend to be, cutting off their ears and that kind of thing."
Even without Ferrara acting, his best films suggest the blind of a director as driven as his characters. "I have to film where I'm at," he says, "or else the films mean nothing." He has made films about drugs, vampirism, slaughter, but Dangewus Game with Harvey Keitel as a film director, suggested that movie making was as extreme as any of these topics. "More so! Heh! Because it's like any gig that you're gonna take to that level, that's gonna determine how you live or die. It's not a game to us."
Ferrara has done mainstream work, like episodes of Miami Vice and the Elmore Leonard adaptation Cat Chaser. But the hard core Ferrara is in those films where he grapples with spiritual questions I though the result can topple over into the risible, as in The Addiction, with its philosophical name dropping.
The films are so fixated on badness you are almost bound to read them as spiritual parables. Does he believe in God? "I'm tryin' not to think of it in these terms that have been hangin' me up my `whole' life. I mean, God hasn't been defined - that's the "definition of God, right?" He pauses for a mighty yawn. "I don't know, man, I'm comin' at it in every way, shape or form. If it ends up that I become a die hard Catholic, well, so be it!" He bursts out in wheezy laughter, only a notch short of satanic.
Ferrara does not like being thought of as "some New York primitive", but more myths of hard living circulate about him than about any film maker you can name. A New York director once regaled me for, a whole evening with assorted Abel fables, none of them repeatable. Ferrara swears he doesn't know where the image originates. "They're in search of Fassbinder or Sam Peckinpah - this wild, renegade lunatic I don't particularly aspire to be."
But these films do give a sense of sailing close to the wind. In Dangerous Game, Keitel's film maker character rows with his wife about his infidelities; she is played by Ferrara's own wife, Nancy. But that is more to do with Keitel than himsell, Ferrara insists. "Once he got involved, it was more about Harvey's personal journey. Harvey's not gonna play me." Casting Nancy Ferrara was Keitel's idea.
But a director can hardly make a choice like that without being accused of looking for trouble, or encouraging the viewer to look for it. The marriage, Ferrara later tells me, "is not quite making it all the way. Nancy's from a very traditional background; I'm more or less from a hippie background."
They have two adopted daughters, aged 12 and eight, from Mother Teresa's orphanage in Calcutta. "I should send you photographs of these cowboys."
He know the interview is coming to an end when, in mid sentence, he slumps, his jaw drops and a distant snoring sound is heard. Half wondering whether to sneak out quietly or maybe call a doctor, I discreetly cough and ask whether he wants to continue the interview.
The head jerks up. "Yeah! No!" He stands up and paces around, hands deep in pockets. "To try to really answer, I mean, just to slough off these questions... You think it's easy asking questions, tryin' to figure out what to ask somebody and see if you can get an answer out of them?"
I am sitting there thinking, "Hang on, shouldn't that be my line?" when he grabs pen and paper and scrawls his phone number. "You got any more questions, call me."
Four months later I do, to bring things up to date. This time 1 a.m. in London, 7 p.m. in New York - it's me who's the worse for wear, and he's saying, "It's daylight, man! Too much commotion!" He's completed his new film, The Blackout: "It's about an actor who goes off the edge - hah! haaah! - and ends up murdering somebody. It's one of those family movies."
The Blackout is already infamous for its improbable casting of Claudia Schiffer and Dennis Hopper, whom it seems even Ferrara found hard to handle. "Hopper's cinema verite. He's tough, man, he's rough, but the guy's extraordinary, so I'll put up with it." Just as we're signing off, he says hi to someone in the background, and various canoodling sounds ensue. "Hey, my girlfriend's here," he says, chirping up. "She's a gorgeous 20 year old - ask her a few questions.
A fresh sounding voice comes on the line. She's called Amy, she directs, and they met through a common friend. She tells me she wrote in her high school yearbook that she dreamed of meeting Abel Ferrara: "And now here I am in love with this guy." They both sound very happy, and I am thinking, I hope she is used to staying up late.