Although Mister Lonely is a traditionally scripted movie, co-written by Korine’s brother, Avi, he used the script as a mere sketch. Having spent an hour meticulously rehearsing a scene in which we plan a barbecue for the newly arrived Michael Jackson, Korine leaned toward me just before shooting to whisper, “You are not going to do any of that. I want you to tell them about your experience of acid and napalm in the Vietnam War.” He left the room chuckling.

He directs like a solicitous hostess of a cocktail party who makes sure all her guests have their glasses charged, then leaves the room, lobs in a Mace grenade, and locks the door. That’s when Korine shouts, “Action!”

When James Fox arrived, sometime after the rest of us, to play the pope, he said he felt as if he’d landed on another planet. For one sequence, Korine told the 69-year-old actor, “Do a card trick with your ass sticking out, then dance like you’re in a swamp.” Somehow when he demonstrated to the bemused Fox, it all made perfect, hilarious sense.

Forty years previously, Fox and Anita Pallenberg had famously ended up in bed in the Nic Roeg film Performance. Korine was delighted at the idea of reprising this coupling, with His Holiness and Her Majesty sharing a postcoital joint. He also found it hilarious to put me as pillion passenger on Michael Jackson’s motorcycle and send us into town. He handed me a megaphone and said, “Advertise a gala concert we’re doing tonight at the commune, like a fairground barker.” Giggling maniacally the whole way into town and back, he filmed the bewildered locals’ reactions to seeing Abe Lincoln and the King of Pop sharing a motorbike.

Choreographing confrontations isn’t new to him. When he made his movie Fight Harm, he walked the mean Manhattan streets verbally provoking passersby, trying to start a fistfight while his friend David Blaine filmed the resulting bloodbath. He said at the time: “It’s very brutal—I’ve already broken a collarbone and been arrested. The punches and kicks are all real; it’s one of the most disgusting things you’ll ever see.” That production was halted early on. Following three arrests, Korine had to serve a two-and-a-half-month prison sentence. His girlfriend at the time, the actress Chloë Sevigny, was, he says, totally freaked out by it. “My family tried to get me institutionalized,” he says. “They thought I was trying to kill myself. But it was just something I had to put myself through.” Not exactly Sir David Lean, then.

Korine is now married to his sweetheart, the actress Rachel Simon, who plays Little Red Riding Hood in Mister Lonely, and they live, perhaps surprisingly, in Nashville. He says he’s cleaner and happier than he has been for many years. His dark night of the soul, which tortured him in his 20s, has now passed. He neither drinks nor does narcotics, nor seems to hanker for either. This is a man who was once so physically overloaded that his body shut down and he went temporarily blind and deaf.

Despite his former appetite for life in the margins, Korine has always had his supporters. The French fashion designer Agnès B is one of the producers of Mister Lonely and threw a wonderful party at her home in Antibes after it premiered at Cannes last year. The film features performances from two leading directors of European art-house cinema, Leos Carax (Les Amants du Pont-Neuf) and Werner Herzog (Fitzcarraldo, Grizzly Man). The fashion photo-grapher Juergen Teller was on hand to take stills on set. All were united in the view that Korine was a very special talent.

On the occasional days when neither Anita nor I was filming, we’d rent a car and drive off into the wilds to explore. The Isle of Skye, across the road bridge from our bed-and-breakfast in Kyle of Lochalsh, was a particularly rewarding destination. Sublime coastal views, towering hills, and the eerily humanoid shapes of some of the rock formations were constantly beguiling and thrilling. One phallic protuberance, known locally as the Old Man of Storr, is the priapic remains of a prehistoric volcanic plug.