On a dreary, overcast Saturday morning in London, the sedate atmosphere of a Leicester Square hotel is shattered by the arrival of Roberto Benigni. The irrepressibly exuberant Italian actor, writer and director is on vintage, motor-mouth form, bubbling with enthusiasm and spouting a torrent of conversation in heavily-accented English, only rarely calling upon the assistance of the translator who sits serenely opposite us.
A remarkably physical performer on screen, Benigni is highly demonstrative in person, his arms flailing through the air to embellish the ideas he is expressing. He is so tactile that he keeps moving closer to me on the couch in his suite, to the point where I expect him to end up on my lap.
He's never been to Ireland, but that doesn't prevent him from immediately bursting into a rhapsody of praise for the country. "I like Ireland very, very much," he says. "I read a book which explains everything about Ireland - The Third Policeman. Flann O'Brien is a wonderful writer.
"I would love to make a movie about it. Because it's fantastic, and very violent and poetical. I tried to buy the film rights, but they have been sold to somebody else. And James Joyce. You know he's half-Italian because he lived in Trieste and he wrote in Italian."
Benigni almost falls off the couch in exaggerated astonishment when I tell him that James Joyce managed the first commercial cinema in Ireland (the Volta on Mary Street in Dublin, back in 1909). "No!" he exclaims. "You are pulling my leg? Really? This is wonderful news."
Finally, I begin to get in a question, raising the subject of his new movie, La Vita e Bella (Life is Beautiful). "Ah," he interrupts. "Ah, from Joyce to Benigni. I feel so humble!"
A formidable contender for Oscar nominations in Los Angeles next Tuesday, his film already has won a raft of awards, principally the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes last May. When the award was announced by the jury president, Martin Scorsese, Benigni responded with characteristic flamboyance by throwing himself prostrate on the stage and elaborately miming the kissing of Scorsese's feet.
The first half of La Vita e Bella is set is 1939 in the Tuscan town of Arezzo where the ingenuous and seriously accident-prone Guido Orefice (played by Benigni) arrives with a poet-upholsterer friend and the dream of opening a bookshop. Benigni's wife and regular co-star, Nicoletta Braschi, plays the schoolteacher for whom he falls - when he crashes into her on his bike, landing on top of her on the street.
The slapstick comedy which permeates the movie's first half is expertly executed and with played with terrific panache by Benigni. As background to all this humour are ominous signs of the growth of anti-Semitism as the second World War breaks out, and the film's second half is set five years later when Guido, who is Jewish, is sent to a concentration camp with his young son.
The humour of the second half resides in Guido's elaborate attempts to save his son from the gas chambers and to shield him from the reality of their plight by pretending that it's all a game with a prize at the end. Although the abrupt switch in tone and mood never quite gels, the movie remains a tour de force for Benigni's physical style of comedy and his keen sense of the absurd.
Benigni worked closely with the Centre for Contemporary Jewish Documentation in Milan while he was preparing and making the film. However, daring to raise humour in a concentration camp setting, the film has, inevitably, been the subject of controversy, with some critics complaining that it doesn't show enough of the suffering and wondering if nothing is scared when it comes to comedy.
"I think almost everything is sacred," Benigni replies, "but we can joke about it a little. Of course, it's an oxymoron to think of an extermination camp in terms of jokes. But the Bible says there is a moment to laugh and a moment to cry.
"But to answer your first question about not showing enough suffering. Everyone has their own view of what a movie should do and what it should show. It's the same with me. Even with my own movies I often feel like I would like to remake them."
Directors, too, have different styles, he says, and his style is not to depict certain things explicitly. "I am not Spielberg or Scorsese - they are brilliant at showing violence. I think that in La Vita e Bella I am evoking the atmosphere rather than showing it. Like Edgar Allen Poe said, it's better not to watch the bottom of the abyss but just to imagine it. Otherwise, what do you show?
"I am a director who's not able to show torture or skeletons. It's not my style. Spielberg can do it, but for me the way to respect the Holocaust is to stay very far away. So this is a kind of fable evoking what happened, this revolting side of humanity. I wanted to show the horror in a different way.
"And I am a comedian. Like St Francis is the clown of God. He was using humour in a very poetic way, even when people were dying in his arms. He was telling them some jokes, smiling to the dying."
Benigni's risk-taking approach to the sensitive subject matter of La Vita e Bella made the organisers of the Jerusalem Film Festival wary of showing it last year, but the film was warmly received by the audience and Benigni was made a freeman of the city, leaving both the organisers and Benigni himself greatly relieved and feeling vindicated for the risks taken.
Benigni is correct to state that he has made the movie in his own, distinctive style. La Vita e Bella has much in common with his hilarious earlier farces, Johnny Stecchino and The Monster. Like the new film, both of those movies were rooted in brilliantly judged Chaplinesque comedy and their humour derived from elaborate misunderstandings and misassumptions - in Johnny Stecchino Benigni played a mild-mannered bus driver who looks identical to a wanted Italian mobster; in The Monster he was another ordinary guy, this time mistaken for a serial killer.
"The Monster was about a very dark and violent subject," he says. "But the style was a comedy. La Vita e Bella is not a comedy. It's a tragedy - a tragical movie with a comedic soul."
A welcome spin-off from the huge international success of Benigni's latest film would be the acquisition of his brilliant earlier work for distribution here and in Britain where audiences have been starved of opportunities to enjoy their side-splitting set-ups.
As it happens, Benigni is more familiar to Irish audiences from his work as an actor for other directors - Down By Law and Night On Earth for Jim Jarmusch, La Voce Della Luna (The Voice of the Moon) for Federico Fellini, and Faraway, So Close! for Wim Wenders. The few who saw his only Hollywood movie, the dire 1993 Son of the Pink Panther, most likely have forgotten it already; its feeble, unfunny screenplay did no favours for Benigni who was perfectly cast as the inept, illegitimate son of Inspector Clouseau.
Nevertheless, he does not rule out another Hollywood picture, and there certainly should be no shortage of offers coming his way as the critical, commercial and Oscars momentum builds for La Vita e Bella in the US. "Of course I would do another movie there," he says. "Making a movie in Hollywood is like making a pizza in Naples."
Benigni most recently has been co-starring with Gerard Depardieu in a major new movie based on the Asterix cartoon series. "I play Detritus," Benigni says. "He's a charming character - a lair, a coward, a betrayer, a piece of poo-poo. Depardieu is such a generous man as an actor. We immediately clicked together. He's worked in Italy a lot and he speaks some Italian. I want us to work together again, we loved each other so much.
"Depardieu is a very natural actor, you know. He doesn't prepare, but he's very instinctive. He could be there one minute talking to me about sex, talking about making love, and then the director calls `Action!' and suddenly he's someone else."
Given that Benigni immerses himself so deeply in his personal projects, - writing, directing and starring in them - he is unusually open to working for other directors. "It's always much easier that way," he says, "even though comedy is the hardest thing to do. I made The Little Devil with Walter Matthau and he told me about an American comedic actor who's very well-known - except, forgive me, I forget his name right now. This actor was dying and Walter went to visit him and the last thing he said to Walter was, `Dying, it's so hard, it's as hard as comedy'."
La Vita e Bella opens in the Screen at D'Olier Street, Dublin on Friday