The Art of Making ‘Money’ : Films: Philip Haas’ ‘Money Man’ follows artist J.S.G. Boggs as he tries to get people to take his artwork instead of money. The United States follows Boggs too.

Filmmaker Philip Haas knows all about artists.

But does he know all about an artist whose medium has inspired accusations of forgery and con jobs? Isn’t it possible that conceptual artist J.S.G. Boggs, who Haas profiles in “Money Man,” his latest in a series of films about artists (and airing tonight at 10 on PBS’ “P.O.V.” series), is making Haas just another mark for his artistic sleight of hand?

Haas, sitting in a restaurant, barely takes a moment to respond: “Definitely not.”

Boggs is no more tricking him, Haas goes on, any more than Boggs could fool anyone into thinking that the dollar bills of various denominations that he creates from scratch are actual counterfeits. Indeed, as Haas’ camera follows Boggs around his hometown in Pittsburgh and in Washington--where he does battle with the U.S. Secret Service regarding a seizure of his money art--Boggs always stresses to anyone handling his artificial cash that it may look like the real thing, but is too fake to pass as counterfeit bills.

“Remember,” Haas notes, “the back side of every Boggs bill is blank, with his thumbprint as an artist’s signature.”

It is the illusion created by Boggs that fascinates Haas--an illusion with close ties to the drama at the heart of Haas’ first feature film, “The Music of Chance,” currently at Laemmle’s Sunset Five. “Chance,” based on the acclaimed Paul Auster novel of the same title and starring Mandy Patinkin as an ex-Boston fireman freely spending all the money he won in a lottery and James Spader as a card shark Patinkin picks up on the road, also dwells in the Boggs universe of money--what it means and how we affix a value to it.

The 38-year-old Haas’ body of work--11 years worth--has only recently come to the surface: in retrospectives, on TV and in “The Music of Chance’s” appearances in this year’s New Directors/New Films festival in New York and in the Un Certain Regard section of the Cannes Film Festival. Stanley Kauffman in the New Republic magazine hailed Haas and his writer-editor wife, Belinda, as having made with “Chance” a film “that is serenely eccentric, perfectly modeled, exquisitely seen . . . the richest American debut, in both accomplishment and promise, since Hal Hartley, Steven Soderbergh and Jim Jarmusch--with all of whom they share an interest in evocative understatement.”

And yet, for all of the Haas’ tendency to underplay the odd behavior of either Boggs or Auster’s characters, the director says he is fundamentally interested in the revolutionary qualities of art.

“The artists I’ve filmed,” he says, “tend to push the limits of art. But their work-as-stories, like the fiction film, must be inherently dramatic and cinematic. What drives Boggs isn’t so different from those desires driving (British conceptual artists) Gilbert and George to expand what art means.”

When Boggs in “Money Man,” for instance, is trying to persuade a postal clerk or a restaurant owner to accept his handmade currency, arguing for its intrinsic value as a unique work of art, he forces them to judge what the dollar bill and artwork actually are.

“Boggs is really on the outside of the art Establishment, just as much as the government may consider him to be outside the law,” Haas notes. “He’s cutting out the middle men of the art world, such as the dealer and gallery owner.”

Haas insists that Boggs’ successful attempts to persuade people to take his fake money weren’t affected by his camera’s presence: “They weren’t manipulated, and I wasn’t. Boggs is my friend, and we had been talking of doing this film for a long time. Besides, he got the same kind of results when a camera wasn’t around.”

The abstract quality of Boggs’ art is a world away from most of Haas’ earthbound subjects. They’ve ranged from land artist Richard Long making earthworks in southern Algeria (“Stones and Flies”) and David Hockney talking directly to the camera about contrasting values in Eastern and Western art (“A Day on the Grand Canal With the Emperor of China”) to Senegalese sculptor Seni Camara creating joyous, witty sculptures in her family dwelling (“Seni’s Children”).

That last film “is probably my favorite--the way it captured her way of life,” says Haas.

In a striking echo from one film to another, the earthen walls made by Long are reflected in “The Music of Chance,” when Patinkin and Spader are condemned to build a similar wall after they lose at cards.

Is it an obsession with the earth, rocks and soil?

“It doesn’t come out of my background,” Haas says, puzzling over it himself. “I grew up in suburban Palo Alto and then, in Rome, but I wasn’t a kid who spent time digging the dirt. It’s just that once I find an interest in something--earth-based art, adapting literature to the screen--I want to explore it more and more.”

A Harvard graduate, specializing in folklore and mythology, Haas learned about directing as an assistant at the Royal Shakespeare Company and then on the James Ivory film “Jane Austen in Manhattan.”

He keeps in contact with Ivory and his producer partner, Ismail Merchant (“They just sent me a script the other day”), just as he does with the various artists he’s filmed. “Whomever I was filming, whether it was a group of aboriginal men in the Australian bush or David Hockney, I always considered what we were doing together as a collaboration--another artwork.”

Haas and his closest collaborator, writer-editor-wife Belinda, are discussing a possible project with novelist Don DeLillo while adapting “Morpho Eugenia,” the first of two novellas that comprise A.S. Byatt’s “Angels and Insects” (also the script’s title).

Even in the middle of a process in which he writes the first draft, which Belinda then molds into a second draft before they polish it together, Haas isn’t afraid to analyze “Angels and Insects.”

“While ‘Music of Chance’ was an unrealistic story told in a realistic way, ‘Angels’ is a realistic story told in a completely unrealistic way. I just can’t wait to get Byatt’s images on film.”