Many film-makers have profited from the wild and vivid imagination of Alejandro Jodorowsky, but Jodorowsky himself is not one of them. He has made three classic cult movies - El Topo, The Holy Mountain and Santa Sangre - and he has had a significant influence on popular culture over the past 35 years, from Mexican cinema to the making of Alien, the imagery of Marilyn Manson and even the development of mime. But he hasn't made a penny out of it.

A Chilean-born Jewish Russian, Jodorowsky has described his films as the equivalent of psychedelic drugs. They mix surrealism, mysticism and warped violence, and have invariably been too esoteric, too pretentious or too graphic for popular consumption. They are, however, filled with unforgettable images: the conquest of Latin America re-enacted by costumed frogs; a circus elephant's funeral, complete with giant coffin; a master duellist whose weapon is a butterfly net.

His film-making techniques were similarly unorthodox. He regularly used non-actors he found on location, and there are tales of him putting them, and himself, through gruelling experiences for the camera. Rumour has it he would make them drink one another's blood, film real violence rather than staged and dangle himself off rickety rope bridges in the desert. Allegedly, he even killed 300 rabbits with his bare hands for one scene.

Separating truth from fiction, or even the past from the present, has always been a problem with a figure like Jodorowsky. Today - silver-haired, smartly dressed and surrounded by cats in his book-lined Paris apartment - he looks every bit the senior artist. However, his contempt for linear thought is undiminished.

"Listen," he says. "I can make this interview like a normal person. I am not a normal person. I am living in a normal body, but my mind is not normal. When you speak about my past, I have no past. You see the person I am now - I am 74. My wife is 37 years younger than me. I don't feel the difference. My consciousness is without limits more than when I was 40 or 50. I don't regret any past. I am not there. I am not sorry not to make pictures, because I know one day I will do it. I intend to live 150 years. I am only in the middle of my life. So when you say what do you think about the past? Nothing! It's done!"

This much we do know. Having directed theatre in Chile and studied mime in Paris with Marcel Marceau (for whom he claims to have invented the famous "I'm trapped inside a glass box" routine), Jodorowsky filmed his no-budget 1967 debut, Fando y Lis, from a half-remembered play by his surrealist associate Fernando Arrabal. The film generated censure and death threats in Mexico. But Jodorowsky didn't come to international attention until two years later when he released El Topo, in which he plays a black-clad gunslinger in search of enlightenment.

The film was seen by John Lennon, who advised Apple manager Allen Klein to buy the rights to it, and introduced the first screening of it in New York. El Topo became a permanent fixture of late-night hippie cinema for the rest of the decade and a favourite of the emerging New Hollywood generation, particularly the likes of Dennis Hopper and Jack Nicholson. Hopper's ill-fated follow-up to Easy Rider, The Last Movie, was inspired by Jodorowsky's spontaneous, free-ranging methods, as well as his mystical and anthropological concerns. At one stage, Hopper invited Jodorowsky to his studio in Taos, New Mexico to help him finish the movie.

"When I see the rushes - not very clear, but some beautiful scenes," Jodorowsky remembers. "He had a lot of material and six editing machines, but he could not do it. In one or two days I cut it myself, but I think Dennis didn't want another guy making his movie, so he rejected it and made his own. It was not so good. Later I asked him to be in Santa Sangre, and he said no, just like that."

Meanwhile, Lennon had persuaded Klein to put up $1m to help Jodorowsky make another film, The Holy Mountain. Like El Topo, it was a spiritual quest, this time following a Christ-like figure (Jodorowsky, again) seeking immortality. "El Topo was normal, The Holy Mountain was abnormal. My ambition was enormous. I wanted to make a picture like you would make a holy book, like the Bhagavad Gita or the Tao Te Ching. I went very far."

Jodorowsky hired a fashionable guru to prepare him, performing mystical exercises and experimenting with LSD and magic mushrooms (the only time he has taken drugs, he says). He put his cast through a similar process, keeping them in a house together for two months and allowing them only four hours' sleep a night. The result was even more extravagant than El Topo, and although it was never shown in the US, it became an underground hit in Europe.

Jodorowsky's next project was even more ambitious. Over-ambitious, as it turned out: a $20m French-financed adaptation of Frank Herbert's Dune. An impressive team was assembled. Orson Welles agreed to take a role, as did Salvador Dali, who recommended to Jodorowsky a Swiss painter called HR Giger for concept designs. Also on the team were Pink Floyd, French graphic artist Moebius and writer Dan O'Bannon. After a year of preparation, the project fell through. According to Jodorowsky, the Hollywood producers realised they could make a similar picture without a wild card like himself at the helm, and pulled the plug. Jodorowsky's disregard for the sanctity of Herbert's novel could also have been a factor.

A few years later, Hollywood was working on its own version of Dune, with David Lynch directing. Meanwhile, Ridley Scott made Alien with half the crew Jodorowsky had assembled, including Giger as creature designer and O'Bannon as writer. Jodorowsky was left behind. His one triumphant return was Santa Sangre, made in 1990: a customarily freakish but more accessible circus horror with echoes of Tod Browning and Hitchcock's Psycho. There were two more failed projects: an Indian elephant film, Tusk, and an unreleased film, The Rainbow Thief, starring Peter O'Toole ("I hated him; he was the worst person I ever met in my life").

"When you don't do something, you shouldn't think of it as a failure," says Jodorowsky. "Failure doesn't exist. It's only a change of direction." Now he has turned to the medium of comic books, where his imagination can run riot without budgetary constraints. He has several titles on the go, including an epic sci-fi series, Incal, with Moebius, and its offshoot, Metabarons, a sort of delirious, space-age Greek tragedy.

There are plans for a $15m sequel to El Topo, in which Jodorowsky's friend and fan, Marilyn Manson, is expected to star. But raising capital is difficult for Jodorowsky, and he has no expectations.

Nor does he have any bitterness, he says, towards those who have made money from his ideas. "It's not important. What's important is to give your ideas to the world if you love the world. My pictures are a gift. I am an honest artist.

"For me, the goal of art is to heal. I see avant-garde art now - it is all destructive. But I think to be avant-garde, you need to be a saint. That's why I push my art into therapy. I help people. In the last six months, three young people who were going to commit suicide have told me I saved their lives. That is better than making films."