FILM / Rewind: A tender wolf: The actor Gottfried John remembers Rainer Werner Fassbinder

I FIRST met Fassbinder when he was looking for an actor to play the lead in Eight Hours Are Not a Day (1972). My first impression was of a child - a big, fat, naughty child. He always seemed very young. He was very direct, which these days is rare and could be hurtful. He always said exactly what was on his mind. He didn't make any concessions, which was hard for people around him, because most of us can't live like that.

At first we fought all the time and a kind of love-hate relationship developed. Later, it became constructive: I directed him in the theatre in Frankfurt - he was a very good actor - and we met up again and again. We must have made about 10 films together. It was very easy, very natural, fast, intensive. You never had the feeling that he was directing you; he never said anything at all. He refused to tell you how to play a scene. He just looked on intently. And the first take was crucial: no second chances] That's why he worked so fast, and why there was huge tension because, as in life, we couldn't do things again.

His films were unconventional, and not so smooth. That's why he was notorious and was said to be a difficult man. but it's more to do with the fact that he was several people rolled into one. In Berlin Alexanderplatz, for instance, Franz Biberkopf, the hero, and Reinhold, my character, are both very different, but each man is the other's alter ego. I think that's what fascinated him about the original novel: the good personality and the negative one, who are actually one and the same.

I saw him for the last time about three months before he died. He was full of plans and projects. He was always depressed, because of his inner loneliness, but I don't think he knew he was about to die, although he realised he would never grow old - he said he would rather live life to extremes than grow old and dead inside. Some people thought he had a death wish, but I always saw it more as a lust for life.

He put a lot of his own money into the smaller films because he could find no-one to produce them. Today he is part of film history, but it's a shame we'll never know his reaction to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder died of a drugs overdose in 1982. A season of his work, including 'Berlin Alexanderplatz', continues at the ICA until the end of the month

(Photograph omitted)