It's not acting if you can see it."Did Andy subscribe to this?"He didn't have many points of view He didn't have many ideas at all, actually Maybe three If you're gonna make a movie, hopefully it will be funny. And hopefully people will pay to see it - that was another of his ideas But he had no good sense. What I always believed in was the truthfulness of artificiality. He was young and pretty; mostly he moved like a panther; sometimes he had a galumphing awkwardness He had time to kill.

Morrissey had an unused reel of film, and a hunch about this beautiful kid. Suddenly, his movies had a centre.Dallesandro won a part in Lonesome Cowboys, but it was with Flesh, Trash and Heat that he actually became the subject of the films He was celebrated, fetishised And, for the most part, naked. David Thomson has called him "obdurately impassive and unable to animate his beauty" His allure is buried in this frustrating impenetrability The camera wanted him, and he gave himself obligingly. But Morrissey is keen to stress that, despite the loose feel of Dallesandro and co-stars like Holly Woodlawn and Jackie Curtis, the actors were not, as has been suggested, interchangeable with their characters."If a person is in front of a camera, they're acting," he says "It's not possible to live in front of a camera. In real life, not in theory.The second change that Morrissey brought with him was the introduction of a new star for the camera to worship. Joe Dallesandro ("Little Joe" from Lou Reed's "Walk on the Wild Side") had wandered into an apartment where Morrissey was filming, and hung around. But at least they existed.This is what separates the two periods in Warhol's film-making career: the early films, which nobody saw but everyone ranted about (Warhol called these "my art films"); and the sex comedies made between 1968 and 1973 - Flesh, Trash, Women in Revolt, Heat; and the two horror spoofs Blood for Dracula and Flesh for Frankenstein, which hilariously transposed New York accents and attitudes to rustic Italy You can watch these films, and enjoy them.

And while purists have argued that Morrissey was refining, and therefore compromising, his producer's work, the transition was ripe with the sort of incongruous juxtapositions that had long fuelled Warhol.Morrissey brought with him two vital additions that shifted the Warhol movie into a new phase. Firstly, a different shape: the new movies were built around the more ordered narrative structure of Hollywood melodrama. The stories were minimal (1968's Flesh follows a hustler as he rustles up the money for a friend's abortion, though in the final reel she decides to keep the baby anyhow). In 1968, he was wounded in a near-fatal shooting by Valerie Solanis, a deranged hanger-on. At this point, Morrissey assumed full creative control over the movies - or rather, his full creative control over the movies was finally made explicit. "You can't take a bad picture." He sought to render a pure cinema untainted by technique or affectation, and driven by the camera's act of surrendering itself to its subject.

The actors were everything - the way they moved, spoke, slept, screwed. The camera simply revered, and revealed.Warhol's vision of cinema as a monument to the star remained intact even as the films began to alter irrevocably. Warhol slipped the knot a short way into the picture.He had publicly exhibited around a hundred of his own films, and was rumoured to have made double that number, by the end of the 1960s. The later works such as My Hustler and Lonesome Cowboys even had vestiges of narrative planted there by Morrissey ("I started saying to Andy, 'We can't let the camera roll for 30 minutes any more - it's a waste of film!' "), and pointed to a future where this underground form would adopt the conventions of mainstream cinema, creating a kind of Warhollywood."People are so fantastic," Warhol enthused.