His first experiences on the Riviera were not especially favourable. "I was a bit appalled by Cannes," he mumbles into his coffee. "When I actually went there, it was considerably more of a market place than I had expected with showbiz stunts and advertisements everywhere. I had been expecting a more esoteric event." 

Rather than suffer the torments of the Croisette, Rafelson promptly left town and headed off to Italy to meet Orson Welles. "We had just purchased our first novel and Orson wanted to direct it." But his first encounter with the legendary director was stormy. "Welles said to me how dare you ask so many questions about how I plan to make the film and then threw me out of the room." Nevertheless, Welles eventually came to America and lived off what little money Schneider and Rafelson could provide him with. "He stayed at the Beverly Hills Hotel and meanwhile completed plans for another picture, all the while saying he was working on ours." 

Head, Rafelson acknowledges, was always the kind of film that was going to get a warmer reception in Cannes than back home in America. "I remember the French flipping-out over this movie but not having a clue what it was about. They didn't know who the Monkees were. For them, there were just these hallucinogenic images up there on the screen and this non-narrative film."  

Head was the quintessential late Sixties film. Making it, Rafelson claims he was partly influenced by the French New Wave. "I liked that complete disrespect for the film itself, that violation of the celluloid – the idea of handling it roughly and not aiming for perfect lighting." But, he acknowledges, it wasn't only Godard who inspired him: a healthy consumption of acid also helped the creative process. Head boasts a more than eccentric supporting cast: everybody from former Heavyweight Champ Sonny Liston to Victor Mature, from a famous female impersonator, to a topless model from San Francisco. 

Rafelson and Jack Nicholson co-wrote the screenplay. At that time, Rafelson recalls, Nicholson was an out-of-work actor, an aspiring writer and he was living in Harry Dean Stanton's basement. "That's where we wrote – in an odd, dark little room with just a small bed and a desk. It was more like a prison cell than anything else." 

Since then, Rafelson has made many films with Nicholson. By the time the duo shot The Postman Always Ring Twice in 1981, Nicholson was a fully-fledged star. "Jack's salary was four times the cost of all my pictures put together so there was a kind of economic intimidation there." He was used to storming into Nicholson's room whenever he wanted to, but now found that he had to wait his turn outside the star's trailer like everyone else. 

"I had gotten into trouble with one of the studios and had been out of work for many years when Jack suggested that we do Postman," Rafelson remembers. He recruited David Mamet to write the screenplay (his first) after auditioning Mamet's then wife, Lindsay Crouse, for the film. In the end, he gave the part of the bored wife to Jessica Lange (then a struggling actress best known as King Kong's squeeze). Nicholson plays the hobo who drifts into her life. 

"I was drawn to the intensely erotic nature of the material," Rafelson explains when asked what led him to remake the old John Garfield/Lana Turner classic.  

"Everything that couple did had a primitive erotic and sexual tension. When they try to murder the Greek husband, the car gets suspended on a hill. They have to beat each other up to make it look as if they too were involved in the automobile accident. But that turns them on. So they fuck with the dead Greek still sitting in the car."  

Perhaps surprisingly, Rafelson, a filmmaker acknowledged as one of the kings of the independents in the late 1960s and early 1970s, seems to be out of favour in present-day Hollywood. His last feature, Blood and Wine (starring Jack Nicholson and Michael Caine) bombed at the box-office despite favourable reviews. All the studios may have their art house divisions, but nobody from Miramax or Fox Searchlight is beating a path to his door. Exasperated at the difficulty of putting together his own feature films, he recently took a job as a hired hand, directing a version of Poodle Springs, Raymond Chandler's final novel, for HBO. The screenplay is by Tom Stoppard and James Caan plays Philip Marlowe. The film is due to be broadcast in the US in July. 

From The King Of Marvin Gardens (1972) to Blood And Wine (1996), Rafelson's movies often struggle to find an audience on their first release but then go on to become cult favourites on the art house and repertory circuit. He is particularly gratified, he says, by the response to The Postman Always Rings Twice in Cannes after it was snubbed back home. "The US critics hated Postman. They didn't like the idea that a guy who looked like a sloth (as Nicholson did in that picture) could touch the pussy of Jessica Lange. And touch it he did by god!" Rafelson roars with laughter.