The mayor didn't bat an eyelid. Not many internationally renowned artists have ever shown much interest in Pittsfield, a decaying backwater on the western edge of the state. "They told me, 'Sure, that'll be no problem,'" Crewdson recalls with a grin. Then, casually, he told them that he had one picture in mind that required something special. He needed to burn down a house. "You could see a gleam in the fire chief's eye," he says. "A few hours later they showed us up to 40 possible houses we were welcome to burn down. They were all owned by the city, on schedule for demolition. They said we could do anything we wanted."

The results, three years in the making, of Crewdson's imagination being allowed to run wild Ð in Pittsfield and other small towns in Massachusetts and Vermont — will soon be on display at London's White Cube gallery, and will be shown next month at galleries in Beverly Hills and New York. He seems assured of a triple triumph.

Few flowers are on view in the 21 images of Beneath the Roses (Crewdson actually made more than 40 pictures, but rejected half of them as not good enough for public display). The title speaks of the deeper entanglements that lie beneath surface beauty — of Crewdson's favourite themes of anxiety, loneliness, mystery and separation, all played out in arenas of jarring domestic banality. In his huge digital chromogenic prints — produced from 8-by-10in negatives, they are more than 7ft wide — lies a warped psychological world of strange figures, unsettling symbols and improbable collisions of the ordinary and the weird. Little in his pictures makes sense and nothing is explained.

"One of the things I love about a photograph, as opposed to a film or other narrative form, is that the viewer will always bring their own story to the photographs, because my photographs are unresolved," says Crewdson, who is 42. "When I say that I don't really know precisely what a picture is about, I'm telling you the truth."

Crewdson's elusiveness is all the more intriguing in the light of his unusual childhood. His late father was a Freudian psychoanalyst who had an office in the cellar of the family home in Brooklyn. Crewdson has often been reported to have derived much of the inspiration for his work from pressing his ear against his father's door as patients on the couch inside talked about their dreams. Did he really eavesdrop on his dad, the shrink? "Well," he replies, laughing, "this is an ongoing discussion between me and my mother." There's a grain of truth to the story, but the reality is actually more revealing. "My father had an office in our basement — that was a very powerful fact," he says. "As children, me and my brother and sister were always aware when my father was in session. There was always a sense that whatever was happening beneath our living-room floor was secret and forbidden."

He was not allowed downstairs, and acknowledges that he could not have heard much by trying to listen through the floor. "But in retrospect, it did create my first aesthetic viewpoint of trying to project images in my own mind. That is exactly what I am still doing. I also think that in all my work, there is a very strong undercurrent of voyeurism. And a very strong sense of a certain kind of alienation between me and the subject. And I think that was all set up in some weird way by the circumstances at home."

Nowadays he enjoys long-distance swimming, and has many of his ideas in the pool. "I think it's something about being underwater, sort of removed from the cares of the world. I come up with images and they float around, and if they stick we move to the next step and start incorporating them into our next production."

Crewdson works on a grand scale. The production notes for Beneath the Roses list more than 150 participants, including 55 "actors", eight "set dressers", several "best boys", a lead greensman, an aquarist and a manufacturer of synthetic corpses. When one of his images called for rain, he lined a street with water towers feeding sprinklers. He has borrowed fire engines, ambulances, and once used a bucket of pig's blood. In the past his images have featured well-known actors such as Gwyneth Paltrow, William H Macy and Tilda Swinton. In Beneath the Roses, the only celebrity involved is Jennifer Jason Leigh, a close friend, who in one of the images sits unrecognisably in a car.

The result of what Crewdson freely admits is his "obsessive... maniacal... perfectionist" approach is a unique body of work that combines the all-American eye of the painter Norman Rockwell with the brooding menace of Norman Bates, the motel owner from Hitchcock's Psycho. Crewdson denies that he is trying to send any kind of message, or has any political axe to grind. "I'm just trying to create beautiful images that have some kind of psychological content to them," he says.

"The thing that is important to me is that I want a sense of complicated beauty: not a beauty that is purely seductive or elegant. My pictures reside in the collision between my irrational need to make a perfect world, and the impossibility of doing so. I want them to be psychologically fraught with certain anxieties or fears or desires."

His pictures are certainly fraught, but Crewdson turns out in person to be a relaxed and affable figure who sometimes seems as mystified as everyone else by the tensions in his work. He spends tens of thousands of dollars (he won't say exactly how much) and employs dozens of people to create fabulously detailed re-creations of what are ultimately deeply personal visions. "There's almost a paradox in that, really," he muses.

He also acknowledges that too much tension and angst can be bad for you. This summer he intends to relax. He will take a simple digital camera into the New England countryside, to photograph fireflies dancing at dusk.

Gregory Crewdson's photographs are at White Cube, London N1, from April 15 to May 14. Tel: 020 7930 5373