Michael Haneke discusses The White Ribbon

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.

After the war, his parents separated, then both remarried. He found himself with a Jewish stepfather. I ask him if this was of any significance. "Hard to say. I'm not sure I ever really asked myself that... You are psychoanalysing me."

I tell him one doesn't often have the chance to do that with Austrians. It's usually the other way round.

Chortle.

At the age of "five or six", he was sent to Copenhagen for a "rest cure". There, he was taken to a cinema. "The film was set in Africa, with the savanna and the animals. I was very excited about it. When it was over, the door on the left of the auditorium opened, and outside it was dark and raining, and I couldn't understand how I could have moved from Africa to Copenhagen."

He had been stricken by the power of the moving image. He was further stricken when he saw Laurence Olivier's Hamlet (1948). But the decisive early influence was, bizarrely, Tony Richardson's 1963 film of Tom Jones. It all came down to one shot: Albert Finney, as Tom, suddenly turned to the camera and addressed the audience.

"It was a moment of enlightenment, of understanding that you can reflect on the medium within the medium. We all know theoretically, when we buy a cinema ticket, that we are buying a ticket to be manipulated, but it's a different thing to feel that experience and to know it. That's what happened with the Richardson film."

This is the heart of the Haneke matter, and it is all about the Hitler disruption. It is also, crucially, why post-war European cinema diverged so radically from Hollywood. To be governed by Nazis, with their endless fairy tales about the destiny of the German Volk, was to be confronted with the power of the story to play on people's fears and aspirations. "In Germany, there was a break in realism after 1945. It happened in literature and film. In Europe, people were aware of the possibilities of manipulation through all that happened in the war. The manipu­lation of the media was such that, after the war, it had to become self-reflexive. You had to question the basis of the narration within the narrative itself, whereas in Anglo-Saxon literature and cinema, you have a relatively unbroken tradition of narration."

So, in his film Funny Games - strangely made twice: once in German, in 1997; once in English, in 2007 - two violent psychotics turn, like Finney, to the camera and comment on their own barbarity. We are being invited to collude and, thereby, fully to confront the horror. Haneke has said that his goal is to "rape" the audience into independence of thought.

Yet this "alienation effect" is all too well known from the plays of Bertolt Brecht, surely? "Yes, but the point with Brecht is that he doesn't educate his audience into independence of thought, he educates them into an ideology. The question in the case of manipulation is what you are being manipulated into - into independence of thought or an ideology?"

This is a particular issue for cinema. Because of its combination of framing, images and words, it is a medium that, more than any other, tends to restrict the freedom of - and, therefore, to manipulate - the audience.

"In painting and sculpture and music, you are outside and you observe and you have a certain kind of independence. The problem is when words come into the equation. They complicate things because words lead to concepts, and that's where the problems start. If you have a concept of an artistic work, then it's artistically dead, the concept functions like cement. But literature gives the reader greater freedom than film because the images are evoked in the head, whereas in film those images in the head are suppressed by the director's own concrete images. If film wants to be an art form, it has to give back to the audience the freedom they have in the other arts."

In 2005's Hidden, his most commercially successful film, a TV talk-show host is sent videos of himself. He is being secretly filmed, but by whom and why? His attempts to find out what is going on exactly parallel those of the audience, who are, of course, watching the whole thing on film. We are more free than the hero, but the film is generically confusing - is it a thriller or not? - and our freedom involves a costly effort of concentration. There is a solution to the puzzle in the last shot, but you may miss it - you are free to miss it. I did. Haneke tells me it doesn't matter.

"I have a friend, a doctor, who thought it was great, but who hadn't seen the two boys at the end. We put the two boys in the shade. Not seeing them was a kind of freedom for the audience - they see it from different positions, and they have a different experience." If you do see the final answer, however, surely you understand the film? "What is understanding? In a sense, nobody can understand it in the same way the director intended. Understanding takes place in our head. It's exactly the same with reality - there's not a fixed interpretation. There can be a complex one or a simple one. There isn't just one way."

In this context, the last shot of The White Ribbon is an even more masterly achievement. You just see, in a single, centred, flat shot, the villagers entering the church. Your point of view is where the altar would be. This is what there is - make of it what you will.

I put to Haneke three themes I see in his films - concealment, violence/cruelty and shame - and ask him where they come from. Somehow, we never get on to shame. "No idea. Well, in the case of violence, it's fairly straightfoward. It makes you afraid, so it's a good artistic motor. In the case of things hidden, I've not really seen it that way, but it's part of human nature not to accept things as they are, and one of the things you do is develop a sensibility for spotting these things.

"As a child, I was very much an observer. All writers have it, it's a kind of disease. They are constantly observing themselves and others. It's a disease you have or you don't."

Chortle.

The obsession with violence in the movies seems to be inevitable. Films, after all, are about movement and action. But it's how you do it. Lars von Trier aestheticises it. Tarantino adds comedy and intense stylisation. Big mainstream movies turn it into pure spectacle.

"But all these just make it consumable, unrealistic - and that's what I'm fighting against in my films. My films are made in opposition to the cinema that exists at the time. It's very difficult to show violence seriously and appropriately. The only film I know that actually achieved that is Salo, by Pasolini [a wrenching depiction of sadism]. I only saw it once, and I felt ill for two weeks afterwards. I bought it a couple of years ago on DVD and I haven't had the courage to watch it since."

The paradox of Haneke's position is that, however hard he tries to set his audience free, to impose nothing, he remains the director, the imposer-in-chief. What, I ask him, is being imposed now in this rather deadly corporate room in a London hotel?

"That you should ask that question. The question itself is what is being imposed. What I always try to do is ask questions. Giving answers is either cowardly or stupid."

Very big chortle.

The White Ribbon is released on Friday