Sam Raimi, the man behind the mask

By JAMES MOTTRAM

If you ever find yourself stuck at a party with Sam Raimi but no bottle-opener, you should be aware of his party trick: he can uncap a beer bottle with his eye socket.

Ghoulish, but fitting for a director who made his name with the low-budget Evil Dead trilogy. "One day I'll do it for you," he promises when we meet in a London hotel. "I will perform that stunt."

Of late, it would be more appropriate if Raimi used his ocular skill to pop open the champagne. Spider-Man 2, his sequel to his 2002 film version of the web-spinning superhero, has swung past box-office records with alarming ease. It took US$40.5 million ($61.7m) on its first day in America, and passed the US$250m ($383m) mark in a record 12 days.

Typically, Raimi felt unable to kick back and soak up the success. As he did two years ago, when Spider-Man exceeded the hopes of Sony Pictures by raking in US$800m ($1.2 billion) worldwide, Raimi looked at the figures with "a sort of strange fascination and detachment, as an outsider" - which, until recently, is what he was.

Evil Dead was unleashed on the world in 1981. Raimi, now 44, followed it with eight films, not one of them a hit. Box-office tallies used to make him "depressed and miserable", to the point that when he shot the disappointing Kevin Costner baseball movie For Love of the Game in 1999, he resolved to change his thinking. "I thought, 'I better define my success in a different way than Hollywood defines theirs'."

He had no choice. Even those of his films that drew raves - notably A Simple Plan (1998), his Fargo-esque tale of two brothers who find a stash of cash - fired box-office blanks.

"I determined I would only define my success by a combination of seeing what the audience felt about the movie, my own opinion and, finally, the summation of what the professional critical world thought of the picture - and not by box office."

Wearing a charcoal suit, white shirt and navy-blue striped tie, he looks like he's here for a job rather than a newspaper interview. His pale round face has an on-time five-o'clock shadow, and his hair is geeky-neat with a dash of grey at the temples.

He looks remarkably alert, considering he's been up till 3am working on a storyline for Spider-Man 3, set for release in May 2007.

But if he seems nondescript, within beats the heart of a sensitive artist. Talking himself into believing that Spider-Man or its sequel wouldn't strike it big came naturally. "It's how I survive. I get so depressed when people don't like a movie I've made that I have to come up with some other new rationale to move on to the next step."

No need to worry: the critics salivated over the sequel - a blockbuster that devotes more time to character than to action, and plays with notions of identity and deception.

Initially, Raimi wasn't sure any of this would work. Having a set release date didn't help. "That's terrifying," he says, "because the screenplay has to be done in a finite time, but no story is ever finished being written."

Did this get to him? He rolls his eyes. "Oh yeah. There would be moments like the production designer coming up to me and saying, 'Sam, we have to design the set now. What is it you need exactly?' I realised that in each of these situations I only had rudimentary storyboards, and often I needed to take the script in a different direction for that scene - so it was very hard to answer those questions. I just had to guess."

But he's pleased with the result. "I wanted to make the audience identify with what the characters felt in a way more common in an independent film, rather than big-grossing films. [Without knowing it] they let me make this little independent love story inside this bigger machine of an action picture."

A father of three, Raimi has been married for 11 years to Gillian Greene, the daughter of Bonanza's Lorne. No surprise, then, that he toned down the violence because he wanted it to be "a family experience". It's a move that impacts on Alfred Molina's Doc Ock; less complex than Willem Dafoe's Green Goblin, he's also less scary.

"I wanted [parents] to enjoy it fully, and not be concerned their children were watching something they shouldn't."

Raimi, the fourth of five children, raised in Michigan, has always made film-making a family affair. His older brother Ivan wrote Army of Darkness (1993), the third Evil Dead instalment, and Darkman (1990), Raimi's previous stab at the superhero/villain genre. His younger brother Ted has had parts in many of Raimi's films, including the latest.

Led by their father, who ran a furniture store, and mother, who owned a lingerie shop, the family became very close after Raimi's elder brother Sander drowned in a swimming pool at the age of 15.

Raimi has said of that trauma: "It colours everything you do for the rest of your life." As a result, the fragility of existence is a dominant theme for him.

His father gave Raimi his first Super 8 camera when he was 13. "My parents supported me and let me bring all the kids into the house and stage bank robberies to film," he recalls. "But there was a schism when I said that's what I wanted to do professionally. Then they thought I had lost my mind, and they weren't going to support me on that. That was healthy for me, too, as I had to support myself as a bus boy, a waiter and a 16mm film projectionist, and raise all the money myself - and it gave me a great sense of individual power."

Dropping out of Michigan State University after 18 months, Raimi and a couple of friends set about making Evil Dead, primarily to turn out something cheap for the drive-in market. It was the archetypal five-in-a-cabin horror narrative, enlivened by the visceral camerawork that would become Raimi's trademark. He followed it with the disastrous Crimewave, a romp penned by his old friends Joel and Ethan Coen, that stalled him for a while as a director of few dimensions.

It's only recently that Raimi has got into character, so to speak. Merging his interest in style with a new-found love of substance, he's winning critical, cult and commercial kudos.

Having set up Ghost House Pictures (he's producing a remake of Japanese horror film The Grudge, with Sarah Michelle Gellar), Raimi wants to keep his hand in his favoured genre.

With Sony set to distribute, he's their brown-eyed boy right now, and he knows it. "Hollywood allows people who have made successful financial pictures to have one or two shots at doing anything they want ... It's probably a three-year window where I'm allowed to do that before I'm back on the street."

Ever the pessimist, Raimi is "absolutely" convinced this will happen. Is he frightened, like Spider-Man, of losing his power? "I've gone so long without power ... that I realise it is a transitory thing. It's not really mine, in as much as I am the beneficiary of it from the Spider-Man franchise. And, yet, I don't want to lose the power. It really offers me something."

- INDEPENDENT