A month or so ago, a tiny shop selling delicate chocolates on 132nd Street in New York decided to make an elaborate confection in honour of cult film director Vincent Gallo. The woman who ran the shop, Christina Markoff, thought it might be fun to have Vincent involved in the unveiling, and so contacted the great man to see if he would like to come. Gallo responded almost immediately with a raft of demands about how the chocolate should be produced: the consistency and darkness of the cocoa powder; the design and finish of the chocolate itself; and, of course, the issue of copyright. Markoff was so scared of incurring the wrath of Gallo that she shelved her homage in confectionery and went back to making coffee creams.
Gallo has a reputation as not only one of the most paranoid, controlling men in movies, but also one of the funniest. There is no slight too small to pursue, no grudge unworthy of holding. As the chocolate story demonstrates, there is nothing he can't be viciously funny about, even if he demonstrates his particular brand of humour by appearing to have had a complete humour bypass.
Paranoia and control-freakery hardly mark Gallo out from anyone else parking their armour-plated Lexus in a Hollywood studio lot; what does is that he has turned his fear and loathing into an art form.
In 1997 Gallo wrote a notorious piece for Grand Royal magazine, the in-house publication of the Beastie Boys. The piece took the form of an interview with himself, and is one of the most hilariously searing attacks on Hollywood ever written. It begins by asserting: "The best interview of Vincent Gallo was done by Vincent Gallo. The best articles about Vincent Gallo were written by Vincent Gallo, the best acting performance of Vincent Gallo was directed and edited by Vincent Gallo from a screenplay written by Vincent Gallo. So you see, this is painful for me. I'm better off interviewing myself. Imagine getting to interview myself. I'd be so excited, I'd shit my pants."
In the "interview", Gallo lists everyone he despises in the film industry. It is a breath-taking index of hatred, taking in directors such as Abel Ferrara (who, Gallo alleges, was too high on crack to direct properly), lowly make-up artists and costume designers who once slighted him by failing to let him keep a designer jacket, fellow actors such as Tim Roth ("that filthy mini-dwarf no-talent Brit") and Chloë Sevigny ("Connecticut without the etiquette... too busy spreading Harmony Korine's herpes" to act properly).
Beyond Hollywood, the list took in, at random, former business associates, gallery owners, people he once met at a party and didn't like the expression on their face. Gallo also took a broad swipe at the east-coast liberal establishment (a bête noir of his), John Kennedy Jr ("that philandering cadaver") and the then president: "Bill and Hillary Clinton and their ugly, orphan-like daughter Chelsea".
For all its petty beefs, the Grand Royal "interview" is a breathtaking piece of writing. The stream of vitriol is unrelenting, and Gallo's sense of humour about himself, shown by his perpetual self-aggrandisement, is curiously disarming: "God, I do it all," he says at one point. "I glow like a ray of light is around me. A kind of Jesus."
Unfortunately, not many people got the joke - not even Gallo, whose parodic portrayal of himself as the ultimate nightmare interviewee was subsequently backed up in real interviews, in which he intimidated anyone who dared cross him in even the tiniest way, asserting that he had the vindictive, furious vengeance of a thousand men.
All this didn't bode well for me when, a year ago, I decided to contact Gallo to make a programme for a Channel 4 series I produce called The Art Show. The film was to be based loosely on the Grand Royal piece, and I already had a title that I was sure Gallo would like: 48 People Who Should Be Shot in Hollywood.
I wanted to use Gallo's hit list as a way of telling his real story. As well as an actor and director (of, most famously, Buffalo 66, hailed as one the best independent movies of the 1990s), Gallo has also been a model for Calvin Klein, a motorcycle champion, a breakdancer and hip-hop impresario ("I was the first white homeboy on earth"), an expressionist painter, mumbling folk singer and - something he is less keen to advertise on his CV - a go-go dancer in a gay strip club and a rent boy on 52nd Street.
Of course, most if not all of this is probably untrue. When you deal with Vincent Gallo, this is the kind of man you're dealing with: someone who has spun so many myths about himself, you really can't be sure what is real and what is designed simply to further the bad-boy brand. If his own list of achievements is to be believed, Gallo has had a hand in, if not actually brought about, most of the great cultural moments of the past 20 years.
Gallo claims to have met Richard Nixon when he was six and lived with William Burroughs. According to him, he befriended and (of course) was screwed over by Jean-Michel Basquiat: "One of the most talented, charming, charismatic, clever, bright, irresponsible, self-centred, self-indulgent, bastards that I've ever met. He became a millionaire art star... Sometimes it's good to be black." Gallo turned Quentin Tarantino down for the role of Mr Pink in Reservoir Dogs, though whether he actually just failed to get it is hard to tell. I'll let you decide.
I tried to get a number for Gallo through a record company that released some scratchy, self-indulgent folk albums of his. "If you speak to him," they told me, "get him to give us a call. We haven't heard from him in over a year."
Gallo doesn't have an agent. He uses a trusted friend who lives on Sunset Boulevard called Cad to field requests for him. Cad told me that Vincent was deep in editing his new movie Brown Bunny, the long-awaited follow-up to Buffalo 66. "How much you paying him?" Cad asked.
"Well, we don't have much money. It's an arts programme. Certainly far less than Vincent would have got for playing a Mexican transvestite serial killer in Freeway II: Confessions of a Trickbaby."
"Hmmm. Let me speak to him and I'll get back to you."
Cad never got back to me, but out of the blue I got an email from Gallo saying he would be interested in the doing the film, but "please, could you wait until I've finished editing my movie". The rumour in LA was that the editing of Brown Bunny was not going well. Bitchy stories on the internet referred to the film as Brown Turkey, and Gallo was tearing his hair out trying to turn the film around in the edit.
Perhaps this explained Vincent's sudden change of mood towards our film. One day I decide to call him. "Hi, is that Vincent?" (Long silence.) "No, this is Vincent's brother." Strange. It sure sounds like Vincent. "Is Vincent there?" "No. This - is - Vincent's - brother," he says, enunciating each word as if uttering them causes him physical pain. "And Vincent's brother says leave Vincent alone!" The next day our stringer calls him and is told more straightforwardly: "Go away, witch!"
Undaunted, we track Gallo down to the Cannes film festival a month later, where he has flown in with the finished cans of film for Brown Bunny. He believes that if he entrusts them to anyone else, he will be screwed over in some way or a copy will appear suddenly on the internet. He is in a foul mood, we are told by a publicist. This is not a good time to approach him.
The word in Cannes is that the film is catastrophically bad. The highlights of the plotless road movie appear to be a 15-minute shot of a dirty windscreen gradually accumulating dead bugs, and an equally tedious blow-job involving Chloë Sevigny and a very pleased-looking Gallo. Roger Ebert calls it the worst film ever seen at the festival and Gallo conducts one of the weirdest press conferences anyone has ever seen at Cannes, apologising for the film and bursting into tears.
We stalk him for a couple of days, putting cryptic notes under his hotel bedroom door referring to 48 People Who Should Be Shot in Hollywood as a way of reminding him of our existence. They don't exactly have the desired effect. Gallo looks disturbed when we see him next. He is wandering around Cannes like a ghost, far too depressed to talk to anyone, let alone some jerks from television with an idiotic programme idea. We think that he has in fact forgotten entirely about the programme idea and suspects that these notes under his bedroom door are from a psychopath. Jesus, I think, we've really scared him...
Against the odds, he calls up suddenly and agrees to meet us in a bar to discuss the show. When we meet, he wants to know what we thought of the movie. He seems desperate to find someone, anyone, who liked the film. "Well, er, the scenery looked nice," we offer. "Thanks," he says, genuinely touched. He tells us he can't do our film as he has to re-cut his own. He is flying back to LA immediately with the cans of film and no one is going to see even a single frame until it has been re-cut. We stay in the bar drinking with him for several hours, but only after we have proved to him that we have no recording equipment of any kind about our persons.
Days after our meeting, Gallo seems in better spirits, going on the offensive and launching a vicious attack on Roger Ebert, calling him "a fat pig with the physique of a slave trader" and hoping he gets cancer and dies. Gallo adds for good measure that he once put a hex on Ebert's partner, Gene Siskel, who died in 1999 of complications from a brain tumour.
In spite of the fighting talk, Gallo seems devastated by the hostile reception to Brown Bunny. The viciousness of the attack on Ebert (made all the more unpleasant by Ebert's announcement that he did indeed have cancer) seems less like Gallo's humour than a sign that the man is unravelling.
How did he end up so angry?
Gallo was born in 1962 and raised in Buffalo, New York state - an icy nowhere place whose sole claim to fame is that once a year, the town appears on the national news when someone gets stuck in their car in a giant snowdrift. His mother ran a beauty salon and his father dragged him seven days a week to various racetracks. "And boy, was it fun," says Gallo. "I got to starve all day long and finally maybe got a hot dog and a cup of warm water, while watching my father lose my mother's hard-earned pay."
Gallo is keen to play up how badly he was treated as child, and seems to use his parents' behaviour as an explanation for just about every one of his own neuroses (though, thanks to a therapist called Malcolm Hill, he has largely forgiven them). Yet there doesn't seem to be much evidence of abuse. He says of his father that "there wasn't a day when he didn't hit me, punish me, yell at me or tell me something I did was wrong," and he alleges that he was grounded once for a year because he raised the house's thermostat from 38 to 41 degrees. But as far as I could tell, his dad seemed merely a bit grumpy.
Just as Gallo seems to parody the idea of being a difficult Hollywood star, he romanticises the background that might create such a star. The Gallo mythology does not merely involve vaguely unspecified abuse in childhood (very Oprah), but an unreconstructed white-trash Republicanism. That, like everything else about the man, is so over the top, it's comical. Gallo likes to portray himself as racist and anti-semitic. An interviewer once asked him if he wasn't Jewish himself. "No, I do not have the Jew gene," he replied tersely.
These views seem "real" but in fact they are a complete pose: much as he might deny it, Gallo is impeccably broad-minded. No, the reason he maintains his hillbilly political incorrectness is that it looks cool and outsider-ish (compare and contrast this with the pompous sermonising of Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins). It's an artful strategy to appear controversial, and he does his best to keep a straight face when engaging in it.
When he talks politics, he eulogises "about what a wonderful president George Bush has been so far.... how ridiculous handicap parking is, why the Puerto Ricans think they need to have a parade down 5th Avenue, or the gays for that matter too". Gallo's hatred of immigrants, scroungers, Jews, gays and liberals is so broad and exaggerated, it's comical. Yet Gallo is serious in one respect. His hatred is not based upon whom these people are (like many rightwing Republicans, Gallo comes from immigrant stock), but how easily these people have come by success in America.
The key to Gallo is not that he is reactionary, or even that he's just doing all this rightwing shtick for effect, but that he genuinely cannot bear anyone making it without having struggled as damn hard as he has to become a successful movie star. It's not personal so much as childish.
Unsurprisingly, Gallo refers everything back to his childhood, mining his youth for anecdotes. "When I was 12, I was a compulsive masturbator. I used my mother's hand lotion. I was up to about 10 times a day and started to need help." He was a good-looking lad and had attention from both sexes. At 16, he moved to New York, making his living by picking up $5 bills at Studio 54 that had been discarded by "coke-snorting queens". He claims to have worked as a rent boy, yet even this story seems designed merely to keep his gay audience happy. Gallo says of this episode of his life that "I must make it clear that I'm not gay. Never have been. Never will be. But if I was gay, I would have made one of the great gays of all time."
It's no accident that Gallo, like Woody Allen, is admired more in Europe than in the US. (The French love him: When Brown Bunny was accorded the dubious accolade of worst film ever shown at Cannes, several French critics bemoaned the fact that their countrymen hadn't managed to produce a more pretentious film to rival Gallo's.) His breakthrough movie, Buffalo 66, was an American independent movie with a deadly European earnestness about it, and the film's faux-seriousness is one of the reasons it is so funny. Yet Buffalo was snubbed at Sundance by one of the judges, Paul Schrader, who, Gallo says, "is that half-man who wrote a couple of scripts for Scorsese". In spite of the film's commercial success, Gallo never got over the fact it never received the critical acclaim he thought it deserved.
Buffalo 66 and Brown Bunny bookend Gallo's career, justly or unjustly. This is in spite of the fact he has turned in some notable acting performances in movies such as Palookaville and House of Spirits. Yet he is still better-known for his off-screen persona. His life is an ongoing work of fiction, a work of art far more interesting than anything he could do or make. Gallo is also, ultimately, a satirist. He satirises the idea of celebrity and success, simply by trying to be a celebrity and trying to be a success. And the negativity and vitriol he pours on everything and everyone is an energy. It's what we all feel about the world, but no one has the guts to say out loud.
Three months into making our film, we are deluged with stories from one-time acquaintances and obsessive fans of Gallo. Yet he manages to nobble a number of people who first agree to contribute to the film, and then mysteriously (or not so mysteriously) drop out. We receive a letter from Kate Moss's lawyer informing us that if we repeat any of the allegations made about her in the Grand Royal article, we're dust.
Gallo finds time in his schedule to tell everyone involved that "Jacques Peretti is a bad man trying to do bad things to Vincent." I continue to worry that he will actually come over and kill me (the way you do when you're a major Hollywood star), even though the film is a sympathetic, even affectionate character assassination.
A friend who interviewed him for a film magazine assures me that Gallo is "all mouth and no trousers. He threatened me, too, but it never came to blows. He's got a glass jaw." It doesn't fill me with confidence, though, and when the lawyer looking after the film says, "Well, when it comes to it, you could have him in a fight," I feel it might be worth investing in some tae kwan do lessons. He might be willowy, but it's the willowy ones you have to watch out for.
· Jacques Peretti's 48 People Who Should Be Shot in Hollywood will be shown on Channel 4 on November 28.