Haneke a master of unease

Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche play a couple under surveillance in Hidden.

When director Michael Haneke won the best director prize for Hidden at the last Cannes Film Festival, he commented that it was the attention, and not the award, that was the important thing.

This was already the most talked about competition film among critics, and the spotlight of a major prize meant Hidden could no longer remain so.

Since Cannes, Hidden has been showered with awards. International distributors have come flocking.

"That doesn't mean it'll be on the same footing as Star Wars," said Haneke in a rare moment of humour. But in art-house terms, the release of a Haneke film is becoming as much of an event as the conclusion of George Lucas's space opera.

Haneke is level-headed about the film's success.

"The more important the prize, then the better the conditions you have for your next film," he shrugs, when we meet in Paris.

With Hidden the Austrian's ninth feature film (his fourth in French), in the pantheon of European auteurs he must now be ranked alongside Pedro Almodovar and Lars von Trier as one of the most provocative yet consistent directors working today.

While he has the ability to disconcert with images of violence, he inspires loyalty from his actors, with the likes of Juliette Binoche and Isabelle Huppert repeatedly working with him.

While his last film, 2003's Time of the Wolf, left most people blinking in the dark, its predecessor, The Piano Teacher, won the grand jury prize in Cannes.

The story of the eponymous Vienna virtuoso with a penchant for extreme sexual practices, it was the classic example of a film by Haneke, who likes nothing better than forcing his audience to feel as much pain as his protagonists.

"I think it's with extremes that you can best deal with normality," he argues.

"I'm not a naturalistic film-maker. I take these realities, exaggerate them and take them to extremes. That's the best way of depicting the normal insanity of our lives."

Shot on high-definition video, to affect an unreal look, Hidden begins with a long, static take of a suburban home that belongs to a bourgeois Parisian couple (Daniel Auteuil, Binoche).

It's only after the credits have played out and the screen hits "pause", that we realise this is not "reality" but a videotaped recording sent anonymously to the couple to indicate that they are under surveillance.

"I'm always attempting in my works to shake up the confidence the viewer has in what he's seeing," says Haneke.

"The more you shake it up, the more you disturb that sense of trust and confidence he has in what he's seeing, then the less capable the viewer will be of being manipulated by the images he is seeing."

Ostensibly a mystery thriller, the film follows Auteuil's TV show host, Georges, as his attempts to find out who is watching his family lead him back to an act of cruelty from his childhood.

Haneke says he wanted to make a film about guilt, specifically about an adult forced to confront the actions of his youth.

But, with the film referencing the 1961 Parisian massacre of Algerian immigrants - when French police gunned down as many as 400 protesting against a government curfew - Haneke widens the scope of the story beyond the personal.

Inspired by a documentary which "shocked" him, he nevertheless does not want his feelings towards the massacre to be the focus.

"The film could take place in any country, and every country has these dark corners where collective guilt corresponds to a sense of personal guilt in terms of each of us," he says.

With the release in France just a few weeks before November's riots, Hidden uncannily foretold the country's worst unrest in 30 years.

Immigration is evidently a subject he feels passionate about. "We're all afraid of sharing and that leads to the very restrictive immigration laws we have everywhere."

Speaking through a translator (though he evidently is able to understand English) Haneke makes for a truculent interviewee. With his ability to make you feel as if your questions are beneath him, one has to feel for the students he teaches in his role as professor of directing at the Vienna Film Academy. "It's true that I have an analytic gaze, but it's also mixed with compassion," he argues.

Raised in Austria, he studied psychology, philosophy and theatrical sciences at the University of Vienna, all of which lends him and his work a scholarly and detached air.

Yet, as the son of the director and actor Fritz Haneke and the actress Beatrix von Degenschild, Haneke had a background that was as much in the arts as anything else. He began his career by writing scripts for German television in the late 1960s before branching out as a director of television and stage.

It wasn't until 1989 that he directed his first feature film, The Seventh Continent, but Haneke has watched his reputation grow steadily since.

And as he prepares to direct his next film, a three-hour epic about Nazi youth, it appears his ability to hold a mirror up to contemporary European society has become unparalleled. Independent

* Hidden opens on April 6.