I once told a newspaper that, if I were ever to do opera, it would have to be The Ring. Two days later, an invitation arrived from Bayreuth, where the Wagner Festival is staged every year under the direction of his descendants. They had been accused of being too old-fashioned and so came up with the idea of asking me to create a new production. In contrast to the general tendency of the time, in which the director presumes to know better than the work, I intended to stage it as Wagner had conceived it.

In order to immerse ourselves as fully as possible in the task, the Icelandic scenographer Karl Júlíusson and I spent the night on the stage at Bayreuth. Meanwhile, Wolfgang Wagner, the grandson, and his wife, who was also his secretary, proceeded to get drunk. At one point they came in to us and said: ‘You probably think we’re dreadfully wicked.’

The lighting was to be gas lamps, as it had been in Wagner’s day. As soon as electric light flooded the stage, it was dreadful to look at, whereas gaslight created a mysterious atmosphere. Wagner hated singers for their acting. What he wished to convey to the audience was the pure musical experience.

After two years’ work on The Ring, I realised that the family had no intention of changing anything at all. Wolfgang Wagner even called my production ‘entartet’. Werner Herzog, incidentally, had been treated in much the same way a few years earlier. He wanted live horses on stage. Wolfgang’s secretary-wife boasted of having thwarted this.

Wagner’s music appears in several of my films, including Melancholia and Nymphomaniac.

In my view, Wagner was an opportunist. He was bankrolled by the Bavarian king Ludwig II, who, among other things, built Bayreuth and Neuschwanstein Castle, which later became the model for Walt Disney’s fairytale castle. He eventually became such a drain on the Bavarian regime’s finances that they are said to have killed him.

I consider Wagner highly disagreeable, not least because of his antisemitism, from which even Nietzsche distanced himself.