Derek Jacobi plays controversial painter Francis Bacon in John Maybury's Un Certain Regard entrant, Love is the Devil. 

You may be as indiscreet as you want, dear boy," British painter Francis Bacon said to one of his biographers. "After all, that's what people are interested in." 

This, it later transpired, was one of those many statements the painter made which didn't turn out to be, shall we say, 100% accurate. Bit of a porky, in other words. When the time came to dish the dirt, Bacon had put away his shovel. 

Not that it mattered: the circles in which Bacon moved, notably an 'artistic' drinking establishment in Soho called The Colony Club, was not short of shovellers. Nor, for that matter, was the painter's private life short of dirt. Gay from early childhood, he liked rough trade long before it became a fashion accessory, and had a particular fondness for burning cigarette ends and belt buckles properly applied – an inclination which John Maybury's Bacon biopic, Love Is the Devil, screening in Un Certain Regard today, dutifully explores. 

What Love is the Devil does not explore, directly in any case, is Bacon's paintings. The process of painting and the fact that he was a painter, yes, obviously: these are the stuff of the film. But the paintings themselves, no. 

"It was some row with his estate which happened early on," says renowned British actor Derek Jacobi, who plays Bacon in the film. "They came round towards the end, but I think one of the stipulations was that we didn't actually show the paintings on screen. We shot a couple of mock-ups, but they weren't the real paintings. 

"And anyway," adds the actor, referring obliquely to what is sometimes referred to as the Lust for Life syndrome (after the Vincent Minnelli biopic in which Kirk Douglas knocked off a few sunflowers), "John said he never quite believed it when actors had a paint brush in their hand and pretended to be doing a Van Gogh. So, whenever I did have a brush in my hand, the canvas was off-screen." 

But, if there are no actual paintings in Love Is the Devil, whole sections of the film achieve a remarkable facsimile of that swirling, tortured mass of colour that Bacon applied to what, an art critic once told me, was an endless effort to paint the perfect mouth. 

"John wanted the whole picture of each scene to be like a Bacon painting," says Jacobi. "The whole look of the film was supposed to suggest that, rather than the audience seeing me falsely paint a picture." 

Did this, I wondered, pose problems for Jacobi as an actor?  

What was it like having to fit into a composition rather than give a performance? 

"I think there were only a few occasions when the work was really about which way you were going to be photographed, how much they could get of your face in that door handle or in that light bulb," he says. "That means you are just lending your face and your thoughts while they photograph you. But a lot of filming is like that. 

"It's one reason why I think deep, deep down, I prefer theatre. Anything in front of a camera is about photography: it's about what frame you show and what bit of you is showing at any one time. And those artistic, creative decisions are taken by the director and the editor. The actor sits in a canvas chair a lot of the day trying to maintain his concentration for those two seconds he's going to be able to work." 

Jacobi is, however, full of praise for Maybury, an avant-garde filmmaker who worked with Derek Jarman on War Requiem, but whose first solo feature this is. "To start with, he stood very much in awe of the actors," chuckles Jacobi. "He said, 'Oh, you can do it. I can write it and direct it but I couldn't begin to act it, I don't know how you do that'.  
But we soon broke him down. We soon knocked that out of him!" 

One of the most striking things about Love Is the Devil is the uncanny ressemblance between Jacobi and Bacon, at any rate on the evidence of surviving photographs and TV footage of the artist, who died in 1992. But Jacobi, it transpires, doesn't entirely take this as a compliment. 

"I was amazed at how quickly they made me look like him," he says carefully. "He wasn't the best-looking chap in the world and I think it's really the hair – the colour of the hair, which they changed, and the style of the hair. And those ugly eyes. I seem to have acquired sort of little chipmunk pouches, which I don't normally have." 

The makeover was good enough to convince surviving members of the Colony Club. "It was a difficult moment for me walking onto the set as Francis into a room full of all his cronies," admits the actor. "But they were all marvellous! And there was one lady who flung herself at me in floods of tears and said, 'Oh Francis, Francis, Francis!'. Of course, she was pissed at the time – at 10 o'clock in the morning. But it did help." 

Love Is the Devil focuses largely on Bacon's long-standing relationship with George Dyer, who quite literally dropped into his life one day through the skylight of his Kensington studio while trying to burgle it and became his lover for the next nine years. 
And, because of this focus on the flesh (which was such an essential inspiration for Bacon's paintings), the film has already engendered a degree of controversy in Britain, where it doesn't open until the autumn. Does this worry Jacobi, who was knighted  
for his services to the British theatre in 1994? 

"On, no, no!" he guffaws. "I'm a jobbing actor. I go where the work is. You can't be too conscious of your position. That's a load of rubbish for an actor, because actors deal in basics. And, if there is a scandal when the film opens, well, then, it'll sell tickets!"