As a father, actor and director

Tim Roth was beat; he had just finished a long day of interviews for "Youth Without Youth," the long-awaited film by Francis Ford Coppola that opened Friday. And he was already thinking ahead to "Funny Games," coming in March, in which he and Naomi Watts play Hamptons parents who are taken hostage in their home by two savage young pranksters; Roth's character spends much of the movie in agony.

Did your (journalist) dad ever give you tricks of the trade to deal with journalists?

The one thing he did say was: Watch out for the pause. They'll ask a question and they'll leave a gap. . . . It's a trap.

It's fantastic advice.

Of course.

[Pause]

It'll encourage me to lie.

At the Angelika [Film Forum in New York] last night, they showed a preview for Michael Haneke's "Funny Games" and I broke out in a cold sweat.

That's horrible.

I thought I was going to vomit.

Yeah, it's a tough one. It was a very hard film to make. I like Michael very much, but I found it so distressing being involved in that movie. That child is the same age as one of my children. I'm not going to see it -- I seldom watch what I do -- but I'm hoping it's not exploitative. I hope it serves a purpose.

Michael Pitt [who plays one of the home invaders in the film] said of making the movie: "There are things you can do to make sure you're not the one being terrorized. Or at least give as much back. Michael Haneke was the father of the house."

Yeah. I think Michael Haneke found it very difficult -- because he had that communication issue. [Haneke is Austrian.] We have a shorthand in our own language, and nuance is a very important part of communications, and he was stripped of that. So a flat translation of what someone said is not what they mean. And it was frustrating as hell for him. . . . I found that to be unable to protect, unable to leap in, to be weakened to that extent that you cannot protect what you love, very hard. A very, very hard movie to make. I hope people like it or will respond to it. There were two films: the film that Pitt and Brady [Corbet, the other invader]were in, and then there was our film. Our film tended towards realism, and theirs didn't, and the two things met in that house. It was a complicated experience. I lived through it.

You've said you hated your performance in "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover."