This time last year, Michael Caine could be seen on screens around the world playing the very likeable (if somewhat controversial) Dr Wilbur Larch, the orphanage director and occasional abortionist in The Cider House Rules. It was a role which would go on to win him his second Oscar (his first was for Hannah and Her Sisters in 1986). But, during the months that Dr Larch was endearing himself to American audiences, Caine himself was back home in the UK, working on a very different movie.

Ironically, the role he was playing was again that of a doctor, but a much less likeable one: Dr Royer-Collard in Quills, the latest film from director Philip Kaufman, which shot through the autumn of last year at Pinewood Studios, plus on location in other parts of England, and is based on a prize-winning stage play by Doug Wright (see box on previous pages).

Quills is a partly fictionalised recreation of the period spent in the asylum at Charenton by one of history’s most enigmatic and reviled characters: Donatien-Alphonse-François, Marquis de Sade, played in Kaufman’s version by another Oscar-winner, Geoffrey Rush. A writer most of whose books it was still impossible to buy over the counter as recently as 20 years ago, Sade did a lot more than give the world the word ‘sadism’. He was to the 18th-century Age of Enlightenment what Salman Rushdie is to Islam: a writer and thinker who pushes the tenets of a belief to and beyond their logical conclusion.

For the French philosophers of the pre-Revolutionary era, human nature replaced God as the source of morality. Sade simply turned this on its head, saying basically: ‘If it is in my nature to be cruel, then that is my natural morality’. The problem was, he put his philosophies into practice, particularly on the sexual side, again pushing things to their logical extreme. “If it is the dirty element that gives pleasure to the act of lust,” he wrote in his most notorious book, The 120 Days of Sodom, “then the dirtier it is, the more pleasurable it is bound to be.”

Geoffrey Rush as the Marquis de Sade and Madeleine (Kate Winslet), the young laundress who befriends him in the Asylum at Charenton.

As modern writers and film-makers have recognised, from Simone de Beauvoir (who wrote an entire book on Sade) to the Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini (who used The 120 Days of Sodom as a way of exploring Fascist Italy in Salo), it is not so much the feverish side of Sade’s imagination that makes him our contemporary: it is the subversive nature of his thought and behaviour. This, essentially, was what attracted Kaufman to the project.

“I have always been fascinated by extreme literature,” he says, “because it expands on our concept of what is human. And Sade more than anyone seems to demonstrate how extreme behaviour can bring out hypocrisy in those who claim to be moralists. Quills is a provocative film, but the Marquis would have it no other way.”

It also, thanks to Rush’s performance, presents a man rather than a monster. “Geoffrey brings an essential humanity to the role that lets the audience into the heart of a man who otherwise would be considered nothing more than evil,” says Julia Chasman, who produces Quills along with Nick Wechsler and the director’s son (and regular producer), Peter Kaufman. “His portrait seduces you into curiosity about the Marquis, and then he unleashes his full complexity.”

The focus of Wright’s play and Kaufman’s film is the ‘cure’ which Napoleon attempts to impose on Sade, using Caine’s character as his tool. This brings Royer-Collard into conflict with the young abbé who runs Charenton, played by Joaquin Phoenix, swapping the petulant villainy of his Emperor in Gladiator for a complex portrayal of a man of the cloth who is determined to find the good in the Marquis. And the doctor’s cure is repeatedly thwarted by Madeleine, the young laundress (played by Kate Winslet), who responds to the writer in Sade, smuggling his manuscripts out of Charenton, but repeatedly rebuffs the sexual energy that is the source of his genius.