The Final Curtain story may already sound familiar. Maybe you read about it in the Los Angeles Times or the Boston Herald. Perhaps you heard about it on NPR, or a morning show on your local radio station. It’s even possible that you saw something about it on a Fox television affiliate.

It doesn’t really matter where you actually heard about the Final Curtain. Most of the stories — dozens of separate pieces — were pretty much the same. They were all wrong. Deathly wrong.

The Final Curtain, the news organizations reported, was the name of a chain of theme-park cemeteries being built by a New Jersey company called Investors Real Estate Development. The business model was a bit complicated (the Final Curtain was supposedly a private corporation, but some sites would be given away), but the central idea wasn’t. The hook: to give artists a chance to design their own grave sites.

In proper forward-thinking art-speak, the Final Curtain Web page called these burials “site-specific works of passage.” The company was seeking — and had accepted — proposals in anticipation of its first park in New York. Illustrator Nick Gaetano proposed a hot-blue neon sign reading “Nick is Dead.” An artist and writer named Julia Solis wanted her body fat to be rendered to fuel an eternal flame. A woman named Kim Markegard had submitted plans for a jukebox and a 10-foot by 10-foot parquet floor so that her friends and family could dance on her grave.

There was more. The Final Curtain would make money by charging guests admission and cleaning up on concessions. There were timeshare plans and vacation packages, galleries and museums, Dante’s Grill and the Heaven’s Gate Cafe. If it sounds ridiculous, consider a few other cultural realities: “Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire?”, cloned pets, impeachment.

Now, imagine that you’re a journalist. You want to cover this story. You can’t lose with a story about Cemetery Theme Parks. Your editor is impressed. The jokes write themselves. The headlines alone …

It’s almost too good to be true.

Unfortunately, that was the problem.

The Final Curtain turns out to be an elaborate media hoax cooked up by Joey Skaggs, a 45-year-old trickster in New York who’s made a career of fooling the media and calling it art for nearly 35 years. Skaggs has appeared on CNN and “Good Morning America” as a drill sergeant with the Fat Squad, a fake disciplinarian diet program; WABC did an Emmy-nominated investigative segment on his Cat House for Dogs, a place to get your pooch laid.

Skaggs refuses to reveal how much of his own money he spent on his latest prank; he makes a living selling paintings and sculpture and occasionally teaching.

This is a great story.

“The hook, the line and the sinker.” These are the three phases of any Skaggs prank. Setting up the Final Curtain took Skaggs more than two years. The reporters who fell for his story spent anywhere from two hours to two days writing their stories.

A prank as long and complicated as the Final Curtain required a lot of legwork. First, Skaggs needed a physical space for the Final Curtain to exist, so he installed a hard phone line at a friend’s home in New Jersey. Then he printed stationery and business cards. He collected ideas and artwork from 15 collaborators. He invented personas. Most importantly, he registered www.finalcurtain.com and built a deep Web site.

Then he baited the first hook — more than a year ago — with a little ad on the back page of the Village Voice and 19 other alternative weeklies. The advertisement read:

DEATH GOT YOU DOWN?

At last an alternative!

www.finalcurtain.com

Later, when reporters questioned him — or, rather, his invented personas — he would point to those advertisements as evidence that the Final Curtain had not gone up overnight. The fact that Final Curtain was already spending money gave the project an air of legitimacy. The next step was a simple press release. “Until now, the handling of death has been regimented and boring,” it explained. “At the Final Curtain we are throwing away all the rules.”

The press release was picked up almost immediately on Oct. 7, by Wireless Flash News Service, a daily wire that “provides daily feature and entertainment content to more than 800 broadcast outlets, newspapers and Web sites world wide.” The dummy phone in New Jersey started ringing almost immediately. Calls were mostly fielded by “marketing director” Stuart MacLelland or “spokesman” Paul Corey — personas cooked up by Skaggs. Some reporters didn’t even bother to call.

On Oct. 11 the L.A. Times published a column called “Off-Kilter” by Roy Rivenburg. The headline was “Go out with a bang: Cutting-edge tombstones in a theme-park setting.” Rivenburg wrote the story straight. He spent about 200 words introducing the idea and cut straight to the grave markers: “A giant Etch-a-Sketch filled with cremated remains mingled with iron particles”; “A massive ant farm tombstone made from a combination of soil and cremated remains”; “a coffin containing a video camera — so visitors could watch the corpse decay live or via time-lapse recording.”

Rivenburg was one of the writers who didn’t call anyone at Final Curtain, although he did exchange an email or two. He was skittish enough about the concept to write a sort of disclaimer into his copy: “Although much of it sounds tongue-in-cheek, Final Curtain officials insist the proposal is real.” Those Final Curtain officials, of course, were Skaggs.

Amazingly enough, two days later Skaggs received a letter from an attorney representing Uncle Milton Industries Inc., the maker of Uncle Milton’s Ant Farms. The letter was also sent to Rivenburg at the Times. Turns out that “Ant Farm” is a registered trademark. “We believe that you and Final Curtain meant an ‘ant vivarium’ or an ‘ant habitat’ to describe the concept. ‘Ant Farm’ is not a descriptive phrase but is an incontestable trademark that identifies Uncle Milton Industries.”

Skaggs had a new line. He fired off another press dispatch about Final Curtain and the Uncle Milton letter. Now he had something far better than a silly idea: a controversy. The only thing the press likes more than a gimmick is a controversy.

“Sometimes you have to nurse things along,” said Skaggs last week from his studio. “Controversy is a smokescreen. This is what politicians do to us all the time. They take you away from important issues by creating stupid issues. Then the media focuses on the stupid issues and you never question the premise.”

From that point, the Final Curtain took on a life of its own. All Skaggs had to do was sit back and watch the press clippings pile up. On Oct. 22, Rivenburg at the L.A. Times kicked off the coverage with yet another column that made fun of Uncle Milton for going after Final Curtain. By this point, the site was drawing tens of thousands of hits per day, according to Skaggs.

By mid May, 39 newspapers in Europe and the States, some of which ran AP stories that originated with a story in the Charleston (S.C.) Post and Courier, at least 19 radio stations, 10 magazines, 20 Web sites and six television stations that had all fallen for his hoax. “It was a snowflake into a snowball into an avalanche,” Skaggs says.

Two European TV crews inquired about shooting documentaries. A student at the University of Chicago asked to use Final Curtain as the basis of her graduate thesis. And then there were the online businesses and Web rings, which were only slightly more plausible than the Final Curtain. One site, selling itself as “the No. 1-visited cremation site online” offered advertising banner space. A letter from the founder of NetKin, which sells “virtual memorials,” invited Final Curtain to become an “associate” site and place “Netkin Memorials” on its site. Final Curtain would take in a chunk of blood money from anyone who bought a memorial. Progressive-minded infidels from Funeral Industry made a few calls, too.

Then a pair of state agencies became intrigued.

In December, New Jersey and Colorado sent letters to the Final Curtain demanding that the site produce financial information or quit soliciting online. A Colorado officer refused to comment on the case, which is apparently ongoing. New Jersey did not return phone calls. Skaggs dismissed both with a polite letter pointing out that he wasn’t soliciting any money.

A few months later, he sent out another press release, explaining that the whole thing was a hoax.

As a breed, journalists don’t particularly like making mistakes. They like being bamboozled even less. Upon being informed of Skaggs’ hoax, some grudgingly admit they were taken.

“I am aware of him and of the tradition of this sort of stunt,” says Boston Herald writer Joel Brown, who wrote about Final Curtain in his column “The Web Browser” in October. “Usually they don’t seem to be as dedicated. My bullshit detector didn’t go off on this one.”

Though Brown detected something rotten — he inserted the following caveat into his story: “In the back of your mind, you have to wonder if the whole thing is just some sort of art-weasel prank, but the New Jersey outfit seems for real.” Still, he never made contact with Final Curtain. Nor did he check anything about the organization other than its Web site. He copped to his mistake in his last column.

“We’re embarrassed and disappointed,” says Mother Jones staffer Alastair Paulin, who wrote a short item about Final Curtain. “This was a really sophisticated prank with a lot of people involved. The fact checker here actually spoke to the same artist [I interviewed]. It makes it tough, even if it smells funny.”

So what’s the point? Well, Skaggs calls it art. He claims to have a social message. From his press release: “To Joey Skaggs, the death-care industry is a giant corporate scam, exquisitely successful at commercializing death … Ultimately, it’s a waste of space and resources, and a burden to the natural environment at the financial and emotional expense of their clients.”

Skaggs’ pranks are a bit more graceful than his explanations.

To complete this story, let’s incorporate some of Skaggs’ words, a few quotes from the journalists who took the bait and a few other proverbs for a more suitable ending.

1. There’s a sucker born every minute.

2. “The line between truth and falsehood has become blurred online.” — Village Voice freelancer Jeff Howe.

3. “We’re a service industry. We’re no different than any other industry.” Jay Roberts, Lowe Funeral Home, Burlington, N.C.

4. Don’t believe everything you read.

5. “It’s hard for satire to stay ahead of what’s already a bizarre culture. But that makes satire all the more important.” — Skaggs.

6. There is a difference between a prank and a scam. A scammer only wants to rip people off. A prankster wants to make them laugh.

7. Ant Farm is a registered trademark of Uncle Milton Industries, Inc., of Westlake Village, Calif.

8. “Media hoaxing has a bright, promising future. All we can hope is that the hoaxers are smarter than the media.” — Jeff Howe.

9. “No matter how lightweight the story, or how archly it was written, we were presenting it as real.” — Alastair Paulin.

10. No one can resist a good story.

“A Man Apart” is basically a revenge tale set somewhere on the backlot of the “Traffic” set. Diesel plays a DEA agent who uses streetwise tactics to fight the drug war along the Mexico-California border. We learn immediately that he’s not the kind of guy who plays by the rules. (Are they ever?) He and his partner, Larenz Tate, are working with Mexican cops to bust a kingpin they’ve been tracking for seven years. When the bust finally goes down in Tijuana they, as Americans, are not allowed to have assault rifles like the rest of the Mexican cops. Diesel works his way around the prohibition with a little 9-millimeter friend. And of course he’s the guy who nabs the baddie.

Then we’re off to Diesel’s beachside home in San Diego (I guess they pay DEA cops buckets of money, you know, so they’re not tempted by the millions in cash they could get from scumbag runners for looking the other way). The next few scenes exist simply to establish that Diesel genuinely loves his attractive wife (Jacqueline Obradors), so much so that he kisses her under a beach sunset with the seagulls in the background. Even though you’ll be trying to decide if you’ve ever seen a more clichéd representation of what love or marriage means, you still know that something’s going to go horribly wrong.

And of course it does. That means that Vin Diesel has to figure out who did the bad thing. His thirst for revenge leads him to an unlikely alliance with the kingpin he busted at the start of the film, plus some old friends who work outside the law on special projects like this. All signs point to Diablo, a person or team or evil presence that is trying to take over the border’s coke pipeline.

Look, I like Vin Diesel. He’s a good, maybe great, action star. He’s tough, cool and he gives off this impossible sense that he would have no problem kicking your ass, but he’d rather go snowboarding with you and grab a couple of microbrews, brah. As a straight guy, you don’t even mind the idea of him busting out of his shirt. It’s hot with all that fire and explosion and gunplay, you know, and it was in the way.

There’s a chance that Diesel thought that he was going to get serious in “A Man Apart.” He certainly doesn’t have to say as anything as absurd as “I live my life a quarter-mile at a time” — one of the many howlers from “The Fast and the Furious.” But he never gets to do anything as cool as ride a zipline from a parachute to a remote-controlled speedboat with a nuclear bomb on board, either, like he did in “XXX.”

To be fair, Diesel isn’t bad in “A Man Apart.” He’s always forceful, and he manages to communicate a sense of dazed anger, a mien to match his scruffy facial hair. It’s just that the script is never really there for him. He has to go outside the law? Well, isn’t that what drug-cop action stars like him always have to do? There’s a double-, maybe triple-cross betrayal among dealers? We weren’t supposed to believe them, were we?

Diesel never takes off his shirt in “A Man Apart.” He bitch-slaps a Porsche-driving playboy called Hollywood Jack (who’s probably gay), he handles an array of weaponry and he fucks up some scumbags, but there’s not a single moment when you wonder what might happen next or when the spectacle simply leaps off the screen. You’ve seen it all before.

Me too, but “A Man Apart” wasn’t a complete loss. The burger place was still open, and the fries were delicious.

“Spun” is about speed — methamphetamine. The plot is fairly thin, happening over three days in one of those washed-out places in Southern California. Ross (Jason Schwartzman from “Rushmore,” who will always be from “Rushmore”) meets the Cook (Mickey Rourke, who apparently will never be Mickey Rourke again) through stripper Nikki (Brittany Murphy). In return for little bags of speed, Ross runs errands — picking up ephedrine, buying porn — and chauffeurs the Cook, who is mad-sciencing a new batch of meth out of a sweaty motel room.

There’s also Spider Mike (John Leguizamo), a low-level dealer, and his girlfriend Cookie (Mena Suvari). They live and deal out of a trashed ranch house where kids like Frisbee (Patrick Fugit) come over to buy drugs, get high, and play video games. (Which are — sound the hip alarm — homemade and totally retro; you’ll probably see a feature on them in Vice magazine next month.)

The story, inasmuch as there is one, wonders whether Ross will get back together with his girlfriend, who has left him and moved to Los Angeles, and whether Nikki will leave the Cook. There’s also a subplot involving two bumbling cops who are speed freaks themselves (like everyone else in the film), and a recurring bit involving a stripper whom Ross fucks — yes, fucks — until he hallucinates dirty cartoons (the hip alarm is still ringing, right? Look for the cartoonist in a Japanese fashion magazine) and ties naked to his bed before leaving the apartment.

All this is to say that “Spun” is one of those episodic pictures. It apparently derives from the exploits of one of its co-writers, Will De Los Santos, a speed freak from Eugene, Ore. (The beginning of the film, which is co-written by Creighton Vero, announces “based on the truth … and lies.”) And it is real life in the sense that it’s more of a vibe or a grind or something than a movie. The whole thing is stitched together with coherent production design and masterful editing.

In a way, “Spun” is editing. Its filmmaker, the Swedish music video and commercial director Jonas Akerlund, is known principally for Prodigy’s jittery “Smack My Bitch Up” and Madonna’s stop-start “Ray of Light.” According to the film’s production notes, the debut feature project started off with a 1,000-page storyboard comic book, every single shot of which was captured on high-speed 16-mm film once production started. The finished product includes 4,500 edits, or almost a cut every second.

And there certainly is some nice technique. One trick makes every object appear to us as the sum of its component parts. So when Schwartzman gets in his crappy-ass brown Volvo, we see the wheels turning, the pistons pumping, the fan belt whirring. The technique communicates that speedy sense of everythingallatonce. It’s a style that bites “Requiem for a Dream” — in particular the little impressionistic bits that recurred every time the characters shot up — and makes no particular improvement.

As there was in “Requiem for a Dream” — a vastly superior film — a fairly conventional morality is at work in “Spun.” Drug dealers get busted, rats get shot, and guys who fuck with women get beaten down. No bad deed goes unpunished. And in one sense, with all the brown teeth, groaning constipation, and Leguizamo jerking off in a sock, there’s nothing sexy about the loser pageant. In all its bleached-out shots and hyper-quick editing, “Spun” is an anti-drug film.

Sort of. Because these guys still get to wear Diesel and look like John Leguizamo in a pair of low-rider leather pants. Or be a bad-ass cowboy like Mickey Rourke (playing his best role in years), and fuck Brittany Murphy. (Yes, fuck. In one of the film’s most hilarious scenes Rourke delivers a “Patton”-like tribute to pussy, with an American flag waving in the background.)

The biggest problem with “Spun” is that it’s really just about speed (and editing). And speed, like most other drugs, is in and of itself boring. (Have you ever had one of those three-hour conversations about pot? Stoned? It feels like time dying.) Further, the young-and-beautiful drug movie is finished — at least until someone makes a genre tribute in 20 years. I can’t imagine a picture saying anything that hasn’t already been said better by “Drugstore Cowboy,” the abject “Kids” and even “Trainspotting.”

At this point, the only interesting drug movies are the ones that start with drugs and work outward, like, again, “Requiem” (about addiction and the death of the American dream), or “Jesus’ Son” (about redemption and Billy Crudup). (It’s worth noting that both evolved from novels.)

“Spun” is ultimately a nasty movie. It’s the kind of film that mocks overweight people who work at gas stations and makes parody out of people who live in trailers. It tries desperately for its edge, achieving it occasionally (maybe with former Judas Priest frontman Rob Halford working the counter at the porn store), but never really gets past the same kind of one-dimensional jokes about speed freaks that Jay Leno makes in “Tonight Show” monologues. I laughed, but I didn’t feel good about it.

Jane’s son, Sam (Christian Bale), is an uptight psychiatrist who has rejected Jane’s cocktails-in-the-pool California lifestyle for an East Coast education and prim fiancée Alex (Kate Beckinsale). When Sam and Alex move back to California with their twin rolling suitcases, they end up in Jane’s house with the band. Piece by piece, Alex finds herself drawn to the band, its music and its libertine frontman. Meanwhile, Sam starts to fall for an Israeli doctor at his hospital (Natascha McElhone).

One of the best things about “Laurel Canyon” is that it just feels right; every piece of it has a rare honesty, from its characters’ decisions to the crates and crates of vinyl stacked against the wall at Jane’s house. I’ve never seen a better movie about recording music, and by extension about the often banal process of making art.

I spoke with Cholodenko, who also directed Ally Sheedy in “High Art,” another dense, subtle film about seduction, over the phone last week. She was in Colorado, doing press for “Laurel Canyon,” while I was in New York, recovering from a blizzard. The director’s California mien extended beyond her casual slang, as I found out toward the end of our conversation, when Cholodenko asked me a personal question with all the loose confidence of one of her Left Coast protagonists. It’s not that she was being nosy; she was just being open.

Were you interested in the music business before this movie, or was that just where these characters happened to find themselves?

I mean, I think the answer is a little bit of both. I was curious enough to want to spend a few years with the music business because that’s what it takes as a writer. So I was interested in how it works and how it doesn’t work, and how it’s oddly similar to the film business in a way.

What do you mean?

You know, the way that I dramatize it within the film is as these commercial demands that are going on outside. Then there are people on deadline to do something spectacular when all they really want to do something in a different direction or something more personal. Which is reminiscent of something I struggle with as a filmmaker. That said, I think the music-business aspect of this film came less as this overdetermined idea to set a film in that world than out of the character, Jane. As I fleshed her out, this world got created around her. It came from within, rather than from the outside.

Was she modeled on a particular music business figure?

Not really. Because as I discovered later after writing the first draft of it, there really wasn’t anybody of her age group, of her generation, any women who were record producers.

What about Ian’s band? Is his band modeled on a particular group?

I started writing this in 1998, right around the time that Radiohead’s “OK Computer” was all the rage. And I really liked that record, and became aware of bands following in that tradition, like Travis or Coldplay, mid-tempo, balladeering rock-pop music. So in that tradition.

How much did Folk Implosion, the indie rock group that plays Ian’s band, bring to the film? Did you learn about band behavior from them?

No, not really. They sort of came in at the last minute and saved my ass. I was really having a hard time casting actors to play a band. It seemed like a recipe for disaster to do that. I think what they helped was for Fran McDormand and Alessandro Nivola to get a general sort of energy, if you will. And while this band isn’t modeled on the Folk Implosion, those guys have been in the music business for a long time so there’s just a general demeanor …

They look exactly like a band sitting around a table smoking pot.

Yeah, well, that’s exactly what they were supposed to be. They didn’t have huge personalities. They just were there making a record. And their frontman is the charisma guy.

I wanted to get into this idea about emotional responsibility, which is this phrase that I’ve read you use. I wanted to ask what that meant to you.

Oh, man, that’s like a huge question!

OK.

Do you want to ask it about a specific character? Did you see the film?

Yeah, absolutely. My question is kind of vague, but I was so drawn to that idea. One of my favorite scenes, and one of the best sex scenes I’ve ever seen, was when Christian Bale and Natascha McElhone are in the car.

Yeah.

They’re basically having this emotionally irresponsible affair. There’s no actual sex involved, but he’s cheating on his fiancée in a bad way. So he is sort of betraying an emotional fidelity. But I think the idea of emotional responsibility is something bigger in the film …

In a kind of crass shorthand way, I would say that emotional responsibility in this film means copping to your fuck-ups, which doesn’t mean that you have to be honest about everything that you do and think. It’s like the opposite of denial. It’s about admitting where your boundaries are and are not. I think it’s a portrait of this couple that is in extreme denial about who they are. So while they have this self-righteous opinion of themselves, while it’s unspoken, it’s emotionally irresponsible of them in a certain sense that they’re so vulnerable to being set off course, if you will.

Do they love each other?

Yeah, I think they love each other in that kind of repressed, “Do I love you or are you my Barbie doll? I don’t know ’cause I haven’t gone to the other side to figure it out” sort of way.

So they might not really even know what love is?

I think that’s a great way of saying it. I think the film is kind of a funny meditation on that. Kind of like, you got to go to know.

You have to what?

You got to go to know.

You got to know … gotcha.

Gotta go.

Gotta go to know.

Yeah. You don’t necessarily have to act on every desire, but you have to be open to your doubts and your darker sides to really understand what you’re about, what makes you tick and what love is.

Jane has gone all the way, and she’s coming back. Is that what emotional responsibility is?

Yeah, totally.

So how do you go about doing this all of this in a way that doesn’t come off moralistic? Because that is one of the real achievements of the film, that it doesn’t seem preachy.

Well, thanks, I appreciate that. I don’t know. It took me a long time to write it. I kind of saw the whole thing as a funny math problem. You know, I got all these people on a chessboard, and if I move so-and-so a little too much that way, this character seems like a victim and that character seems like an asshole. You know, then it sort of becomes a morality question. It was a constant balancing act with all of these characters. You know, they move in these incremental ways that affect the other person. But you try to keep them all in a place where their move seems not only affected by the other person’s move, but reasonable given where they are coming from, and where we as an audience feel that to be better or more truthful people, they need to go.

D.H. Lawrence. Were you reading D.H. Lawrence when you were writing this?

No, but I should. Like “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” or something?

In particular.

You know, I’ve never read that book.

Really? There’s the greatest line in the film that I thought was a direct nod to it.

What is it?

The exchange between Christian Bale and Natascha McElhone that goes, “Are you having a sexuality crisis?” Answered by, “I’m not having any crisis.”

Really?

“Crisis” is Lady Chatterley’s term for orgasm.

Oh … that’s genius.

That’s what I’m saying …

I love that. I’m going to take that on the road. That’s coming into every interview I do from here on out.

You can take it.

I haven’t read that book, but I’ve been meaning to for 20 years.

OK, I’m going to change the subject. What did Frances McDormand bring to Jane?

God, she really kind of brought everything to Jane. She was this person who was in my imagination and she really made her 3-D in a way. You know, I invented this character who was sexy and saucy and smart and shrewd and flawed and hedonistic and tender and all these different things. And when I went to cast her, I thought, “I just screwed myself. This is impossible. I’m never going to get all these qualities in one actor.” And she walked in looking like she does, and being like she is, and it was, you know … Directing is a pretty rigorous thing to do with yourself, but there are moments that make it worth your time.

I’m sorry, I don’t understand.

It’s just that directing’s real hard, and there’s a lot of downside to it, a lot of anxiety and disappointment. But when something like that happens, when you’ve written this character where you thought, “I’m going to sink my own ship,” and Fran McDormand walks in and she is that character, it’s like a really awesome, transcendent moment that makes everything else seem reasonable.

I love the scene with the old man, when Alex, Jane’s daughter-in-law, goes apartment hunting and looks at his house. I love the economy of it. It’s showing that Alex really isn’t working hard to find a way out of Jane’s house, and it’s also about another type of relationship between a parent and a child. I admire the way that every scene is trying to do more than one thing at once. Is this something that you try to achieve in your writing?

I appreciate that. That’s a nice thing to say. I really care about the way that I write, and I think that way. I think that’s the kind of stuff that gets lost in the translation if you’re not sensitive to it, or not interested in that. I appreciate it. Yeah, that’s what I enjoy when I go to see films. I really enjoy these layered, carefully inscribed character studies that have larger subtexts going on with them. So it’s the kind of stuff that I try to write.

What about the production design? Did you have a lot to do with the way … the house is so perfect to me. It’s sort of the dream, the idyllic California …

Can I ask you a question?

Yeah, sure.

Are you gay?

No. I’m straight.

Excellent.

[Laughs.] Why?

‘Cause I just thought … I was going to ask you if gay men were going to like this movie better than straight men.

I really couldn’t say.

I’m glad to hear that you’re straight.

I’ve never been asked that in an interview before.

Well, now you’re not a virgin anymore. Yeah, well, it’s a great house. A bitchin’ house. My producer …

No. It’s more than the house. It’s what’s in the house. It’s the racks of records, and all the flyers — you have flyers from the old punk band Crime on the wall. Who’s responsible for Crime flyers on the wall?

You know who did it? My production designer is this woman Catherine Hardwicke, who six months after doing my film went on to direct her own film, which just got bought at Sundance. She’s got a film coming out called “13.” [Hardwicke also did spectacular work in David O. Russell's "Three Kings."] And I wanted that house to feel like … I don’t want to spend a lot of expository time talking about Jane’s past. I just want to walk in the house and go, “OK, I get it.” It was filmed in this span of time, these are the people she hangs out with, she’s got a lot of money, she’s really cool, she’s doing her own thing, she’s got a huge collection of vinyl.

So, wait — do you think gay men are going to like this movie more than straight men?

I don’t know, because the other night we had a premiere … I don’t know. I just like that you’re straight and that you’re a detail-oriented guy. That’s good. It’s a quality that’s a little more common in gay men. But then again, you’re a culture guy, and it’s your job. I hope you’re not offended by that.

No, why would I be offended?

I don’t know, maybe you have some trauma from the past.

Look, you have a total straight male fantasy at the center of your film. You’ve got a rock star who gets to have a three-way with Frances McDormand and Kate Beckinsale.

Yeah, that’s good, huh?

It’s really straight. It’s so straight.

OK, good.

Well that’s more than 20 minutes, and I only had 20 minutes of questions, so I should …

Well, I appreciate talking to you. You’re very astute.

Good luck with the film.

All right. Stay warm. [Laughs.]

There are, of course, stunning images as well. (The film is currently playing in New York; it opens in Los Angeles next week and in several other cities in March.) Hirsch captures some great stuff — he spent nine years making the movie, shooting mostly on video — but the most powerful images in his film were selected from archived footage: Blacks shuttled off to the Meadowlands township in the late ’40s, guerrillas moving through the bush in the ’70s, massive crowds bobbing up and down, dancing the ferocious toyi-toyi in front of riot police in the 1980s.

The soul of the film, in some ways, is singer Vuyisile Mini, a songwriter and anti-apartheid leader who was hanged in 1964. “Amandla!” (it’s the Xhosa word for “power”) begins with his family and admirers exhuming his bones from a mass grave and giving them the respect of a proper burial in a state memorial. It’s a potent metaphor for what the film does. Like Mini’s family, the movie gets into the dirt, touches the bones, cries, sings and dances.

Using a number of narrators, including activists, political prisoners and exiled musicians like Hugh Masekela and Abdullah Ibrahim, the film moves through the history of the struggle. I’m no expert on South Africa, nor apartheid. I was a kid when it was a celebrity cause and college students were living in campus shantytowns and calling for Coca-Cola to divest. No matter. The film quickly sets up the conditions and continues to limn the high — and low — points of the long revolution. The white National Party sends blacks into townships, then restricts their movements. There is resistance, then blacks are massacred at protests, then leaders like Nelson Mandela and Vuyisile Mini are sent to prison. There are uprisings, a guerrilla movement, a slow repeal of the vicious apartheid laws and finally democratic elections. This takes 50 years, and freedom always seems just around the corner.

All of that comes out in song, but also in stories. Thandi Modise, who went on to be a member of South Africa’s National Assembly, was imprisoned for nine years and tortured while she was pregnant. She considered suicide, she says, but found her way back by singing. Three white policemen admit to being scared by dancing blacks. Radio Freedom, the illegal radio station of the African National Congress, begins and ends with a song.

“Amandla!” is never cloying or hippie-ish. It doesn’t drone on about oppression. It doesn’t feel sorry for anyone, and its subjects do not feel sorry for themselves. The people in the film sing on their way to the gallows and dance at funerals. You get the sense that some of that comes from facing so many horrible things, witnessing so much injustice. From that, you learn how the music worked, why a joyful, happy song had the lyrics “the dogs must die.” As Modise puts it, when a comrade dies, you don’t cry, you sing.

Colombani’s love-drunk thriller plays with Hollywood conventions. From its start, it seems like a sunny romance, centered on an affair between art student Angélique and Loïc, a married cardiologist who is expecting a baby with his wife. But halfway through, the movie flips and reverses, like “Rashomon” or “Run Lola Run,” going back in time and showing a much darker version of each event. Angélique, it seems, suffers from erotomania, or a delusional obsession with a man who doesn’t actually know she exists.

I met Colombani in the lobby of an over-designed New York hotel. She was cheery and excited on a rainy morning, eager to talk about the research that led to her script, why she likes manipulating an audience and the fine points of distinction between an erotomaniac and a stalker.

Can you tell me what you learned about erotomania? Was that the genesis of the film, or did you come upon that later?

Actually, I was writing a thesis in my school about madness and movies, and I was supposed to write a screenplay about madness. And so I wondered what madness should I choose. And one night, on a TV show, I heard somebody talking about erotomania. And I didn’t know anything about this disease, but what this person told was amazing.

What did this person say?

She was a woman, and she was in a wheelchair. She had been the victim of her neighbor, and he had fired her with two bullets. He was in love with her, and he was an erotomaniac. Her story was extraordinary, and so I decided to search in books: What exactly was erotomania? I discovered that it was fascinating and absolutely not famous. I didn’t see other films dealing with the same subject. And so I thought it would be great for my thesis and for my work and for my screenplay to deal with erotomania.

What is the difference between an erotomaniac and a stalker?

The difference is that in erotomania the mad person is convinced that she is loved in return. She is absolutely convinced. In erotomania there is nothing real. For example, in “Fatal Attraction,” Glenn Close and Michael Douglas had an affair, and when they broke up she could not bear it. But that is not erotomania, because there was something real. Naturally, in erotomania, there is absolutely nothing real, but the person is convinced that she is loved by somebody who is, in most cases, inaccessible. Loïc is a doctor, is married and is going to have a baby. It’s only in the person’s mind. But the person interprets every act as a loving act. The interpretation is the most important thing in erotomania.

You wrote the screenplay in school, and then you won a contest, right? Did they just say, “OK, now you get to make your movie”?

Yeah, well, actually it was a nice prize, but I had met my producer one month before. Everything went together. I met my producer in January, I won the prize in March and I started to shoot the movie in July. So everything was very fast.

Now, it usually doesn’t happen like that in the States. I’m assuming it’s not like that in Europe either.

I was very lucky. When I finished my screenplay I decided to send it to a famous producer [Dominique Brunner]. I was hoping he would give advice; I didn’t think he would produce it. But he read the script in one week and decided to produce it immediately. He called me and said, “Let’s do it. Let’s shoot it.” After that everything went very fast. Because he is very famous he could get the money fast. We cast it fast. Everything was very easy for me. It was like in a fairy tale. It was amazing.

I read that you originally wrote the lead for yourself.

Yeah, I am an actress too, and I really like acting, and when I was writing the script I thought I could be Angélique and act in my own movie. But when I started to prepare it I just realized it was so huge, the work of doing my first feature, that it would be better if I only direct because it’s too much work.

So I decided on Audrey Tautou. I was thinking that she would be perfect from the part because she was far away from the mad girl. You can’t imagine that she would be mad. I am still an actress, but I am sure that I do not want to act in my own movies.

Why is that?

It must be very hard to be in the same time in front of a camera and behind. I think that an actor is really better when he is being directed by someone else.

What directors would you like to work with?

As an actress?

Yes.

Well, my three idols, you know. Roman Polanski, Jane Campion and Tim Burton are my three favorite directors. And I would die to work with them.

I keep reading these reviews of your film, and they say it’s “Fatal Attraction” meets “Amélie.” But I think that your movie goes deeper than that.

Actually, I didn’t see “Amélie” before I wrote my screenplay, or before I cast Audrey. I don’t think people would think of “Amélie” if Audrey Tautou was not in it. I don’t think there are many common points between the two movies.

“Fatal Attraction,” yeah, there are more common points. In the first draft of the screenplay the film was like “Fatal Attraction” because it was very linear. And then I decided to cut the film into two parts. So I think it’s a little bit different, with two points of view. It was very important for me to try a different structure, to try things in my first movie. It was kind of dangerous, but I was very excited to try it.

What about this story made you decide to use this structure?

Well, I first wrote the story very linear, but after that I said it would be more fun for me as a screenwriter to try to deal with a strange structure. It was like a game, you know, writing a thriller. To link the two parts with small details was like a game, and I really had a lot of pleasure to write it. But on top of that I thought that the structure would really help the subject. Because it is about madness, and I wanted to the spectator to identify with the mad character in the first part. A kind of manipulation.

You know the film “Psycho”? It’s one of my favorite movies, because you are manipulated all the time, and at the end there is a twist and you want to see everything again to see how you have been manipulated. It’s kind of a game between the director and the spectator. And I really enjoy that.

Why does Angélique go crazy?

It’s a huge question. I read a lot of books about erotomania, and the causes of the disease are very complicated to explain in a movie. It’s something that happens in the very early years of a child. I thought it would be too psychiatric, too complicated to explain in my movie. But for me, she’s very, very lonely all the time. She was lonely since she was a child. She finds in her fantasy what she cannot find in her reality. It’s my own version of the facts; a psychiatrist would say something more complicated. That’s why I wanted her to be an artist: She’s living in the world of art, of fantasy, of imagination. At one point, her imagination overtakes the place of everything in her mind and she has no contact with reality any more.

Talk to me about color and lighting. The first half of the film has bright, saturated colors. It’s a bright, ideal place.

I wanted the two parts of the movie to be very different. I wanted the first part to be very bright, very romantic, passionate, in even in a teenage way. Like in a very immature girl. She can imagine a wonderful love story with lots of hearts, lots of flowers. It reveals, for me, her own world. She’s living in a world of fantasy.

For the second part, it was important to have something more realistic, more scientific, more normal. It’s more usual life. Loïc is a doctor. For me Angélique is living in a fantasy and Loïc is living in reality. And so I wanted the second part to be in blue shades, with not so much camera movement. The light should not be so bright, but quieter, calmer, more normal.

And the music changes a lot. In the beginning, it’s loopy, with chimes, and it becomes darker.

It was also a part of the manipulation.

So you are really about manipulating an audience.

Yes, but not in a bad sense. It’s manipulating like in a game, playing. Not in, you know, a dark way, a perverse way. I really like Alfred Hitchcock’s movies because I have a feeling that he plays with us all the time. I enjoy this relationship, between me and this movie. And it was also the case with movies like “The Sixth Sense,” or “The Usual Suspects.” It’s really stimulating for me, as a spectator, to be manipulated like that. I really enjoy to be manipulated in a way where I think I have understood something, but actually it’s this other thing.