Each time I set out to make a film I am starting all over again. I remember the films I have made as dreams, or fugue states, too intense and painful to bear. But once they are over, all I can think about is: how do I get back there, wherever there is. Any film begins to assemble itself long in advance, on the outer edge of an intuition. Being a director at this stage is like being a woman who is only beginning to think of becoming pregnant. It begins as a nudge, an idea of itself first, a galactic child nagging you to yank it out of oblivion. Four years ago I went to Portbou for the first time, and remembered who had died there, and what it meant. In that strange place -narrow streets truncated by mountains or by the sea, the devouring lurid perspective of the place - a new child was born.

I wondered why his life had never been filmed. When I first floated the idea, Joanna said: that film's been done, intellectuals, Holocaust, Nazis shouting " Raus !" We're living through an eruption of neo-fascism now. Shouldn't you write a story of our times instead of treading over well-worn ground? "Well-worn ground is the best kind of ground." "What kind of budget are we talking?" she snaps. "I don't know. Three million. Pounds," I add, for good measure. "Too -" Joanna's hand flatlines just beneath her nose - her habitual gesture of the task of balancing artistic inspiration with the likelihood of financing - "low.

And anyway, who would watch a film about a hapless Jewish intellectual everyone pretends to understand when actually no-one has the faintest what he was writing about?" I would, I think. And it's too late, in any event. He - Walter Benjamin - is already here with me, his serge overcoat, its cuffs rubbed so clean they look like coils, his copper eyes luring me into the livid dimension of the resurrected.