Franco Zeffirelli: Tea with Zeffirelli

Even as he turns 80, Franco Zeffirelli doesn't plan to rest on his many laurels. With two new projects in Britain this year and a new film, he's far too busy to retire, he tells Anna Kythreotis

Though he celebrates his 80th birthday this Wednesday, Franco Zeffirelli still rarely pauses between professional commitments, so the only way to meet him to discuss his forthcoming plans is to join him during his opera rehearsals in Italy. He is warm-mannered, spirited and thoroughly engaging, and his softly expressive voice takes on an entirely different volume and character whenever something on stage provokes his disapproval. Toscanini was once on the receiving end of such an explosion for interrupting a Zeffirelli rehearsal – a jolting reminder that the career of this apparently ageless Italian director goes back well over half a century.

The walking stick by his side is a concession not to his years but to a recent brush with death after a failed hip operation left him with near-fatal septicaemia: the medication that saved his life caused damage to the vestibules of his ears, and he can no longer control his balance. "I'm very healthy," he explains, "but like a ship without a rudder."

His professional pace, though, remains unfaltering and uninterrupted: a formidable body of work amounting to a score of films, almost a hundred opera productions, numerous stage plays, the epic Jesus of Nazareth for television, and more. He has served two terms as senator in Silvio Berlusconi's party, Forza Italia, and is now special advisor to the Minister of Culture. "I'm accustomed to this kind of metabolism," he says of his inexhaustible drive. "If I stop, then I die."

Many directors would sooner open a vein than rehearse under the scrutiny of the press; Zeffirelli has no such inhibitions. "What do you think?" he asks, indicating the dancers on the stage with disgust. "They look like fleas, no?" He yells. The walls tremble. His slumbering Jack Russell terriers, Blanche and Martino, which accompany him everywhere, simply yawn with indifference.

Zeffirelli's sprawling estate on the outskirts of Rome has become something of a dog sanctuary since he returned from his latest film location in Romania with the collection of strays that had attached themselves to him during the shooting, and which he felt unable to abandon again to the streets. The estate is also home to a clutch of people close to Zeffirelli, principally Pippo Pisciotto, who has been with Zeffirelli for more than 30 years. Associate producer and assistant director on Zeffirelli's films, the amiable Pisciotto has also worked as assistant director on Merchant-Ivory's A Room with a View.

Pisciotto tactfully watches that Zeffirelli doesn't tire, but Zeffirelli is on great form – animated and unreserved, his conversation leaps from the origins of the Jack Russell breed to metaphysics. He seems delighted that I remember the de Filippo play Saturday, Sunday, Monday, which he staged at the Old Vic in 1973: Joan Plowright cooked an Italian ragu on stage.

Long absent from the English stage, where he created some of his finest work for Laurence Olivier's National Theatre in the 1960s and 1970s, he returns to London in April to direct Joan Plowright in Pirandello's Absolutely! (Perhaps). "Theatre is something I had to reduce because of my other work," he explains. "It's no longer what it used to be for me – there has been so much worthless experimentation."

More significant, perhaps, is his return to the Royal Opera House in July for Pagliacci – astonishingly, the first new Zeffirelli production there since Tosca with Maria Callas almost 40 years ago. The ties he established with Sir David Webster in the 1950s unravelled under the artistic policies of subsequent administrators who embraced a more radical style.

"I learn a long time ago that my dialogue is with the audience and the author, not with these politically correct, artistically correct trends that change so many times," he says wearily. "What infuriates me is it indicates the total sterility of creativeness in contemporary culture."

The epic scale and ornate opulence of Zeffirelli's emotionally-charged productions observe the traditional principles of grand opera rather than the austere abstract approach that has become the new orthodoxy. Yet for all the barbs aimed at Zeffirelli's conservative aesthetics by the progressive lobby, his stagings – many still in circulation decades since their creation – continue to form the core repertory of major houses, including the Met, La Scala and Vienna. Last year the Met binned Nicholas Hytner's proposed new production of Falstaff and rebuilt the one Zeffirelli created in 1964. "This audience is a completely new generation," reflects Zeffirelli quietly, "and still they find in it something – they understand it is something important, beautiful."

Asked to explain the demonstrably enduring quality of his work, he says he does not have an answer. "I'm only happy that I did the right thing then – by that, I mean I served the author. A good part of the audience wants to see those masterpieces presented in a certain way, that they can understand and enjoy. Frankly, we have lost that knowledge. Many directors take opera as a pretext – not as a text – for unnecessary super-impositions. You cannot take an opera and make it into something the authors didn't intend. It's not a matter of being old-fashioned but of being faithful. You have to serve these masterpieces, not interpret them. Opera is one of the most devastated fields in the arts – I am the only survivor. They say I'm the greatest director of opera in the world; I'm not the greatest – I'm the only one."

He roars with laughter, but it's a view endorsed by opera house chiefs who offer him unprecedented levels of artistic freedom and financial indulgence. When the truculent John Dexter was head of production at the Met he insisted that Zeffirelli's contract contain precise budgetary restrictions "for him to ignore".

For all that, the new Pagliacci, originally created for Los Angeles Opera, is set in the present – a Neapolitan slum of seedy tenements populated by roller-blading punks and junkie hookers. Zeffirelli smiles at the apparent contradiction, but doesn't miss a beat. "I have never been taken by the egomaniac idea of 'Yes, it's Verdi, but it's old-fashioned, so let's Brecht the whole thing'. In this case the story is based on a true incident, and the composer (Leoncavallo) always intended to have it done in the present day." Zeffirelli's dazzling inventiveness still has the edge over contemporary conceptual distortions – as he demonstrated with the stylised Aida at Verona last summer, and the chamber versions of La Traviata and Aida for the Verdi centenary at Busseto.

The last of the great European directors to emerge from the fertile and influential post-war period, Zeffirelli's bold ideas have had, perhaps, the most far-reaching effect on the cultural landscape. He swept the cobwebs from Shakespeare, presenting the plays with a fresh, pulsating energy, the texts spoken as living, breathing dialogue – his Romeo and Juliet at the Old Vic in 1960, unconventionally cast with Judi Dench and John Stride as authentically young lovers, received savage reviews – except from Kenneth Tynan, who recognised it as a "revelation, perhaps revolution"; he shook up the world of opera with verismo stagings (his groundbreaking Cavalleria Rusticana for Covent Garden in 1959 is still in the repertoire); his vibrant films of opera and Shakespeare drew audiences that might otherwise never have experienced those arts in their original form.

Due for release here later this year, Zeffirelli's new film Callas Forever – a homage to his close friend and colleague to mark the 25th anniversary of her death – is one he had repeatedly turned down offers to make. "Lately I began to wonder if it is right that nobody tells exactly the story of Callas. We have the living document of her voice but, sadly, her identity begins to fade. I am one of the last witnesses of this woman's extraordinary career and presence, so I felt I had to bring forward what I know. If I don't do it, who else now is left who has the weapons to tell the story of Callas? Not literally, but in substance, in the spirit of this woman, the reason why she was so extraordinary."

Zeffirelli's film, which he describes as a "personal fantasy" rather than a biographical account, presents a plausible dramatisation of her final months based on his unrealised idea of filming Callas performing her signature roles to recordings made years earlier when her voice was at its peak. "This was the late Sixties, but at that moment she was very distracted and depressed, so we never came to any conclusion," remembers Zeffirelli. In the film, however, Callas (played by Fanny Ardant) eventually agrees to the proposal but, ultimately unwilling to sacrifice her artistic integrity, withdraws from the project. The essence of her tragedy is crystallised in one affecting image – a long shot of Callas slowly walking away from this Faustian pact, to solitude and death.

"It's a tragedy of sunset – of somebody who couldn't accept decadence and oblivion. Her last months were consumed in very deep anguish with alcohol, sleeping pills, amphetamines. So it has remained a deep regret of not having done enough perhaps. But she had decided to go. When the voice was no longer what she wanted it to be, she just understood there was no more purpose to her existence. Either pure perfection, or nothing. It's very Greek. Tragic. But a magnificent tragedy."

Reflecting on his own life, references to which featured in his film Tea with Mussolini, Zeffirelli opens his eyes wide in amazement. "I can not believe the wonderful things that have happened to me – working with Callas, with Visconti – that Richard Burton came to see the Much Ado About Nothing I did at the Old Vic with Maggie Smith and Robert Stephens and Albert Finney, and offered his right arm to work with me, so we made The Taming of the Shrew – my first film – with Elizabeth Taylor – imagine. So many incredible things – it's a miracle. That's why I believe in my heart that my mother, whom I lost when I was six, is always with me. A superior hand has helped in so many moments of my life."