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Gallo wrote, produced, directed, cast, styled, scored and edited. He says he worked 20- to 22-hour days for four solid months. He says he still hasn't recovered.

One of the scenes takes the form of a flashback to the protagonist, Billy Brown as a boy. His pet puppy has urinated on the floor, so Billy's father picks it up and strangles it. You may think this sounds melodramatic, but Gallo was born in Buffalo in 1962 and chose to premiere his film there, hosting a picnic for his extended Italian-American family in the afternoon, then shipping everyone to the theatre by limousine.

Afterwards, one of his cousins, ex-boxer Louis "Kid" Gallo, was heard to comment that if Gallo "had made that movie about my parents, I would have punched his lights out". The film wasn't autobiographical, but Billy and
Vincent had a lot in common. It's tempting to see the premiere as a kind of elaborate revenge. When people refer to him as an actor, Gallo replies that he's a hustler.

He left school and home at 16 and did all the usual stop-gap jobs, but also raced motorbikes professionally and, with no formal training, went on to become one of the most successful American painters of the 1980s. He was granted his first solo show in Manhattan at 21 and shared the same dealer as Jean-Michel Basquiat, with whom he also played in a band, Gray. Through the '90S, his wired screen presence caught the eye of many independent film-makers, and he claims to have turned down roles in Reservoir Dogs and Boogie Nights to work with the maverick likes of Abel Ferrara (The Funeral) and Emir Kusturica (Arizona Dream, with Johnny Depp).

He is openly contemptuous of the Hollywood milieu and, uniquely among movie people, speaks his mind of his peers; the collaborator who most excited him, he will tell you, was photographer Richard Avedon, with whom he made the Calvin Klein advertisement for which he is most widely recognised. Which may be why screenwriter Paul Schrader (Taxi Driver) is reported to have told his fellow jury members at the prestigious Sundance independent film festival that he wasn't even prepared to discuss Buffalo 66. "I don't like Vincent Gallo or his attitude," he is supposed to have said. Gallo still fumes when the subject is raised. He made a great film, but nobody gave him his prize. Few people can have more enemies in Los Angeles than he does.

He lives in the Hollywood Hills anyway, in a striking house designed by the modernist architect John Lautner.
He has no agent, no manager, none of the marketing apparatus that usually goes with celebrity, yet is probably the hippest actor in town. After Buffalo 66, he was predictably offered further funding for his own films and big money to direct other people's, but instead withdrew to make the nakedly beautiful album When. He hasn't drunk alcohol or done drugs since he was 14, but admits to being sexually compulsive.

He purports tobe a right wing Republican. He says his worst times were stepping out of a Parisian nightclub with a girl- friend at 17, saying, "I feel really happy" and instantly having a breakdown ("my whole life changed in that second") and now. Right now. At least one of these statements may constitute a lie. So, having got all that out of the way, it's time to get properly weird. For his next trick, they want him to play Charles Manson.

THIS MAY SEEM A STRANGE place to start on Vincent Gallo, but trust me, it is the place to start. In 1999 he published a book of photographs that had been taken of and by him. In his amusing and stylishly written introduction there is passage in which he talks in detail about his obsessive adolescent masturbation. Any man who tells you he recognises nothing of what Gallo describes is a liar. But what impressed me was the meticulousness with which he went about it. Displaying great enterprise for a 12-year-old, he planted a collection of porn magazines all over Buffalo, accompanied by little bags containing a scoop of his mother's handcream. He felt safe, he writes, "knowing I could sedate myself all over town." Yet even this doesn't tell the whole story. "You know what I would do, because my family didn't have ziplock bags, I would take sandwich bags, and I found that by heating the edges I could seal them and make little shrink-wrap bags. I spent a lot of time cutting up plastic and forming these little bags. They were good for one jerk-off. I had a fairly compulsive urge about it, so it was fairly serious, the level I went to."

We've been laughing. Now I notice he's not. "Well, you know, it was 15 jerk-offs a day. It's extreme. And as soon as I would come, I would think about it again. And I would do that with food, too. I became harder and darker about it."
He speaks with precise diction and a lot of italics. There is just the hint of a New York hipster drawl; his default expression is a mischievous grin. He talks about the time he almost killed himself by eating too much at his best mate Johnny Ramone's house, where he would go in New York to get a free meal when he was really poor. They called an " ambulance and he was revived, but refused to go to hospital. An hour later he sat up, took a few deep breaths, walked over to the kitchen and devoured a big bowl of cereal with milk. "I don't know why. Those are two things I
don't normally eat. Then I sat back down. That's how I am with work. I'm sort of like a maniac, and I can't get out of it."
The sexual obsession grew as Gallo's teenage years progressed. It became more difficult to maintain his excitement, so he started flashing. One day he was picked up by police and taken home to his hairdresser parents. According to
him, this had happened at least six times before, but always in relation to petty crimes such as shoplifting or fighting or being caught in a stolen car. The reception on this occasion was different.

"My parents were dishonest people. If it was my birthday, my mother took me to the K-Mart and
stole my toy. She'd put it in the shopping cart and we'd walk out. I was raised with that. But then I got caught in this sort of sex crime, that wasn't bringing money to the family, that was socially unacceptable, that showed signs that I was having mental problems, which would reflect on my father. So either he had to blame it on me as some sort of sick, evil mutant, or be responsible for it. Of course, they chose to think of me as naturally being sick from birth. And I knew at the moment of being caught that things would never be the same, that I would never be allowed to be happy, that I would never be allowed to be myself, that my father would finally have a way to put me down and make me believe all the shit that he tried to make me believe, that I never fell for before."

In his book he describes a subsequent occasion on which a bra advert appeared on TV and his father turned round and punched him in the face. On another, the old man broke Gallo's nose in response to a US$55 (HK$428) medical bill for treating a football injury. He had to hide his guitar under the bed because it was forbidden, and would hear his mother colluding with her clients in the salon as they bad-mouthed him. I ask him twice whether all these things are true. "They're all true. I heard my mother talking
badly of me to people who were talking badly of me in her salon. That's probably the thing I'm most sensitive of in all my friendships and relationships. I just ... I just can't take that. I'm comfortable with enemies, but I can't take it from friends."
In a way, Gallo's life is about the question of whether it's better to live with the vivid discomfort of truth, or the numb contentment of self-sedation through drugs, alcohol, delusion, rationalisation, intellectualisation, religion ... all those things that take the edge off existence and protect you from having to see yourself too clearly.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves. The house is perched on Mulholland Drive, where the movie stars live. It's shaped like a concrete and glass rain- bow and as you stand on the deck, the view over LA on this bright, warm day is stunning. Gallo has pulled up slightly late in his Jeep and trotted over to shake hands. Today's look is Soho boho: stained white T-shirt, frayed brown slacks and red trainers. His hair is long and straggling and he sports a beard that lends him a passing resemblance to one of his stated boyhood heroes, Leonardo da Vinci. Given that his other boyhood heroes are Chris Squire, the bassist with rock band Yes, and Richard Nixon, I reckon he looks okay. He's limping badly because he broke his toe, but doesn't know how. Imagining I've been waiting longer than I have, he apologises for his tardiness.

"Isn't Polly here?" he asks, opening the door and fussing over his white hound dog.
"Is this Polly?" I say.
"No, this is my dog," comes the reply. "She doesn't have a name. It seems kind of weird to give a dog a name."
I'm still wrestling with this proposition when British pop star Polly Harvey pads into view. It seems she's staying chez Gallo while preparing for an American tour, and I'm trying to imagine them as a workable couple (a match made in the very depths of hell, I decide ... though he mumbles something about being just friends) when he asks if I want anything to drink, but she chips in with, "I expect you might like a cup of tea?"

Harvey delivers tea and departs, returning about four hours later' with the words, "My God, I'd go mad if I had to talk for that I
long." Gallo can indeed talk. We settle in the big, open-plan living-kitchen area, around the simple wooden dining table that is ' Gallo's only piece of furniture. He's acerbic and entertaining, ~~ with the fierce intellect of the self-taught.

He loves to bait an audience and has one of the driest senses of humour I've ever encountered - even in a New Yorker.
I wonder why he chose to step back from film at the very moment he could have cashed in, or done whatever he wanted. '
"I didn't want to lose my subjectivity and my objectivity about my work," he says. 'I'm not looking for a career. And I don't need to be regarded. I'm not Harmony Korine [Gummo] or Paul Anderson [Boogie Nights] or Darren Aronofsky [Pi, Requiem For A Dream], who are already working on their chapter in the history of film books. I have the capacity to do lots of different things. I don't feel that I need to repeat myself like that." Besides, he goes on to explain, the economics of a million dollar offer to direct someone else's movie - which he has received - are not what they seem. By the time you've paid tax and spread it over the two years you'll be consumed by it, you're on about $200,000 a year ... and Gallo can earn that from an ad or photo campaign, which he'll probably also enjoy more.

"The whole crew in a movie is, in general, lame and out of touch. There's no connection with culture and aesthetic sensibility and art. And the only difference in Europe is that you find more people in the crew who actually like movies. I mean, do you think Johnny Depp is interesting? He's not. He might be friends with Iggy Pop now, but do you think he bought the first Stooges ~ album? To me, fashion advertising is more radical, contemporary and innovative than independent cinema. A Calvin Klein ad is more visually inspiring than nearly every movie poster I've seen in the last 20 years. Everybody on the ad I did was more interesting than anybody I had worked with in cinema, everybody. By 10 times. I decided there and then that if I ever made a movie I'd fill" the crew with fashion people, which is what I did." Is it the ruthless ambition of Hollywood people that he objects to? "Ambition's okay if it relates to the work. But most Hollywood people's ambitions are to do with what they get from the work. I think I'm good at collaborating, but what I don't do well is collaborate with people who have no real passion about' what they do. Film people are suspicious of me. You would think they'd respond well to my honesty and directness, but on the whole they're threatened by it." His love-hate list springs surprises though. He hates Tim Roth, hated his time with Kiefer Sutherland and the hip director Kusturica, but adored working with Meryl Streep on the cruddy House of the Spirits ("she was the nicest lady I ever met in my life").

He thinks Robert de Niro, with whom he appeared in Goodfellas, should be embarrassed by the monsters he's spawned; On Buffalo 66, Anjelica Huston was reportedly a nightmare, and Christina Rica spat, "You've ruined my life!" when he dyed her" hair blonde and transformed her from a Hollywood brat into a grown-up actress ... even though she kept the look for her next 'i" film. He grows impatient when people demand to know how he -,,", persuaded such big stars to be in his movie, blustering to a previous interrogator: "AnjelicaHouston got $300,000 for three days in my film ... I paid them you asshole." For the record, the total budget for Buffalo 66, shot in a month, was $1.5m, and Gallo claims he lost $160,000 of his own money on the film because the financiers knew how much he wanted to do it and cut him a harsh deal.

So how did he afford this house? He explains he bought it five years ago, at the lowest point in a low market, and caught the seller in some undisclosed naughtiness, thereby obtaining a further discount (how delightfully Galloesque). According to him he paid for all of it, plus the collection of vintage guitars and recording equipment with which he recorded his album, with "labour money" earned in restaurants and on demolition and construction jobs. He also bought and sold rare instruments and took his badly paid acting gigs.

NEXT MORNING at about loam. Gallo is wearing the same clothes and says he's been up all night working on various things. He feeds the dog, saying, "She never goes without food, even though I haven't eaten. I don't have a good lifestyle, don't look after myself."

We spend a long time talking about politics - an intelligent person who considers George Bush might be a good president is a curiosity to me. The conversation comes a few weeks after the horrific events in New York and Washington, and Gallo argues his right-wing economic case cogently. Towards the end of the debate he says: "If you think of adults as victims, even for a second, you open a door you really don't want to open. And the worst part about opening that door is that it's the most destructive door to open for the people you're trying to help. Out of context, all this can sound harsh, but I'm not like that. I can't bear to see pain in anyone, or anything, though I do all the time, because I'm not prepared to cut myself off from it. I'm just very conceptual in all ways. If you really believe in principles, if you focus on them more than personalities, it's less dangerous."

I tell him I think he's an idealist and that idealism is a means of avoiding the need to think and feel afresh when faced with the chaos of actual people in an actual world. He wants it to be understandable and controllable because he can't face the idea that it's not. He smiles broadly.

"I told you, I'm an extremist. Even in art, if my work wasn't 50 times more interesting than me and my petty life, it would be useless."

We move on to the album, which reminds me of Tim Buckley, Little Jimmy Scott and Frank Sinatra. The sound Gallo makes, how- ever, is his own: slow and susurrating, with his fragile voice up close in the mix, as though whispering in your ear. Some tunes play like love songs but sound like laments, and the tension between love and desperation is captivating. The sentiments are real:

Gallo broke up with his last girlfriend, Bethany, seven months ago. They'd been together about three years, making it the longest relationship he'd ever had. He had never had a girlfriend until he was in his 3Os. "In the songs, like the two relationships I've had in my life, my intentions were beautiful, my intentions were hopeful. But I've been shot [when caught in a gang dispute], stabbed, crashed motorbikes at 160 km/h, and none of those things frightened me, gave me butterflies, regrets, doubts, made me feel bad about myself like those relationships."

I can't help chuckling; Gallo finally joins the human race. "Yeah, I know," he says. "As I was writing each song I was thinking, 'Oh, this is the sweetest song.' But I never realised until I heard them afterwards that they were filled with loss and fear. When I did the album I was in tremendous chaos because I focused too much on the technical part. I recorded for about six hours in the course of 24 months of making the record. The rest of it was trying to perfect, control these things because my relationship was falling apart. One of the knobs was a slightly different shade of black and I couldn't record until all the knobs matched. That was how I became. I'm a freak now. I'm moving towards an extremely eccentric, withdrawn sort of sick, sick mind." All this is spoken quietly but evenly.

"I'm behaving in ways that are not healthy or productive and are certainly not giving me good feelings," he adds. "I don't really have intercourse of any kind. So here I am, very much a sexual compulsive." "You're a movie star. Can't-you sedate yourself by having flings?" "Never. Never. I'll make out sometimes, try to get a hand job or something really detached. But I can't face the repulsion I get from being with someone I don't really like. I started having sex when I was 12. I'd fucked six girls and women when I was 12, and they were horrible experiences, all of them." How did you get to do that? "Cos I was a maniac. By obsessing every minute of the day.

By making myself available to the old man and his 25-year-old wife who picked me up when I was hitchhiking, by being there in the back seat of the Cadillac they were driving, being the one with whom they could live out a fantasy where he gets to watch her giving a young guy a blow job. But as soon as I would come, it would be horrible. And what's happened to me now is that that repulsion is present beforehand. I can't lie to myself any- more. I'm probably more like a woman in that way. I have to be in love to have intercourse. Which is horrible. I'm worse now than before. And in a city where there's endless opportunity. I'm a physically ugly person."

"What? Half my women friends asked if I could smuggle you out of the country for them." "Really? Maybe because they see me in this other context. Looks are not my best quality: I know what it was like before I had any public notoriety. I always got the girls I wanted, but that's because I always picked the most broken-down, disturbed ones, or they'd choose me. But they were never girls of my fancy. It's been about 12 years since I acted out sexually like that. There have been no significant sexual acts with anyone other than my two girlfriends since then, and I can't imagine making love to anyone else now. "Do you drink?" he asks me. "Yes."

You see, it's harder if you don't drink because you can't even take the edge off the repulsion. Off your conscientious mind. off your clarity." A psychologist once told me his theory of how the psychopathic mind is formed. He ascribed it to events in a subject's childhood, and the archetypal childhood he described could have been Gallo's. When I remind Gallo that he once said, "I like manipulating, it's in my nature," he exhales deeply.

"A lot of people have said that about me. But I don't do things without being aware of them. It doesn't mean I'll always be the best person I can be. But I don't become the worst person I can be without being aware of it. But I had incredible voices during the young period of my life that made it impossible for me to accept any pleasure, any freedom. I'd created a torture chamber for myself. As soon as I moved out of my father's house, where the torture chamber was run by him, I created my own. Paris was the first time it happened and that's the worst time of my life. The second is this period now. Because I thought I'd finally become a real person." "With Bethany? Do you blame yourself for the failure of that relationship?" "I blame myself for not accepting love.

I chose someone who'd play into my most reactive mind, the part of me that's most afraid of being disappointed. And I couldn't forgive that person, realise I'd chosen that person. Instead I punished her for having shortcomings. It's very odd not to be your best with the person that you like the most." Later, Gallo starts asking about my children, showing an interest unusual in single people.

He talks about the problems he has experienced in being consistent with his dog and his horror at getting it wrong sometimes - a feeling parents know well. Eventually he says: "I think the greatest thing you can do as a human being is to be a good parent. That's the most radical impact you can have with your life. The children of good parents, they spread productivity for years to come. And the most evil thing that you can contribute to mankind is destructive parenting."

THE FOLLOWING MORNING I met Gallo again. He was limping markedly less than the day before. I had also heard some colourful tales from women whose paths he has crossed. Suddenly I doubt him. Can he be real? I call to ask. He sounds a little hurt, but recovers quickly.

"No man, I don't trust anyone either. But I hate acting too much and find it too hard work to do it for free. I strapped up my toe differently yesterday so I could walk better. You can ask Polly. She's seen how swollen it is." We discuss the Charles Manson movie. In fact, he's been toying with the idea of using Manson as the basis for a film for years, but thinks the bio-pic being planned will be awful. "I mean, to turn him into a character study... it's embarrassing. What am I supposed to do, do his accent and play the 'real' Charlie? It's ridiculous. What's the point of it?"

He said he would do it for a million dollars because he liked the idea of being "The Million Dollar Manson". Instead, next year is likely to find Gallo slaving on The Brown Bunny, the successor to Buffalo 66. He has a thing about the name Brown, he tells me. Meanwhile, reliable sources say he and Harvey are in a relationship.
Can he repeat the success he had with his first effort? Whatever he does is unlikely to be bland. There are times when Gallo seems like an infantile freak, others when he seems the last genuine artist in America.