With whom do you identify most in the film?

I feel close to the Abbé in some ways. But in some ways I feel closer to Madeleine. She's the character who finds some sort of joy in the Marquis' literature, whereas the Abbé doesn't really find much value in it. Is there something to be said for the writings of the Marquis? Is there something to be said for pornography? And is there something to be said against both? I hope our film is balanced and rich enough to encourage debate and discussion. How potent, how virile, is art? Can it influence people in bad ways? Or is repression a far worse thing?

You know Madeleine is the most noble, least neurotic character in the whole piece. Some of her observations about the Marquis echo writers as diverse as Simone de Beauvoir, Angela Carter and Camille Paglia -- women who've written about him as well as men like Octavio Paz and Luis Buñuel. I have to go back to Doug Wright's thesis -- that by giving a rebirth to the most notorious writer of all time we might be able to shed light on this question of repression and self-expression.

The passages of Sade's work that are read in the movie are pastiche and not from his work at all. Why? Was there any attempt to soft-pedal Sade?

Doug wrote those passages in part because he didn't have rights to the translations, but he wrote these stories truly in the spirit of the Marquis, using the vocabulary that the translations have used. What's really interesting about that is that a lot of these words that were incendiary in their time now seem almost harmless and laughable, because they have this archaic quality. We went through all of that with Lenny Bruce. He was sort of hounded to death because of "fuck." Now there's not a comedian in the world who doesn't stand up in a nightclub and use that word. Children even use the word. But in Doug's telling, "backside" is one of these shocking words for Napoleon as he hears it.

I don't think we soft-pedal anything. These stories are pretty extreme, but the way we're telling them makes them somewhat more humorous. The very first story is a bishop who lifts up a woman's dress, puts a wafer on her privates and plunges his "pikestaff" into her "very entrails." And there's the story the Marquis tells through the walls to the other prisoners of ripping the prostitute's tongue out and cauterizing the wound with fire. That's in the nature of a Sadeian story.

Where the film really becomes a sadistic, Sadeian tale is when the Marquis' tongue is being cut and turned against him. Some people just want it to be a "Tom Jones" romp. But the story, in order to validate itself, has to take these dark turns. The metaphor is the birth of a writer, played by Joaquin, who arrives at the end of the film as a storyteller. But it's the Marquis' voice who speaks through him from beyond the grave, saying, "I leave you now with the Abbé Coulmier, a man who found freedom at the bottom of an inkwell and the tip of a quill."

Geoffrey Rush said you encouraged him with these visions of a dissolute rock star holed up in the Ritz-Carlton. How did that vision of Sade take hold?

Partly in our talking about it, partly from Doug's original material and partly from myself thinking of Mick Jagger down in the lower depths. But a lot of it comes from Geoffrey Rush. I remember the day when Geoffrey finally put on the Marquis de Sade suit and came onto the set and walked around in those white heels. You could just feel we were up at another level.

Of course, I thought Geoffrey was perfect for the Marquis. When I first met Geoffrey, I found him funny, witty. He's physically interesting; he's provocative, thoughtful; the words go on and on. He approaches everything in a very original way. He was reputed to be Australia's greatest theater actor and always looks different from movie to movie -- you can barely recognize him sometimes. He brought a lot of humor and sophistication to the role.

You've said previously that Sade was not "the Hannibal Lecter of literature." Were you worried about portraying Sade as a monster?

Yes, I definitely wanted to avoid that. For instance, there's that scene where Kate goes into the Marquis' bedroom, approaches his bed and throws back the curtain to see a skeleton. The Marquis says, "Oh, did I scare you?" And she says something like, "Scare me? I'm twice as fast as you." Right away, she pooh-poohs him, and we realize there's a human dimension to this guy. Whatever you think of de Sade, he was a complex figure and we should not look for easy answers with him. He was, strangely perhaps, against the death penalty, and he was never put in prison for murders or anything like that. In a sense, he was imprisoned for his writing -- really by his mother-in-law, for more complex reasons than we can go into.

When you took on this story, were you looking for a way to comment on current events?

Well, it just had resonances the minute I read it. I read it during the Ken Starr-Clinton fiasco. To my mind it was a fiasco because there was so much hypocrisy on the part of the pursuers. And it culminated in Starr's publishing this report that became an instant bestseller and was all over the Internet, much like Dr. Royer-Collard does at the end of the film when he publishes the Marquis' works.

I don't know if we did that scene because of the Ken Starr parallel, but it seemed like the proper ironic twist. Just a couple of weeks ago in the New York Times, they had that big front-page article about porno and these huge corporations that market it. We could open that door (indicating a TV cabinet nearby), flip on a channel and see porno far worse than anything we put in the movie. It's the deep hypocrisy of those who would purify the culture. A lot of people behind this represent the most conservative forces. If there's money to be made, they will do it. So Michael Caine's character in a way mirrors those forces. I also like the fact that Caine ends up with Charlotte the Squealer, the Linda Tripp of the film, the woman who tattles on Madeleine because she's smuggling the Marquis' works out of Charenton.

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