Did you always expect to succeed in the various guises that you have, or are you surprised by your success?

"I was surprised that it took the world so long to respond well. It's weird 'cos I'm doing the exact, the same things, with the same sensibility and the same aesthetic, that I've been doing for twenty years. It just seems that it's a better time to become a member of the popular club than it was then."

For just about the first time ever, Buffalo '66 will be premiered in Manchester, before its release in the UK. Have you ever been to the north of England before?

"Yes, I was in London in 1978 hanging out in the kind of rock scene, the punk scene, cos I was in a band at the time. And I was staying in a very awful Bed and Breakfast. There were boys and girls staying there and I met this girl, this British girl from Manchester and instead of going back to the States I stayed an extra 4 days with her at her house in Manchester. The guys are big there, you know. They're fuckin' big in Manchester they've got big necks and big heads. They all look like they play rugby."

What was the band called?

"At the time that band was called 'I'll Wear You', but it became the band with Jean Michel Basquiat."

So do you have an impression of the North of England...other than people with big heads?

"I just remember everybody seemed big there. Cool you know, like the kind of Brits from some sixties film."

In an interview you did recently when they were talking about you being an artist, you replied that you were a hustler. Is this still how you'd describe yourself?

"Well you know, the mags in America have a bunch of errr...uninteresting managing editors and journalists, so to try to speak about sophisticated, or subtle, or conceptual ideas; or to try to be funny in any sophisticated way is rather regressive and unpleasant. I was trying to explain something that when translated into the written word like that, became boring. What I meant to say was that I don't identify myself as an artist in that way, like a preconceived concept of what it means to be an artist. That's what a bunch of TV actors who finally get a movie job like to think of themselves. I've done so many different things. I've done a million different things for money. I've done a million things to have impact into culture. I've done a million things for love and approval and social status. So when I said 'I hustle' I was trying to describe the basic premise of what motivates me to do all these different things, and it's certainly not poetic and anybody who tells you that it is for themselves is full of shit."

You once quoted your father as saying to you as a child that you were nothing but a bum. And that you would always be a bum. Is part of your motivation to succeed a need to prove him wrong?

"Well, it begins with that. One begins one's adult life trying to conquer the voices and the demons and the hangups of one's childhood emotional life. At a certain point for me, I became actually interested in what I was doing to take this revenge. I became more interested in the activity and the result and the objects I was making out of these motivations so I became more preoccupied with what I was doing than what he was thinking and that happened gradually. At about the age of 30 I was finally more preoccupied with my work than with what my father thought of my work. At this point I have very little interest in proving him wrong, I am more interested in the work."

Did you, or do you have any heroes? Any people who you look up to in your life?

"Chris Squire the bass player from Yes is really my only hero. Although there's a guy, a guitar player called John Frusciante, who used to play in the Chili Peppers, I think he's back in the band now. He's the only young person that I like."

You were born in Buffalo. What was it like to grow up there? What sort of place is it?

"It's miserable. It's a failed city living in a delusion of grandeur. It's a regressive unambitious fat ass city with a bunch of real pricks who are controlling things like the newspaper and things like that. Some people are very charming there, and I've banged a lot of cute girls there, but I would say that it's an unpleasant place and it certainly has had impact into my personality hangups and my personality struggles."

When and why did you move to New York City?

"I moved to New York City for a very simple reason. In a city like New York City I could find friends who thought I was okay. I could find girls who thought I was handsome. I could find audiences that responded to my work. Just really basic things. Why would you live in America in the late seventies, in the new world, in what was the most interesting country during that period of time and not want to be in the most interesting city? When, when you're sixteen, seventeen, eighteen years old, would you live anywhere else? The world is different now. If I was sixteen now, I don't know exactly where that city would be, probably not New York, but at the time it was obvious and anyone who didn't get it was out of touch."

Were you a creative person from an early age or did you grow into it?

"This relates back to this idea of me being a hustler. To get what I wanted, or to do the things that I wanted to do, or to have impact, I had to be very clever and part of being very clever requires a kind of creative language so I was always willing to do it that way. But I've also done it in other ways; through revenge; through violence; through salesmanship; through hard work; through building; through working with my hands. I'm not a young poet. I'm a working person."

What medium do you prefer to use to transmit your ideas?

"The things that I find pleasurable are eating, driving my car and chicks, kissing you know. Everything else to me is just a job. So I don't really think of it like that. It's just a job. Okay if you're a homeowner, you got to do a little gardening, you gotta wash the dishes, you gotta cook and you gotta fix the broken car. Which one do you like the most? I don't know. I like being a homeowner. You understand?"

Was becoming famous always what you needed or wanted, or was that itself just a job?

"When I say it's just a job I don't mean it in a bad way. Try to give the reader, who is not listening to me talk, an idea of what that means. I am not ungrateful for my success and I am not ungrateful to be able to live my life as a creative person as my occupation. What I mean to say though is I don't want to think of it in such a pretentious way or self centered way. When you ask me what do I enjoy the most, the pleasure that I get is in the impact, not the specific activity. The pleasure is in the result, not so much in the process. The process is just unconscious. I'm preoccupied with the result. So the process, I don't notice it as much. I don't sit there on set directing a movie saying to myself 'wow man this is just great'. It's not like that. I'm still thinking about the film, just about the film and trying to control as many things as possible. I have the most pleasure when I'm working, when I'm in the most control, when I don't have other people's egos or other obstacles distracting me. I'm very controlling and that's where I find the most pleasure when I have people who trust me working with me."

You used Curtis Clayton to edit Buffalo '66, famous for his editing on 'Drugstore Cowboy' and 'My Own Private Idaho'. Is it true that you had to convince him to do the project?

"Yeah. Yeah, because he was thinking that he was going to do one of two things. Either he was going to edit Gus Van Sant's 'Good Will Hunting', or he was going to direct his own film and I tried to explain to him that Gus Van Sant had become a mainstream faggot and 'Good Will Hunting', because I knew Matt Damon and Ben Affleck and I knew the script would be a mainstream piece of shit. I also explained to him that it was unlikely that he would get funding for his film in the brief period that I needed him to work, and that he should continue to do what he does so well, on one more film."

Why were you so convinced it had to be him? Did you talk to anybody else about the project?

"No, I refused to talk to anybody else. I refused to hire an editor. I had finished my movie and was wrapped for 3 months and still had no editor because I was still convinced that I needed to persuade Curtis Clayton to edit for me. I mean I knew the same way I knew who my gaffer had to be. My gaffer and my editor were very important to me and that was it. As my collaboration people, those were the two people that I knew I had to work with. Everybody else was rigorously hired, I thought about it a lot, but those were the people that I knew were irreplaceable."

You also had some big name actors in the film such as Mickey Rourke and Christina Ricci....?

"Christina got big after, she was not so big at that time. She maybe was eating well so she was a little chunky but she wasn't big publicly."

Mickey Rourke then, he is a big name, was he someone you already knew?

"I think Mickey initially did the film for the money, because I paid him out of my own money. I think after, Mickey and I have become very close friends and he was a very fine actor and a very professional person, but we met in a very professional way, not in a personal way."