"My staff and I work harder than any other staff in the business," insists the veteran producer, who turned 72 last month. "We take great gambles with the subject of our productions and in the way in which we produce. But, while we're extremely radical in subject matter and technique, we're extremely conservative fiscally." 

'Conservative' is something of an understatement. The Terror (1962), starring Boris Karloff, is rumoured to have been shot in two days, using standing sets, stock shots and out-takes from The Raven, which had finished two days ahead of schedule. The contracts were still running: silly to waste them. 

Indeed, reusing sets was one of the keys to the success of Corman's crowning glory, the colour-saturated Edgar Allen Poe series shot between 1960 (The House of Usher) and 1964 (The Tomb of Ligeia), with Vincent Price as the star and Daniel Haller as art director. One of its defining features was an inevitable Big Staircase descending into the cellar. For my money, The Haunted Palace has the Big Staircase to end them all. 

"In The Raven," Corman recalls, "Vincent says to Peter [Lorre], 'My wife is buried in the cellar below'. We played it as a comedy/horror film, so Peter says, 'Where else?', because there was a staircase down into the cellar in every film and, with each film, it got a little bit bigger. We would take the sets from the previous film, or at least the flats. We had the budget for the new film and the budget for the old one. So each film increased in size." 

But, although the Poe adaptations are the apex of Corman's career as a director, it is as a producer that he is being honoured. And, as a producer, he has an unrivalled track-record for giving a first chance to young directors: Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Jonathan Demme, Peter Bogdanovich, Irvin Kershner, Paul Bartel and Monte Hellman all made their first films for Corman. Nor was it just directors he encouraged. John Sayles' first screenplay, Piranha, was written for Corman. One of Nic Roeg's first full DOP credits was on Corman's The Masque of the Red Death (1964), which is one of the five films being screened here as part of the tribute. 

Coppola's first film, a low-budget horror flick about an axe-murderer called Dementia 13 and shot in Ireland, came about because Corman was in Europe, shooting The Young Racers (which starred another stalwart of the indie scene, Mark Damon). As Corman remembers it, here's how it all happened. 

"Francis was very good with his hands, and he and our key grip had rebuilt a Volkswagen microbus into a van with compartments and racks inside, so it actually became a travelling mini-studio. That's standard technique now but, to my knowledge, that was the first time it had been done. 

"I had the best staff I've ever had on that picture: Francis was my number one assistant, Menahem Golan was number two and Robert Towne was number three. We were travelling around, just driving this bus and a couple of cars from race to race. I had to go back to America to do a film and I thought, 'I've got the bus, I've got the equipment, everybody's over here, so we can shoot another picture very quickly'. 

"We were finished at the English Grand Prix in Liverpool, but I knew we couldn't stay in England because of the labour laws, according to which we were just there to shoot a documentary about the race. So we were pushing what we were doing even then. But I knew you could shoot in Ireland, no problem. So I offered [a film] to both Menahem and Francis. They both did treatments. For Francis', we just had to put the bus on the ferry and in a few hours we would be across the Irish Sea. Menahem came up with some idea about putting the bus on a ferry and taking it to Tel Aviv, which didn't make total sense. Also, Francis' treatment was a little better." 

Corman stopped directing films after The Red Baron (aka Von Richthofen and Brown) in 1971. "I'd made over 50 pictures in 15 years, and I barely finished Von Richthofen and Brown, I was so tired," he says. He did direct one other film (Frankenstein Unbound in 1990), but has spent most of the past two decades as a production-company head, first with New World (which he sold for $17 million in 1983), then with Concorde/New Horizons. But is it still true that, as the title of his 1990 autobiography claims, he 'Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime'? 

"That title was never true," chuckles Corman. "I did mention this to the publisher, and he said, 'Well, has every title of every movie you've ever made accurately reflected what was in the picture'? I said, 'Call the book anything you like'. 

"I've made over 400 pictures in Hollywood and I've lost at least 20 times out of the 400."