One thing [opera director Jonathan Miller] has certainly not abandoned is the Interview as Performance Art.

Amid bomblets tossed at traditional opera audiences, the Metropolitan Opera, religious Jews (he is Jewish), American political culture, Belgian colonialists and German conceptualist directors, Mr. Miller weaves a narrative of his directing method: a focus on the ''negligible detail'' and ''subintentional actions.'' He cited Flaubert, Chomsky, the James-Lange theory of emotion, the sociologist Erving Goffman, the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus, the writer Joseph Roth. He quoted Wordsworth and Auden.

Never far from his demeanor is the loony Cambridge University graduate who helped create ''Beyond the Fringe,'' the satirical revue with Dudley Moore, Peter Cook and Alan Bennett in the 1960's. A brilliant mimic, Mr. Miller slid into profanity-laced routines: of an Irish Republican Army terrorist accidentally blowing off his hand or of a Jamaican immigrant returning to Kingston for terror training or of Pakistani immigrants plotting in Cockney accents, making serious points about the nature of Muslim suicide bombers.

He wriggled from behind the table to show the pantomimes people adopt in public situations: the exaggerated, apologetic tiptoe, for example, to compensate for a late arrival at a seminar.

Whatever Mr. Miller's plans, a return to the Metropolitan Opera does not look imminent. He called the company ''unbelievably conservative'' and said, ''The infantilism of that audience is well, it's very depressing.''

He was already persona non grata at the Met after a dust-up with Joseph Volpe, the former general manager, over a 1998 ''Nozze di Figaro.'' Though Mr. Miller said he had not closely examined the strategy of the new general manager, Peter Gelb, he did not think that much had changed.

''They mostly seem to be to me show-biz plans,'' he said. ''They're getting more and more movie directors to do things.''

He called the current ''Zauberflöte,'' directed by Julie Taymor, an ''abomination'' marked by ''silly, glamorous, folkloric nonsense.'' Anthony Minghella's ''Madama Butterfly,'' which opened the season, was a ''Japanese fashion show,'' and he ridiculed the bunraku puppet that portrays Butterfly's child.

"Why didn't the obstetrician tell her, 'We've done a scan, and I'm afraid you're about to have a puppet,'" he intoned in an officious American accent. "'We had thought of terminating, but it was too late.'"