Making waves, however, is what Haneke has become famous for. Over the last two decades, the director has developed a reputation for stark, often brutal films that place the viewer — sometimes subtly, sometimes explicitly — in the uncomfortable role of accomplice to the crimes playing out on-screen. This approach has made Haneke one of contemporary cinema’s most reviled and revered figures, earning him everything from accusations of obscenity to a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art next month. “Funny Games,” the movie Haneke was shooting in New York and Long Island, is the American remake of a highly controversial film by the same name that he directed in 1997. It was from its beginnings targeted at the American moviegoing public — and no other word but “targeted” will do. “Funny Games” is a direct assault on the conventions of cinematic violence in the United States, and the new version of the film, with its English-speaking cast and unmistakably American production design, makes this excruciatingly clear. More surprising still, Haneke remade this attack on the Hollywood thriller for a major Hollywood studio, Warner Independent Pictures, and refused to alter the original film’s story in the slightest.

“ ‘Funny Games’ is an anti-genre film,” Haneke told me over lunch on his last day in New York. “It moves like a thriller, it has a thriller’s structure, but at the same time it comments on itself. A movie is always a manipulation, regardless of whether it’s a biopic or a romantic comedy, and ‘Funny Games’ takes this manipulation as its primary subject. So you were perfectly right to feel uncomfortable.” “People in the film industry underestimate their audience,” he continued. “I believe the viewer is fundamentally more intelligent than most films give him credit for, but only if you give him the opportunity to use his brain.”

This question of who’s watching — both within the film and outside of it — is one of Haneke’s chief obsessions. For most successful directors, whether in Europe or America, the audience exists to be entertained; for Haneke it seems to exist to be confronted. Where another director might cut tactfully away, Haneke’s camera lingers. His screenplays, which he always writes himself, have a sense of purpose about them that only polemic works of art can have. The ideology that underlies Haneke’s filmmaking is a deeply personal, idiosyncratic one, but it’s an ideology nonetheless. Haneke is a man very much at odds with the accepted values of the industry he works in, and if you ask him, he’ll be happy to tell you why.

“Political manipulation is rampant in the American media,” Haneke told me over lunch in downtown Manhattan last winter. “It’s present in the movies too, of course. It’s everywhere. I teach filmmaking in Vienna, and I like to show my students ‘Triumph of the Will,’ by Leni Riefenstahl, then something by Sergei Eisenstein — ‘Battleship Potemkin,’ for example — and then ‘Air Force One,’ the movie in which Harrison Ford plays the U.S. president. Each of these films has a distinct political agenda, but all make use of exactly the same techniques, all have a common goal — the total manipulation of the viewer. What’s terrible about the Harrison Ford film, though, especially terrible, is that it represents itself as simple entertainment. The audience doesn’t realize there’s a message hidden there.” Haneke sat back and shook his head gravely.

The difference between Haneke’s agenda and that of films like “Air Force One” was cast into sharp relief at the premiere of the original “Funny Games” in Cannes. “It was funny — funny for me, at least — how the theater reacted to Anna’s shooting of Dickie,” Haneke told me, referring to a scene late in the film when the heroine turns the tables on her captors. “There was actual applause at first — then, when the scene is rewound, making the audience conscious of what it’s cheering for, the theater went absolutely silent. There was a general realization, even though the victim in this case was a villain in the film, that they’d been applauding an act of murder.” Haneke frowned slightly at the memory, but the frown appeared to be one of satisfaction. “I’m hoping for something similar when ‘Funny Games’ shows here.”

‘Funny Games’ was always made with American audiences in mind, since its subject is Hollywood’s attitude toward violence. And nothing has changed about that attitude since the first version of my film was released — just the opposite, in fact.” When I asked whether the average American moviegoer was likely to appreciate having his attitude adjusted, Haneke-style, the director thought for a moment, then threw up his hands in mock surrender. “I’ve been accused of ‘raping’ the audience in my films, and I admit to that freely — all movies assault the viewer in one way or another. What’s different about my films is this: I’m trying to rape the viewer into independence.”

At certain moments, a conversation with Haneke can feel like a clandestine meeting with the leader of the Cinematic Liberation Front, and this was one of them. Even the word “exploitation” has taken on a kind of lurid appeal — blaxploitation, sexploitation — in the current cultural landscape, and his argument struck me as both romantic and dated. When I said as much — tactfully, of course — to Haneke, he simply nodded. Then I realized that was exactly his point.

Haneke has his own theory for the divergent routes taken by Hollywood and Europe, one in which, perhaps not surprisingly, the darker side of German and Austrian history plays a central role. “At the beginning of the 20th century,” he told me, “when film began in Europe, storytelling of the kind still popular in Hollywood was every bit as popular here. Then the Nazis came, and the intellectuals — a great number of whom were Jewish — were either murdered or managed to escape to America and elsewhere. There were no intellectuals anymore — most of them were dead. Those who escaped to America were able to continue the storytelling approach to film — really a 19th-century tradition — with a clear conscience, since it hadn’t been tainted by fascism. But in the German-speaking world, and in most of the rest of Europe, that type of straightforward storytelling, which the Nazis had made such good use of, came to be viewed with distrust. The danger hidden in storytelling became clear — how easy it was to manipulate the crowd. As a result, film, and especially literature, began to examine itself. Storytelling, with all the tricks and ruses it requires, became gradually suspect. This was not the case in Hollywood.”

The difference between Haneke’s agenda and that of films like “Air Force One” was cast into sharp relief at the premiere of the original “Funny Games” in Cannes. “It was funny — funny for me, at least — how the theater reacted to Anna’s shooting of Dickie,” Haneke told me, referring to a scene late in the film when the heroine turns the tables on her captors. “There was actual applause at first — then, when the scene is rewound, making the audience conscious of what it’s cheering for, the theater went absolutely silent. There was a general realization, even though the victim in this case was a villain in the film, that they’d been applauding an act of murder.” Haneke frowned slightly at the memory, but the frown appeared to be one of satisfaction. “I’m hoping for something similar when ‘Funny Games’ shows here.”