I hit 50 this year. That does things to you. Reality comes crashing in through the roof and you have to run for cover. Four years ago, I made my first movie, American History X; that might have been cause for celebration had I not been preoccupied with destroying myself, my career and my chances of ever working in Hollywood again. I thought I was upholding the old movie industry traditions of strutting around, picking fights with the studio and being the fly in everyone's ointment.

When I left London for Los Angeles in 1990, I saw myself as following in the footsteps of legends like Von Stroheim, Welles, Coppola. I assumed that to be a good director you had to be a pirate just like those guys. What I didn't understand was that they were all playing the game, and playing it magnificently. They had recreated themselves as mythical figures but they had never lost sight of the rules. Unlike me. I did everything just as I'd read that they had done it - the tantrums, the showmanship, the preciousness. And now most executives in most studios won't touch me. It's not that they think I'm no good. It's just that if you're a pain in the arse, it doesn't matter how good your films are. People don't want to be bothered. I had passion - you have to give me that. But I was, it has to be said, a spectacular pain in the ass.

I had been preparing for that first film for 14 years. I was top of the pile in the world of American TV commercials, but I had only got into advertisements because I knew it was a surefire route into movies. But if you're not careful, you get paid a lot of money to stay where you are in life. I could feel that happening. When New Line sent me the script of American History X, about the relationship between a neo-Nazi and his impressionable kid brother, it was deeply flawed. I thought I could manoeuvre around it: invent stuff, improvise, improve what was on the page.

That was one of the reasons I went along with the studio's idea to cast Edward Norton. At the time Norton was Hollywood's golden boy, although personally I didn't think he had enough weight or presence. I held some open casting calls but I couldn't find anyone better than him. And one advantage of having Edward was that we had a shared vision of how to improve the script. In casting him I was really buying another writer.

The shoot went smoothly. That much is evident from the parts of the picture that work. It was the endgame that I wasn't savvy enough to win. That was when everything fell apart, including me.

The first screening of my cut had been a success. Then the studio gave me pages and pages of notes, as did Norton. Let's just say that I was not what you'd call "user friendly". I understand now that when someone offers advice, you shouldn't flare up and throw some prima-donna hissy fit. Better to come up with answers to their questions - or to lie and say you'll give it some thought. I couldn't grasp that.

Their first reaction after I bawled them out was to ban me from the cutting room. Eventually they let me in, and I worked with them on re-edits for a year. In that time, I found a whole new film, one that they never allowed me to finish. At one point, they even let Norton work on the editing. I was so staggered by what he was doing to my film, and by the fact that New Line approved, that I punched the wall and broke my hand.

Whenever I argued with Norton, I didn't have a leg to stand on. He could wipe the floor with me because he's a great articulator. My problem all through American History X was that I could never tell anyone what I wanted to do with the film. Sometimes I didn't even know myself. More often, I was so intimidated by the process that I went into meltdown if I wasn't left alone to work things out. Of course, if you actually listened to what Norton was saying, you could hear that none of it made sense in film-making terms: that's not his forte, as you'll know if you saw the movie that he directed, Keeping the Faith. "Pretty fucking awful" hardly covers that one.

The version of American History X that got released was 40 minutes longer than my cut. I had done a hard, fast, 95-minute rough diamond of a picture. But the movie they put out was crammed with shots of everyone crying in each other's arms. And, of course, Norton had generously given himself more screen time.

When I realised that this cut was being released, I went into a kind of mania. Not that I hadn't already kissed goodbye to rational behaviour. I had hired a priest, a rabbi and a Buddhist monk to sit in on a meeting between myself and the studio executive Michael De Luca at New Line. The priest, the rabbi and the monk hadn't seen the film, but I wanted them at the meeting to lighten it. I told them, "You don't have to be on my side, but if you want to say something in there, just come out with it." They were totally bewildered. It sounds preposterous now, but I was looking for some help from God - anything that would give me the 10 extra weeks I needed to recut the picture. Think how many millions of meetings they have in Hollywood. That's got to be in the all-time top-five crazy-ass powwows ever.

I also got the movie pulled from the Toronto film festival. I was shooting a commercial in Germany when I heard American History X had been accepted, so I jumped on a plane to Canada, marched into the office of the festival organiser and demanded that the film be withdrawn because I wasn't happy with it. New Line went nuts. It would have been a perfect launchpad for the movie, and I shot it down in flames.

I was being a nightmare to New Line. I had started communicating exclusively through advertisements in the trade papers. I would say whatever I needed to say to them in a full-page ad in Variety or the Hollywood Reporter, sometimes quoting Lennon or Shakespeare; sometimes trumpeting myself as the greatest British director since Hitchcock. De Luca responded on one occasion - he placed a copycat ad with a Dr Seuss quote. There was an enormous stir when Terry Gilliam ran a single Variety ad back in 1984, asking the head of Universal when he was planning to release Brazil. But I placed nearly 40 ads. In my eyes, it was the biggest, bloodiest fight in Hollywood since Citizen Kane.

The ads were like a safety net for me. I couldn't have a conversation with anyone, but if I wrote something down, I could distil it, and communicate more succinctly. That's a highly delusional, not to mention incredibly public, way of trying to connect. But I got such a kick out of it at the time. I was making a noise. I'm sure it was hell for everyone else, but I felt energised, like I was on drugs. Once it died down, and I ceased to be hot news, I was stranded in this catastrophic place. All my friends were people who had no interest in helping me get another film made. And those people who would have been interested had been hurt or alienated by what I'd done.

In retrospect, De Luca did his job really well. Not that we're going to have some moist-eyed reconciliation any time soon: that's definitely a door firmly closed, a bridge unequivocally burnt. Recently I was watching a video that I took of one of our breakfast meetings from around that time - I was compulsively videoing everything - and you can see from De Luca's body language that I freaked him out. I was ranting like a madman; it must have been like having breakfast with Robert Mitchum in The Night of the Hunter. When I watch that video, and hear some of the shit I was uttering, I want to blow myself away.

Even when American History X was released, I couldn't see that the battle was over. I hadn't gone to the overdubs, or the premiere, and New Line was begging me to come back because, for a small film like that, it's disastrous to have the director himself discrediting it. I had tried to get my name taken off it, and replaced with various pseudonyms. One was "Humpty Dumpty". Another was "Ralph Coates", who played for Tottenham in the 1970s - I once borrowed his name back in my art-student days when I was collared for fare evasion on the trains. But the Directors' Guild of America ruled that my public complaints about the movie had precluded that course of action. I had immersed myself in books about military strategy, and I got it into my head that I could arrange attacks on theatres that were showing the movie - one idea that almost came to fruition was to send a posse of demonstrators along to barricade the doors and prevent the audience from getting in. I was on a mission. More than that, I was out to lunch.

However ridiculous it sounds now, it was very honest, very heartfelt. Yes, I was just a person who had made a film that didn't go too well. But I had transformed it into a life-or-death situation, and I was only behaving accordingly. I had been making my first movie in my head for so long, I don't think anything would have measured up to my standards. I had set myself this trap, and then walked merrily into it. Deep down, I was fighting myself, and that's a battle that no one is equipped to win.

I was rescued from ending up on a hospital gurney or in a straitjacket by a combination of clarity and crisis. On one hand, I realised that I needed to get off the hamster wheel. I stopped talking on the phone; I hired an intermediary to do all my calls, so if anyone wanted to speak to me it had to be done through this person. That immediately drained the emotion out of everything; I became dispassionate, rational. I stopped going into restaurants, too. I needed to be away from everyone, from the industry. In Los Angeles that's tough. I needed not to feel trapped any more.

I didn't watch the Oscars that year. I don't know what I was doing instead - probably climbing the walls at New Line or plotting some bizarre military campaign. I usually love those Academy awards ceremonies, but I couldn't bring myself to do it: I was too involved. I knew that Norton would get a best actor nomination. But I also knew in my heart that if they had let me finish the movie my way, he would have won it. I appre ciate now that I was an immature idiot, and a complete egomaniac. But I had passion. And that passion helped a young actor give the best performance of his career, and get nominated for an Academy award. I played my part in that.

Around that time, I was up to my eyeballs in debt. My commercials production company had gone down the chute, and I owed millions. My marriage had fallen apart - not that it hadn't fallen apart before, but American History X was the last straw. I had been trying to set up as my second feature an unpublished Tennessee Williams script called One Arm, but that had collapsed in the wake of the American History X furore. Marlon Brando had been attached to the movie: I placed one of my famous full-page ads in the trade papers telling him I had a script I wanted him to read, and he contacted me. He's a bit of a joke in Hollywood - no one takes him seriously any more - and he was flattered that this new director was showing him real respect. I think he sympathised with me, too - it was like I was standing on a window ledge, preparing to throw myself off, and he was talking me down. For a while, it looked as if Brando and I were really on to something. But we fell out when I stopped using the phone: he refused to speak to my intermediary.

That abstinence from the hysteria of daily life saved me in the end. I can see now how absurd my behaviour was - and so I have been cultivating relationships in Hollywood again for the past year, being a real diplomat, playing the game. I like it; I enjoy going with the flow. I've recorded an EP of my songs, with help from a brass band in Bermuda; one of the tracks, titled Hollywood, deals with my ambivalent relationship with the movie business, and hinges on the refrain: "Looking back, looking back/ There's nothing as beautiful as Hollywood."

And I started doing commercials again, as a way of funding my independent projects. Among them are a documentary about abortion during the Clinton years, called The Lake of Fire, which everyone is too frightened to screen; and a video scrapbook called Epicomedy, cataloguing my life from American History X to the present, and featuring footage of Marlon and me chatting together. It's this that in his wisdom he has now seen fit to ban: I had been all set to screen some of it at Raindance until he intervened.

But we will be friends again. We've always had a strange relationship. When I decided to start using the phone again, he called and asked me to direct an acting masterclass that he wanted to film for a DVD. He intended it to be a tutorial in how to use acting, performance, lying, in your everyday life; it was really a genius idea. After asking me to direct, he then decided we should co-direct, which sounded like hell to me. So I said: "No, Marlon, I'll just be in it." On the first day, I turned up dressed as Osama bin Laden. He wasn't too happy. He phoned me the next morning and said, "I didn't like that. This is my show, not yours." Then he asked what I was going to be wearing that day. Already I felt my position in the whole thing becoming unstable.

The next day, some students that he had brought along to the class were acting out this godawful scene. When I told them it was boring, it sparked off a huge Jerry Springer-style slanging match during which Marlon threw out a student who defended me. I had taken along some other students, so we all walked out in support. I had no other choice, though I'm sure it will turn out to be a gigantic mistake. The DVD is bound to be a success, and Marlon had offered me a massive percentage. But I've got so many other things to do; I can't waste my time on something that isn't fun, whether it's with Marlon Brando or not.

After that happened, I started getting strange calls on my answerphone. The worst was a message from someone claiming to be the Devil: he said he was in my house, and he was going to murder me. It was real Charlie Manson stuff. I was away at the time: the people who were staying in my house got spooked and took the tape to the police. When I heard it, I was horrified; it sounded blood-curdling.

I never meant to upset Marlon with the Osama bin Laden stunt; I genuinely thought he would find it amusing. It was something I'd taken to doing around that time. I remember watching that first tape of Bin Laden standing outside his cave with a microphone, and I thought: that would go down really well in a comedy club. The next thing I thought was: oh no, you can't do that. But the minute something frightens me, I know I have to do it. So I got the outfit together, right down to the Timex watch, and I tried to get a booking on the New York comedy circuit. I'd done some stand-up there just after American History X - during the delusional period - but I couldn't get on a comedy stage as Bin Laden. Eventually I got a booking at a poetry reading, though I think the audience was more upset that I hadn't composed a poem than that I had come dressed as Bin Laden.

I did a few appearances like that in New York in the weeks following the World Trade Centre attacks. The most frightening one was when I was casting for Marlon's workshop. I turned up to the theatre in the costume and a couple of people threw coffee over me. It was amazing to be the target of so much hate. And so much cheap coffee.

I believed I was doing what Charlie Chaplin did to Adolf Hitler - doing my bit for the country by recasting this symbol of evil as an object of ridicule. George Bush told us we had to continue living our lives as normal in the wake of the attacks, and that's what I was doing.

I'm not a troublemaker any more. I've learned to channel that side of myself into the work - that's where my eccentricities go now. The commercials enable me to do the films and music I want to do, but I'm not into upsetting or provoking people any more. I can put that stuff into my work now, which I could never do before; it just used to spill out uncontrollably. I don't want to be that person. It's hard enough to get films made as it is, let alone if everyone thinks you're a raving lunatic.

I'm much happier now. It doesn't bother me that I might be a complete failure as a film-maker. I've faced that possibility, and it doesn't scare me. I enjoy being a humble idiot now, and there are rumours that my release from Hollywood jail is imminent. I've even had meetings at New Line again. All I can say for sure is I am reformed. The Bin Laden costume is firmly packed away in the closet now, and that's where it's staying.