Over your extraordinary career, what has creative freedom meant to you?
I have never had a job, so I’ve always – more or less – worked for myself without the restrictions that a nine-to-five existence imposes. Therefore, even the hard, scary times had this wonderful sense of freedom, with the idea you could bounce back from a disaster.

Was there a time when you felt liberated as a filmmaker?
Yes, the period when I did Leaving Las Vegas (1995) through to Timecode (2000) and Hotel (2001), was artistically the most liberated time of my life. I had enough of a reputation to get financial support for these ideas and I jumped at the opportunity with no thought for my future. Just the sheer joy of doing what I wanted to do. I’m now paying for it.

How did Hollywood stifle your creativity?
Hollywood has been both heaven and hell. My first US film Internal Affairs (1990) gave me an entrée into cinema that had been totally denied in the UK and a sense of freedom that pushed me into my next period of filmmaking. But there’s a specific unspoken rule in Hollywood that you should “join the club” – in which case you can do very well, even if you fail. If you choose to be an outsider, you will struggle. Someone said to my agent, “Mike’s problem is he doesn’t understand the social contract.”

You’re a jazz musician, how does that liberate you?
I started off playing the trumpet when I was twelve, wanting to impress my dad who was a jazz fanatic. My father taught me to improvise by making me play along to Louis Armstrong records and then he’d get me perform in front of his drunken friends at his DJ parties. My one regret is that there’s no recording of me playing with dad, although I had a tape recorder from an early age. When I came to London to study, aged eighteen, I joined a radical avant-garde jazz band called The People Band, which took me to a whole new level of experimentation.

How did you root Timecode in musical composition?
It is the most radical experimental film I’ve ever made. It brought into cinema an unprecedented idea of multiple synchronicity within a film, so four stories are running at the same time, in real time. You can’t write a film like Timecode in a conventional, linear way. I had to conceive a method of writing multiple narratives that harmonise with each other, so it was written on music paper like a string quartet.

What new ground would you still like to break in film?
Since 2000 the colossal change in social communication (visual multitasking, shortform films, Zoom), cinema has become part of the public language of communication, rendering the feature film obsolete. To continue as an edgy filmmaker, these social elements need to be incorporated into a film’s visual language. Films can be ten minutes long.

You lost your great friend Julian Sands last year. What made him so special as an actor?
I used to say, “If Julian Sands isn’t in it, it’s not a Michael Figgis film.” He was my dear, dear friend; so eccentric, fearless and unique. When I cast Timecode he said, “I don’t want to be an important character, I want to be a masseuse.” He didn’t have that ego about having to be the central part. When he went missing, I assumed he’d just pop up, because he was a survivor. I’ve dedicated my Francis Ford Coppola documentary to him.

Perspective has a soft spot for Internal Affairs (starring Richard Gere) and 1994’s The Browning Version (Albert Finney). Do you have favourites among your films?
My cliché answer is “like children, you love them all”. Leaving Las Vegas was a total joy. I had creative freedom, a budget, a three-week shoot and great actors who wanted to work. I loved Timecode’s experimentation and collaboration. Internal Affairs was my first experience of US film. I didn’t know LA, except through films, but being there seemed natural and there was a really good script by Henry Bean. You can’t underestimate the power of good writing as a starting base.

If you had total freedom and unlimited finance, what film would you make?
The film I want to make now is the film I want to make most. It’s set in South Korea and deals with corruption in the K-pop industry – the biggest musical phenomenon in the world right now, factory-produced music and choreography. Because it’s contentious, I want to make it as a super-low-budget film, because that’s when I’m at my happiest. I don’t like more than eight or nine people on set. I hate big trucks and film-set food. The problem is that the budget is so low film companies won’t consider it, which I find beyond ironic.

Your films have intensely erotic aspects (One Night Stand, Miss Julie). Is it harder to film sex in the modern era?
Increasingly, as I get older, I believe less sex is more erotic. If you want to focus on the erotic charge of a scene, the worst thing to do is an impersonation of the sexual act. I would do anything to avoid the world of choreographed intimacy; if I read how great the intimacy coach was on a film, I lose the desire to see it.

What’s your motto?
My T-shirt quote comes from Jean-Luc Godard: “Show me the budget and I’ll show you the film.” It’s useful for young filmmakers, a combination of the aesthetic and the practical. You can do so much more now with very little money.

Mike Figgis is in the final stages of post-production on “Megadoc”, a documentary on the making of Francis Ford Coppola’s “Megalopolis”