'There is as much evil in us as there is good'

When people first meet the film director Michael Haneke, they generally expect him to be dark, edgy and more than a little bit weird. Perhaps they are mindful of the scene in Haneke's 1992 film Benny's Video, in which the blank-eyed teenage protagonist shoots dead a schoolgirl with a stun gun. Perhaps they are thinking of Funny Games (1997), in which two young men beat to death a dog with a golf club before subjecting a bourgeois Austrian family to sadistic violence. Or perhaps they remember the French actress Isabelle Huppert mutilating herself with a razor blade in The Piano Teacher.

Whatever the reason, it seems natural enough that most people imagine Haneke will be a scowling mass of repressed emotions. Which is why it comes as something of a surprise to walk into the Munich hotel room where our interview is scheduled to find him giggling. Although he is dressed entirely in black, the Gothic effect is somewhat undermined by his candyfloss white beard and hair. I confess that, having seen most of his films, I had imagined someone a touch more forbidding. He nods his head affably. "Of course," Haneke says, eyes twinkling as he chews. "I'm a very bad person."

Over the past two decades, since the release of his first feature film, The Seventh Continent, in 1989, the 67-year-old Haneke has built up a reputation as one of the most uncompromisingly bleak filmmakers of modern times. His work deals repeatedly with themes of social alienation and the deadening effect of mass media on human empathy and impulse. He attacks the comfort we take in bourgeois certitudes by forcing his characters to make extreme, discomfiting choices.

"There is just as much evil in all of us as there is good," Haneke says. "We're all continuously guilty, even if we're not doing it intentionally to be evil. Here we are sitting in luxury hotels, living it up on the backs of others in the Third World. We all have a guilty conscience but we do very little about it." These are not the sort of subjects that traditionally have audiences stampeding to the box office but Haneke makes no effort to disguise his contempt for the mainstream and its sanitised, neatly-packaged depictions of glossed-up violence. For him, violence must always be shown as it is, in all its vicious detail. "The truth is obscene," he says with the shrug-shouldered nonchalance of a man ordering a cappuccino.

Born in Munich, Haneke has lived in Austria all his life and has a distinctly European artistic sensibility. American cinema is dismissed with a wave of the hand as "cultural imperialism". How so? "I hate films that try to make me more stupid than I am and there are a lot. But I must admit I don't go that often to the cinema. In the 1960s and 1970s, I went almost every day but not anymore."

So it is perhaps ironic that in recent years Haneke has experienced considerable success in the mainstream he so dislikes. In 2005, he had a worldwide hit with Hidden, starring Juliette Binoche and Daniel Auteuil as Parisian intellectuals terrorised by a series of unexplained videotapes left for them by an anonymous stalker. Hidden won a clutch of awards, including best director, at Cannes.

But Haneke's most recent work looks set to become his most acclaimed yet. The White Ribbon won the Palme d'Or at Cannes this year and tells the story of a German village on the eve of the First World War beset by sporadic outbreaks of unexplained violence. Shot in black and white, with no musical soundtrack and no easy resolution, it is in many ways classic Haneke in its refusal to make concessions to the viewer. Again, his focus seems to be the dangerous nature of conventional social structures: Much of the action centres on children who have antagonistic relationships with authority figures, whether it be the priest who rules over the church, the baron who rules over the village or the parents who rule over their families. Critics have theorised that Haneke is attempting to explain the genesis of Nazi Germany — the children who carry out acts of random cruelty will grow up to be the generation that spawned the barbarism of the Holocaust. "It's not a coincidence that I chose this period to present the story," Haneke says. "This is the Nazi generation but I didn't want the film to be reduced to this example. I could do a film about modern-day Iran and ask the same question: How does fanaticism start?

"That's the core of the film. In places where people are suffering, they become very receptive to ideology because they're looking for something to clutch, a straw that will take them out of that misery." Does ideological belief remove the need to ask questions? "Of course. The less intelligent I am, the more easily I follow someone who is going to give me the answers."

It is partly for this reason, one assumes, that Haneke's work never offers one simple answer where several complicated enigmas will do. As a director, he believes firmly that a film should pose more problems than it solves; his ideal viewer is "one who leaves with questions".

In the past, Haneke's absolute belief in authenticity — in showing life as it really is, with all its messy contradictions and brutal awfulness — has led to criticism that his work glamorises violence as a necessary rebellion against stifling social convention. Does he worry about the impact this might have on an impressionable audience? He rolls his eyes. "You'll see more violence in any television crime series than you will in my films. Art is there to have a stimulating effect, if it earns its name. You have to be honest, that's the only thing."

In spite of the fact that most of the children in Haneke films have fairly monstrous home lives, he insists he had a happy childhood. His parents, Beatrix von Degenschild and Fritz Haneke, were actors who met while entertaining the troops during the Second World War: Haneke was born in 1942 while they were on tour near Munich. His father walked out before Haneke was 3, settling in Germany, while his son was raised in Austria. It was only as adults that they got to know each other but Haneke remains remarkably sanguine about being abandoned: "My father and I had a good relationship, it was very relaxed. He had a lot of humour. He looked a little bit like me."

He recalls being fascinated by cinema as a child. His earliest memory of film is being taken by his grandmother to see Laurence Olivier in Hamlet at the age of 4. "She said afterwards that I had to leave after three minutes because I was terribly afraid of the music."

A year later, he was sent by his mother and stepfather to Denmark on a postwar exchange programme for young children. Haneke was away for three months and was miserable but the highlight was a trip to a Copenhagen cinema. "We saw something set in Africa with camels and palm trees and I was so enthralled by this film that when it was over, we went outside into the cold, rainy snow of a Copenhagen evening, I couldn't understand how we could get that quickly back from Africa to Copenhagen."

He ended up studying philosophy and psychology at the University of Vienna and then joined a German television station where he spent the next 18 years directing programmes before making his first feature film at the age of 47. Much of Haneke's film work seems to have been conceived as an antidote to what he believes is the debilitating immediacy of television. "We're used, from TV, to scenes giving immediate information, so that the viewer thinks ‘I've seen it. I understand it. Next,' and you never really get to the point of having a particular sensitivity to the situation." Haneke, by contrast, is unafraid of the lingering shot; of the camera that stays steadily focused on a door that has just closed or a building that has just been entered. "If you want to move someone, then you have to play with their visual habits, with what they're used to seeing."

When our time is over, Haneke gets up from his chair with a bounce and shakes my hand. "Thank you, that was fun," he says, walking across the room and disappearing rapidly behind a mirrored door like a black-suited magician.

Haneke's hits

In what he described as his only piece of agit-prop filmmaking, Haneke confronts audience voyeurism with a brutally violent film about a family held hostage in their own home. To win a bet with their sadist captors and the cinema audience for their survival the family engages in horrifically violent games. Originally made in German, Haneke remade the film shot for shot in English with Tim Roth and Naomi Watts in 2008.

In a further exploration of themes of alienation and voyeurism, Haneke portrays the sadomasochistic relationship between repressed piano teacher Erika Kohut (Isabelle Huppert) and her pupil Walter (Benoit Magimel). Both actors won awards at Cannes and the film won the prestigious Grand Prix.

Using long, unbroken shots and an episodic narrative, Haneke explores themes of nationality, politics, culpability and family through the lives of five apparently disparate Parisians. Initiated by an approach from Juliette Binoche, this was Haneke's first French-language film.

A characteristically tense thriller in which the lives of successful literary couple Georges and Anne Laurent are destroyed by guilt, doubt and mistrust when a mysterious surveillance tape is delivered to their front door. Juliette Binoche and co-star Daniel Auteuil both won best performance awards at Cannes where Haneke also won best director.