Moritz de Hadeln: Lord of the Lido

It has already been called "the Miracle on the Lido", and Moritz de Hadeln, the gruff, Exeter-born 62-year-old put in charge of the Venice Film Festival earlier this year, is the miracle worker. He has salvaged an event that, at one stage, looked unlikely even to happen. "Venice Festival sinks into farce" read the newspaper headlines in the spring as Silvio Berlusconi's apparatchiks in the cultural ministry summarily dismissed the former festival boss Alberto Barbera and unseated Paolo Baratta, the president of the Biennale (the organisation that oversees the festival), thereby plunging the oldest film festival in the world into chaos.

With no one at the helm, accusations of political interference running rife, and the threat of a boycott by international critics, the festival was heading towards disaster. The Italian authorities were made to look ridiculous as the in-fighting grew ever more bitter. It was widely reported that Vittorio Sgarbi, the under-secretary for culture ("an outspoken TV personality and art critic known more for his acid tongue than his diplomatic skills", in Variety's words) had unsuccessfully lobbied Martin Scorsese to take over the festival. Marina Cicogna, an aging countess and granddaughter of the festival's founding father, Count Volpi, briefly threw her hat into the ring. (Her self-proclaimed mission: "To eliminate art-house esoterica and bring back glamour.") Meanwhile, Sgarbi cited Woody Allen's decision to premiere his new film, Hollywood Ending in Cannes rather than in his beloved Venice as evidence of how the festival's stock was falling in the eyes of the world.

"I, like you and many others, was shaking my head and laughing at what was going on here [in Venice]," De Hadeln, formerly a photographer and filmmaker himself, remembers of the events presaging his appointment. "I was reading about it in the press from far away. I never thought it would ever concern me in the slightest."

The former executive-director of the Berlin Film Festival, De Hadeln was used to the politicking and back-stabbing that seemingly go hand in hand with running any major movie bazaar. He started in the Berlin job on a five-year contract in 1979, and ended up staying for 22 years. In 2000, he oversaw the festival's historic move to Potsdamer Platz, its new, custom-built base in East Berlin. That very year, he learned he was to be summarily dismissed, a decision he described at the time in typically forthright language as "an absolute personal and professional affront that is both harmful to my reputation and damaging to the Festival's international standing."

Part of his problem in Berlin was that he never fully mastered the German language. "When he started, his German was not very good. We all thought that after two or three years, it would be fine, but it never was," notes one Berlin-based actress. "His German was a kind of De Hadeln German." While full of praise for his management skills, she likens him to Chancellor Kohl, another public figure famously reluctant to drop the reins of power. "He was there too long! You should not stay so long. He was not a charming boy. I think De Hadeln was a little bit shy... he didn't have much charisma, that's clear."

After the 2001 Berlinale, he was replaced by ex-journalist and film financier Dieter Kosslick. His career in the limelight looked over. He and his wife Erika set up a Berlin-based consultancy, De Hadeln & Partners and business, he admits, was not especially brisk. One Saturday evening last March, not long after he had returned from an exhausting business trip around Asia, the phone rang. It was Franco Bernabe, the new president of the Biennale, offering him the job in Venice. De Hadeln didn't take long to make up his mind. "What did I have to lose?" he asks now. "We all knew that if somebody didn't say yes – and I think I was about the only one left on the list – the festival was not going to take place."

He was the first non-Italian ever to be put in charge of the "Mostra", something that inevitably provoked the suspicion of Italian filmmakers and critics, many of whom were still unhappy about how his predecessor, Alberto Barbera, had been ousted. "I had good relations with Alberto," he reflects. "But I can't do much about it. I'm not the one who shortened his job here."

In a sense, he acknowledges, the fact that he was an outsider was an advantage. It meant he had no vested interests and was removed from all the feuds. Not that he was new to Venice. He had first come to the Lido when he was 18 and trying to break into the film industry. He had also spent much of his childhood in Italy.

Ask what nationality he is, and he gives you a rambling potted biography. He was born in Exeter in 1940. His father was an intelligence officer in the wartime British Army. He was baptised in Northern Ireland but brought up in Florence. His mother, an artist, was an émigrée from Romania. He now has Swiss citizenship, but lives in Berlin. "When I was five, I spoke three languages – French with my mother, English with my father and Italian on the streets," he explains.

The furore over his appointment died down quickly. He quickly came to grips with the festival's chaotic infrastructure (not so much "organisation" as "improvisation", he suggests) and settled down to selecting movies. He acknowledges that the Italians approach the running of a film festival in a very different way to the Germans. "It's a miracle country. Things are always done at the last moment, but they work."

He insists that the politicians have left him well alone. "I don't have the honour of knowing personally Mr Berlusconi, and he never phones me either," he says, as if disappointed by the fact. "I don't think he cares much what the hell is going on here." The only high-ranking Italian politician he has met since taking over in Venice is the minister of culture. "And he was the first to say that he respected my independence."

By the time he announced this year's programme in late July, he had largely won over the Italian press, who acclaimed his first "Mostra" as one of the strongest in years. The main complaint against him in Berlin after the Cold War was that he didn't pick enough German movies (he once likened finding a decent German movie to "finding a diamond in a haystack") and that he was in thrall to Hollywood. In Venice, however, his contacts with the US industry have been his trump card. He has secured international premieres of such films as Kathryn Bigelow's K-19: The Widowmaker; Clint Eastwood's Blood Work and Steven Soderbergh's Full Frontal. The festival opened last night with Julie Taymor's Frida, a biopic of the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo starring Salma Hayek. "For an opening, you have to find a film that is both entertaining and intelligent, and that will have the quality to give the right note to the festival," De Hadeln declares.

"I don't think I ever envisaged I would be a festival director for so long," he reflects. "You get dragged into things in life and suddenly find out that one day you've got white hair." How long will he stay in Venice? "I really don't know. The question is more would I accept to continue if I was asked."