‘I turn on the TV sometimes, start watching something and think: ‘This seems quite good, a bit familiar.’ Then I realise … It’s one of my movies. It’s a pretty odd feeling.” Alan Parker is in reflective mood: the onetime scourge of all that is arty, self-indulgent and non-commercial has, to all appearances, mellowed. Not only because he has just been named as the recipient of this year’s Bafta fellowship (the academy’s lifetime achievement award), but also because he has been spending a lot of time working on his own website: collating pictures, writing production histories, reproducing cartoons; generally archiving his life’s work.

“I’m quite proud of what I’ve done,” he says. “It’s the first time for a long while that I’ve started thinking about my work as a whole again.” He seems almost embarrassed by his own gruff nostalgia. “I always argued against the auteur theory; films are a collaborative art form. I’ve had some fantastically good people help me make the movies. I get annoyed when I see some directors wanting too much credit.

“On the other hand, all films are hard to make; you leave a bit of yourself behind up there on the screen. There is an identity to my films, which is as much mine as anyone else’s and I’m pleased with that.”

Parker is 68, a long way away from the stroppy, huckstering long-haired young man who churned out scores of TV commercials in the 1970s, fought his way into film-making with the kids’ gangster musical Bugsy Malone, and frequently aimed splenetic broadsides at critics – the proper, serious film critics – who he felt never gave him his due.

So what is the Parker identity? Fourteen full-length feature films, ranging from the dinner-party angst of Shoot the Moon, to the high-key theatrics of Evita, to the blood-heat pyscho-noir of Angel Heart. On the way he put the fear of God into the Turkish tourist board (Midnight Express), helped a generation of women into legwarmers (Fame) and played a part in righting a massive civil rights injustice (Mississippi Burning). But in recent years he has dropped off the film-making radar: his last completed film was the anti-death penalty potboiler The Life of David Gale in 2003.

The way Parker tells it, his directorial career has been a triumph of pragmatism over circumstance, something that goes right back to the beginning, with Bugsy Malone. “I had no career path as such. It was very frustrating. There were only two places you could go: EMI at one end of Wardour Street and Rank at the other. If you didn’t get either of those to bite, it was no go.

“Bugsy was an exercise to do something American. I’d written several scripts, but everything came back with a rubber stamp saying ‘too parochial’. I’d done a ton of commercials with kids, so I knew I was good with them. It’s a ludicrous idea that really ought not to work. It’s the sort of thing you would never do later in your career because you would realise how hard it was. We were so naive. But it’s lasted the test of time; it looks very modern.”

Looking back, you could hardly call Bugsy Malone pragmatic. It is amazing to think that Parker’s career survived such an idiosyncractic opening; that a film he still describes as “preposterous” could have got him the searing, Oliver Stone-scripted Midnight Express. “I remember Stone saying: ‘Who is this guy from England, who’s made this fuckin’ film with kids?’ He couldn’t understand why they chose me, either.”

Bugsy may be fondly remembered, but it was Midnight Express that put Parker firmly on the map, earning him a best director Oscar nomination. (It performed even better for Stone; he went all the way and won the Academy award for his script, the first that had been produced.) Parker took to Hollywood like a duck to water – “they embraced us, and we embraced them” – along with his other adland compadres, Ridley and Tony Scott, and Adrian “Flashdance” Lyne.

Parker turned out to be a key part of a new generation of British film-making, flash-Harries who used their commercial savvy to deal directly with the American studios. Much was made of the rivalry between him and Ridley Scott – “There’s a quote where he said he was sick for a week when I got my first film” – but it is Scott who turned out to have more staying power. But if Scott was the master of seductive visuals, Parker injected his cinema with a scabrous, risk-taking energy, hopping like a flea from one high-octane project to another.

But even the most cursory glance at his filmography reveals that Parker’s output began to slow drastically as the noughties arrived; it is no coincidence that at the same time he was unexpectedly taking on appointments in the highest echelons of the British film industry establishment. He became chairman of the BFI – then solely a cultural institution – in 1998, and two years later the founding chairman of the UK Film Council, the body charged with consolidating Britain’s domestic film resurgence on the back of funds from the lottery.

Parker’s involvement with these agencies – which led to a knighthood in 2002 – was something of a statement of the new mood of British cinema’s commercial intent: Parker, after all, had always complained bitterly about what he saw as the mollycoddling of patently uncommercial art-film directors by the pre-lottery state-funding boards, as well as (inevitably) the critics. (He was still at it after becoming BFI chairman, once having a go at Time Out for favourably reviewing Peter Greenaway films – funded by the BFI – during an onstage interview at the BFI’s own National Film Theatre in 2000.)

Be that as it may, Parker remains fiercely proud of the Film Council, which he left in 2005, well before it was shut down by the coalition in 2010. “I was very angry that this government abolished it; it was a petulant, political act.” He’s also highly critical of the aftermath. “It’s all gone back to how it was before: a bunch of disparate self-interested groups. Outside the gigantic things like James Bond and Les Mis, it’s quite scary: the grassroots movies are just not there any more.”

I don’t know whether he would put his own prospective projects in that category, but Parker says he is not frustrated by his seeming inability to get a film off the ground. “I write every day – in fact, I’ve written so many screenplays in recent years that haven’t been made that I could have an entire film festival in my head.

“But the truth is, as I get older, the attraction of being up to my knees in Mississippi mud is growing less and less. Film-making is a physically hard job. I have an eight-year-old son, and I see him every day. I was never there for my four grownup children; I was always on location somewhere. That isn’t the kind of life I want any more.

“Having said that, I truly miss the cameraderie of the film set. A lot of directors prefer the solitude of the editing process, but I revel in the craziness of what a film set is. I do miss that.

“I’ve come close a couple of times; and people who know me say that I deliberately cause arguments so I don’t have to do something. I do have a bit of previous, in that regard. It doesn’t bother me. I’m not that desperate; I don’t need to make a movie every couple of years. It’s nice to have a civilised life.”

But surely, he is not retiring? The Bafta fellowship can’t be some kind of carriage clock? “That would be terrifying. Look: Scorsese got it last year, but I don’t think he’s out of work.”

• The EE British Academy Film Awards take place on 10 February