BBC Four: It's remarkable just how uncommunicative Schneider is in the film. Did you feel it was an act or is he really as dissociative as he appears?
Ben Lewis: I think it's a bit of an act, but behind the act lies something much stranger than the act. He plays weird, but actually he's far weirder than anything he could play.

BBC Four: I could see in the programme your temptation to read childhood trauma into Schneider's art...
BL: Temptation? It's impossible not to. The whole idea of the series was not to approach these works of art from the point of view of some theoretical and longwinded arts critic, but just like anyone else. And I looked at these works of art and I thought "Something really, really bad happened to this guy when he was young". Who wouldn't think that?

BBC Four: When you were talking to the ordinary Germans they didn't seem to think there was anything sinister about Schneider's work.
BL: I still haven't worked out why the German viewers reacted the way they did, it's a huge mystery. I think that there's something dark in all of us really and they were tapping into that. This idea that behind the cosy German suburbia something weird was lurking, I think they identified with Gregor's traumas.

BBC Four: What was it like working on a piece of art with Schneider?
BL: Very strange. Normally in television you're meant to build films out of your relationship with the interviewee, but in this case I had to build a film out of my lack of a relationship. Halfway through that shoot my producer turned to me and said "You have to do something, it's going terribly, the guy's not communicating with you at all". And I said "No, this is brilliant television, it really says a lot."

Here's a great artist, really struggling to make art and in a way there's a tension, you think, "It's just a few walls and a corner", but you see that it's really spooky and he's working really hard to make something horrific and grotesque. That's a very rare moment, to see an artist struggling with himself like that to create. And what is he creating? Not your conventional painting or anything people would think constitutes a work of art but some dodgy corner of a red light district.

BBC Four: It must be difficult to take a Schneider home.
BL: He sells these rooms for tens of thousands of pounds and he keeps on working on them and the collectors come along and say "No stop, I've bought it". I think it's quite difficult to exhibit if you're a private collector. People buy doors and windows, bits of rubble. That kind of art is strange because in a way you're buying a fragment of the work to exhibit and that fragment indicates a bit of the culture. It's a kind of archaeological aesthetic, you might go to a museum and see a fragment of a temple or a bit of a vase and it indicates the whole culture. It's probably the same when you see a little bit of Schneider from his house of horror.