For Weinstein, intensity is the only thing that works. If anybody had the courage to make a movie about him, the pitch would sound something like this: the gruff elder son of a radically minded diamond cutter from Queens, New York, spends his teen years watching European art films in a run-down cinema with his younger brother. Angered by the sudden death of his father, the young man decides to antagonise the world by marketing art films as if they were Coca-Cola. Hits, Academy Awards and millions follow as he bullies his way to the top but the man loses his way and his company when he's gripped by a mid-life crisis and a bacterial infection that almost kills him (and which will never be fully explained). Saved by his wealthy friends and the love of a much younger woman, he storms back to form with the longest Oscar-winning stretch in movie history.

Cue credits, cue music. It'd be like Citizen Kane meets Gladiator.

That record-breaking Oscar streak hasn't happened yet, of course, but Weinstein has no doubt it will.

'We are on an incredible roll right now,' says Weinstein, banging down a Diet Coke in a cafeteria and glaring as if he's going to go all Russell Crowe-Maximus and start yelling about how what one does in life echoes in eternity. Then the moment passes and he's back on message.

'We had The Reader best-picture Oscar two years ago and Inglourious Basterds got a best-picture nomination last year. When I get two best-picture nominations in a row, I end up with 10 in a row. I did 15 out of 16 on my last streak and nobody has ever done that. When I start a streak, it's Joe DiMaggio time, so start watching.'

As Weinstein beats his drum - and blows his own horn - it's impossible not to wonder whether the noise is designed to drown out his fears. At least eight of the past 10 years have not been Weinstein's best and his next moves will be watched closely by everybody from his investors (who, according to estimates, are in to him for close to half a billion US dollars) to Chinese filmmakers who say that his motives in courting Asian directors are suspect, an allegation that he vehemently denies.

'I love Asian cinema,' he says. 'The caricature of a studio boss is untrue in my case. As a collector I have bought Asian films when The Weinstein Company or Miramax wouldn't buy. I bought them with my own money. It's a love affair, it started before Quentin [Tarantino] and that intensified it for me because Tarantino and I would watch them together.'

Maybe it's not surprising that Weinstein has grown sensitive to criticism, for this is a man who once, it seemed, could do no wrong, at least when it came to films. But then everything started to slide.

It all began, so the story goes, in the Mayfair cinema in Queens, where Harvey and his brother, Bob, would go to watch films such as Francois Truffaut's The 400 Blows. It's where his passion for the industry took root; the birthplace of a devotion to film that, he says, is still getting stronger. Take, for example, his acquisition of Ip Man - based on the life of martial arts grandmaster Wing Chin. When he was interested in buying the film for distribution in the United States, he got up at 5am to watch it on the floor of a Kowloon office with a McDonald's breakfast for company.

'I just really wanted to see that movie,' says Weinstein. 'It was like buying it was an excuse. I'm just a fan of cinema, at the end of the day. I'm still doing what I did [in the beginning]; making movies, seeing them, appreciating them.'

The Weinstein empire took its first steps in Buffalo, New York, a dour town on the US-Canada border that's a universe away from the glamour of a red-carpet premiere. He was there to attend the State University of New York but soon dropped out to help create a company called Harvey & Corky Presents, which produced rock concerts. In 1973, Bob joined the company and they acquired a run-down theatre in Buffalo called The Century, which they turned into a venue for concerts and films.

In 1976, when Harvey was 24, his father died of a heart attack. The event still causes Weinstein pain, according to close friends. One of these associates once told an American magazine that what made Weinstein especially sad was that he 'wanted to make Max [his father] proud' and never had a chance to do it.

Three years later, Bob and Harvey formed Miramax, named after their mother, Miriam, and deceased father. Their initial business model involved buying completed art films from Europe for small sums and distributing them in the US.

After almost going bust in 1989, their break-out film was Steven Soderbergh's Sex, Lies and Videotape, which they bought for US$1 million. It went on to gross US$25 million. In the same year, the brothers bought My Left Foot and Cinema Paradiso and began winning Oscars - Daniel Day-Lewis took best actor for his epic performance in the former and Paradiso won the award for best foreign-language film.

But Weinstein didn't get to mount the Oscar stage for either of these films and that was the spotlight he must have yearned for. The brothers had to start producing their own films; producers get to mount that stage and stab their egos deep into its fecund podium, the ultimate G-spot of the movie business.

To produce, the Weinstein brothers needed a lot of money, so, in 1993, they sold Miramax to Disney, where the only Gs were those attached to the ratings for family-friendly fare such as Toy Story. With Mickey Mouse's money Weinstein's first big play was to buy Tarantino's Pulp Fiction for US$8 million. The film's brutal violence helped it gross more than US$100 million. In 1997, Miramax released 34 films and had gross receipts of almost US$500 million, nearly half of which came from its Dimension division, largely run by Bob, which made movies such as Scream and Scream 2.

As the 20th century drew to a close, Weinstein was riding hog-high, hanging out with Bill Clinton at the White House and guiding Gwyneth Paltrow through a series of hits - but he was already losing focus. While Bob concentrated on running Dimension, Harvey launched a magazine called Talk (which failed, with debts of US$50 million) and had a number of high-profile temper tantrums that included putting a New York journalist in a headlock.

'I was a bit of a bear,' he says over more Diet Coke, this time at breakfast. '[In an autobiography], the early years of my life would be about temper, the later years, no. I mean you don't want to lose your edge but it is good to lose your temper.'

Before this piece of wisdom found its way to the front of Weinstein's brain, he had to leave Miramax behind. In 2005, after a series of high-profile battles the brothers parted company with Disney.

Soon after the buyout, Harvey and Bob opened the doors at The Weinstein Company, which, like many sequels, was not great, at least for the first eight years. By last summer, the company had released about 70 films and more than a quarter of them failed to break the US$1 million mark in US box-office receipts.

Last June, a team of financial advisers that had been brought in to review the company's problems urged Weinstein to release and promote no more than 10 films per year, give up on unpromising projects and avoid trying to rebuild a Miramax-style empire.

Hearing this bleak outlook might have been enough to make Weinstein wake up. In early 2007, he said in an interview about the Oscar season that his vigorous (some have said obsessive and intimidating) campaigns for statues might be a thing of the past. 'You leave when you're ahead,' he said. 'I find myself interested in other things.' He went on to remark that he was 'building a business where movies are only a part of it'.

As Weinstein wandered off to buy Halston, a moribund fashion brand, aSmallWorld.net, a website for the rich and famous, Ovation, an arts television channel, and a few other bits of commercial bric-a-brac, The Weinstein Company slid towards the abyss, saved largely by Bob's spoofs and low-brow horror flicks (notably Scary Movie 4 and 1408).

 

Weinstein nods calmly when asked about his misfires. He takes a sip of his Coke and gives me another ursine stare.

'[Our hit to non-hit ratio] has improved greatly in the last two years,' he says. 'That's since I started concentrating on movies as opposed to concentrating on clothing companies and internet businesses, as we sold off the things that at first fascinated me.'

So buying Halston, for example, was a mistake? He blinks, but only for a second.

'Yeah,' he says, looking at the ceiling. 'Now that Sarah Jessica Parker is running Halston, that's the right thing, but Halston was a mistake for Harvey Weinstein. I still have a silent piece ... but I have no time commitment and it was that which killed me.'

And there were creative casualties from Weinstein's diversions and the battles he fought with Disney executives before he had to sur- render Miramax.

'I never read the script for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,' says Weinstein, with a look of genuine regret in his face. 'My staff read it and they said no. So if I had to name one that got away, it would be that one. Subsequently, I bought the sequel rights to it and now I can redeem myself. I'll never make a movie as good as Ang Lee's but I will do the franchise justice. It's all about being hands on.'

He also missed out on Monster's Ball, which won the best-actress Oscar for Halle Berry.

'I read Monster's Ball myself and Meryl Poster, my head of production, said let's make that movie and I didn't get it, I didn't understand it,' says Weinstein. 'And then I saw the movie and I thought it was breathtaking, so Monster's Ball was a mistake that I made.'

From the look on Weinstein's face, it's apparent he's decided to make such mistakes no more. His hunger seems to have returned and now he plans to hit that Oscar G-spot over and over again. And he wants Miramax back. Disney has put the mini-studio up for sale. The Weinsteins have already offered about US$625 million, backed by investor Ronald Burkle. There has been speculation about whether they are planning a second bid.

'My belief is that Disney is talking to a variety of people but we are in the game and we want to be in the game,' says Weinstein. 'There are so many treasures at Miramax. We built a Camelot of movies and it's my mum and dad's name. I think people are rooting for us [to win the bidding] and I think it's great because people are realising that the movie business can also be about heritage, not just about money.'

Although for Weinstein it's also about control and he would no doubt love to be king of Camelot once more.

'I'm very hands on and I work on every detail,' he says. 'David Selznick and Irving Thalberg were my idols. There was no detail too small for those guys, you can see it in Thalberg's memos on Dinner at Eight, or any of the Marx Brothers films. He reshot and rejigged those movies and I have based my entire career on Thalberg and Selznick.'

For some that has been the problem with Weinstein, who was given the nickname Harvey Scissorhands in the 90s for his habit of cutting films to his own liking, whatever the director might say.

In an interview last year, Kevin Smith, director of Jersey Girl and 2008's Zack and Miri make a Porno, said of the Weinsteins, 'They had impeccable taste when they were hungry. The problem is that they are not really hungry anymore. They are starving and desperate.'

'That's Kevin's quote,' says Weinstein in a tone of voice that suggests he would rather have said 'bulls***' than 'quote'. 'Kevin felt that Zack and Miri should have done more business. The movie cost us US$20 million and we grossed US$30 million,' he barks. 'I think Kevin wants to be a big commercial filmmaker and yet he's got an eccentric taste. I love him but in this case there was anger and ... that was truly a sour-grapes comment.'

OK, so he's not desperate. But hungry?

'Let me put it this way,' he says. 'This isn't hungry? I was in Beijing yesterday and Hong Kong today and Shanghai next - that's three cities in three days and I will fly home for the Tony awards, where I have 37 nominations for my Broadway shows this year. I have done 12 movies and I have 10 Broadway shows and published 10 books. What Kevin doesn't realise is that running other companies counts. He thinks Harvey is not concentrating so much on the movie business but I am here to serve my company, not him.'

WEINSTEIN'S TIME IN China has set tongues wagging. Some say he's looking for money on the mainland, hoping that one of the country's billionaires will cough up some capital that will allow The Weinstein Company to jump to the next level.

'We are not looking for finance in China,' he says by phone from his office in New York three days after his return from Shanghai. 'But we want to continue the Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon series and you are smart to get a Chinese partner early. We are looking at a number of offers that came in when we were in Shanghai.'

Weinstein is involved in a raft of new films on the mainland and in Hong Kong, the latest being Reign of Assassins (co-directed by John Woo) and Daniel Lee's 14 Blades. He also has the distribution rights to a lot of Asian films that he has yet to release, including Stephen Chow Sing-chi's The God of Cookery and Jeffrey Lau Chun-wai's Chinese Odyssey. Together these projects suggest that Weinstein is among those who see a better future for the movie business in Asia than in the West. But not every Chinese director has been susceptible to his charms.

One of Weinstein's biggest disappointments on the mainland is his failure to buy City of Life and Death, Lu Chuan's epic about the Japanese occupation of Nanjing. Ten minutes into watching it, Weinstein was bored, confused and wanted to leave but was afraid of embarrassing the producers at China Film Group (the state-run production company that financed the film). Then he became spellbound.

'I am going to be public,' he says, a slight flash of anger in his eyes. 'What a mistake for them that we didn't get it. We wanted it but sometimes first-time filmmakers have stars in their eyes. [Lu] is such a talent but I think he thought he was going to do Schindler's List business in America.

'I think with us he would have been nominated for an Oscar,' he says. 'And I think the film would have been given wide acclaim and he would have been considered a major director - instead, it didn't happen. I don't think it was China Film Group that nixed it, I think it was people around the director.'

He says the last bit without rancour, as if he really has learned to control his temper.

Weinstein divorced his first wife, Eve Chilton, with whom he has three children, in 2004. Three years ago he remarried. He and Georgina Chapman, the 34-year-old fashion designer behind the Marchesa label, are expecting a child and Weinstein's associates say the marriage has mellowed him.

'I will credit Georgina with revolutionising my personality,' he says. 'I think my temper has lessened because of Georgina but as far as movies are concerned, she's the type who watches movies for relaxation, she likes fun movies, TV series. I am trying to put on Truffaut and she's saying, 'Let's watch Real Housewives of New Jersey.' So that's the fight around the family TV.'

It sounds charming, just like the new Harvey himself.

And what of his latest film? Shanghai will have its Hong Kong premiere in August. The private screening finished to mild applause.

Afterwards, Weinstein says, racing up an escalator, that Shanghai is like Casablanca. But John Cusack, who plays an American journalist posing as spy, is no Humphrey Bogart and Gong Li, who is still lovely, lacks the translucent beauty of the young Ingrid Bergman. Not that Weinstein agrees. He thinks Shanghai, a fast-paced thriller that hinges on Cusack's character's hunt for the man who killed his best friend, is good for one of his Oscar campaigns.

'Gong Li for best actress,' he says. 'And Chow Yun-fat for best supporting actor; those two have real break-out potential and I am pretty good at [winning Oscars].'

This is all said at machine-gun speed as Weinstein's passion comes to the surface again.

'I know we are not improving the world when we make a horror movie like Scream but it's a Robin Hood thing, we steal from the rich to help the poor,' he says. 'You roll the dice on something like The Reader and Shanghai. You take a chance, which the big studios don't want to do anymore. There is nobody stepping up to the plate and saying we can [do these kind of films]. Nobody except us.'

And regrets, does he have many?

'I regret losing the name Miramax,' he says, his lips pursed. 'I wish I had held on to that. Ultimately, it's not my favourite thing that I have done.'

Cue credits, cue music (the tune of My Way).

Regrets? He's had a few. But then again, only one that's worth a mention.