My first film, Get Carter, was a hit in 1971. In 1972, my second feature disappeared. United Artists, who financed it, loved my script for Memoirs of a Ghost Writer, but hated the title. An alternative had to be found and, bizarrely, that alternative ended up being Pulp. The posters carried this copy: "Pulp means paperback books, also means pulverised bodies. Mickey King writes pulp, lives pulp, very soon could be pulp." The new title turned out to be not just a title but a prophecy. Despite starring Michael Caine, Mickey Rooney, Lionel Stander, Lizabeth Scott and Denis Price, the film might just as well have been pulped in the literary sense - but received the cinematic equivalent.

It was a comedy, very offbeat, and the US distributors hadn't the vaguest idea what to do with it. Banished to some vault somewhere in Burbank, Pulp languished for a year or more. Then one day, a technician appeared, brushed the accumulated dust from its label to make sure he had the right unknown, unloved film, and loaded it on to a truck. It was on its way to New York.

A new cinema had opened there. I forget its name, but it was dedicated to showing "lost" films. Each film for one week only. Little did I know at the time that I would almost singlehandedly be able to keep that cinema in business for years. Eventually, they might even have named it after me. Anyway, the first film they chose to screen was Pulp.

Now, at last, the critics would get to see it. Much to the distributor's surprise, it received rave reviews. Time magazine got a little overheated and even mentioned the word "masterpiece". While I'm of the opinion that film critics spend too much time in the dark, I'm always grateful when, in the case of my own work, they come to the right conclusions. As they did in this case. Enthusiasm for the film burst from the pages of magazines and newspapers and from radios and televisions across the city, and I like to think of the New York masses converging excitedly on the cinema whose name I've forgotten. Maybe that's a Freudian lapse? For this is where the curse kicks in again. Remember, my film was playing for one week only. So, by the time the aforementioned ecstatic reviews emerged, it was playing nowhere.

Its run was over. But my career wasn't. In 1974, I rolled the dice again. Snake eyes. Fate was lining me up for my second "lost" film. This was The Terminal Man, which Warner Bros asked me to adapt from Michael Crichton's second novel. In retrospect, I see it was a project that resolutely defied box-office appeal. Yet I chose to make it. Why? I suppose because I get little satisfaction from making films that might be considered commercially safe. I like the risky ones. That philosophy can be tough in a world that's financially driven and sees vast profits in producing the familiar, whether it's cars or computers or hamburgers or films. But then the familiar can also be dangerous territory. It can lull you into complacency.

Contemplate complacency for a moment. You feel good, right? You have a healthy bank account, a healthy body, a healthy sex life, a healthy outlook. Just like Harry Benson, the hero of The Terminal Man. Until he suffers brain damage in a car crash. Within seconds complacency is banished. It's replaced by an anger, a violence, that's uncontrollable. Benson, as a last resort, agrees to let his medical team break into his head, the tabernacle of life itself. Once in there, they will implant terminals (hence the film's title) and then select those that will be used to abort his attacks. Inevitably they select the pleasure cells. The very cells that make the world of commerce whirl like prayer wheels. Whirling, it seems, in the hope of eternal growth in output and profits.

The obvious insanity at the very heart of what drives us also drove me to make the film. Years before I had written and directed a television film called The Manipulators. The title is self-explanatory, and, not surprisingly, includes library film of Pavlov's behavioural experiments. The methods of manipulation performed on animals, including us humans, was already an obsession with me. So Harry Benson's predicament now became mine. And the way I intended to communicate this to an audience was to have them observe Benson as if he was a trapped animal.

The film seemed an obvious candidate for shooting in monochrome, but Warners was not enthusiastic about that idea. In retrospect I'm grateful to the studio because it forced me to choose another route. I eliminated all primary colours from the sets and costumes; only allowing red to feature in two scenes before a profusion of colour at the very end, at a funeral of all places. In my effort to illuminate Benson's loneliness, I consistently broke the rules of commercial film-making. For example, when we witness Benson suffering, the camera doesn't move closer but actually pulls away as if finding it too painful to watch. Even the music - a single Goldberg variation played by Glenn Gould - defied convention (one executive at Warners asked when I was going to orchestrate it). The film was shipped to Toronto for Gould's approval. His own solitary existence and extreme hypochondria must have made for a weird screening.

It was to be another 16 years before I managed to rustle up my next "lost" film. This was Black Rainbow, an original script, written on spec, picked up by John Quested for Goldcrest Films and distributed in the UK by Palace Pictures. It starred Rosanna Arquette as Martha Travis, a dodgy medium on the road with her father and was shot over six weeks in North Carolina. The film's motif could have been Karl Marx's dictum: "All that is solid melts into air." Indeed the last line of the film comes from the journalist intent on exposing Travis as a fraud. When he finally walks out on his editor, he yells: "Now you see me; now you don't." That line summed up the film's distribution in the UK and US.

From then on I consoled myself by calling my work "films in bottles". They would wash up somewhere, some time, and maybe surprise somebody watching some remote cable channel in the early hours. This theory was proven correct one morning when I was working with composer Simon Fisher Turner on the music for Croupier (very nearly my fourth "lost" film, but was saved from cinema oblivion by a small maverick distributor in the US). The doorbell rang. It was a Japanese musician friend of Simon's, who was built like a sumo wrestler. They did their business, and he was on his way out. He suddenly turned back and approached me. My name had rung a bell. "You make Black Rainbow?" "I did." "I see six times." I was so astonished I assumed he'd seen it on video. "No. In cinema. Black Rainbow very big in Japan." He bowed and left.

Big in Japan? It was news to me. Trouble is, I don't live in Japan. I live in the UK. And on that score, a definite pattern has finally emerged. Last year I wrote my first novel. True to form it will not be seen in the UK. It has no publisher here. But it does have a publisher in - I still can't quite believe it - in France! And in French! Touché.

• Black Rainbow is screening on November 30 at the ICA, London, and The Terminal Man: The Directors Cut on December 3.