Stockard Channing and her film The Business of Strangers

Stockard Channing appears in the downstairs hotel conference room wearing a black leather jacket, black top and slacks and some heavy black eyeliner that brings a little too much exaggeration to her face. Since she will not be posing for a photograph for the Independent (she’s careful about the unkindness of cameras) I feel obliged to tell you how she looks. Frankly, she looks like the kind of person who breakfasts exclusively on coffee and a packet of Camel Lights. She has the sweetly crumpled air of the late sleeper. I can imagine her wearing sunglasses in dark rooms, in that stylish but raddled kind of Jackie Onassis way. Unlike the yoga-toned Sigourney Weaver who shares a similar Uptown New York debutante background, there’s a bit of mess, a bit of a frayed edge with Stockard Channing. Perhaps that’s why we love her so much. She’s quite the grande dame.

The actress is in town to promote her new movie The Business of Strangers, a striking psychodrama by young New Yorker Patrick Stettner where she plays a successful businesswoman having a ‘breakdown’ in an airport hotel egged on by an evil Julia Stiles. Her long career (in which she ‘couldn’t get arrested’ before the age of 32 in Grease) is full of roles displaying what David Thomson describes as ‘sturdy perversity’ in his Biographical Dictionary of Film. In Stettner’s script Stockard plays a company director, recently promoted, who gets drawn into a scheme to wreak revenge on a man Stiles claims raped her friend in the past. The boozy enthusiasm with which her character decides to go for a wild ride in la-la land at the moment of complete and unadulterated career success is clearly one that appeals to the actress. ‘In a Hollywood film she would either be punished or redeemed, but here she just walks away from it unscathed’.

If the 58 year-old film star has any kind of image created over many years of hard work and career highs and lows its one of picking her teeth with neophytes, wiping the floor with the callow and the dumb. Her best-known role remains the fabulously mouthy Rizzo in Grease (‘where are you going?’ she bawls at an awestruck John Travolta ‘to flog your log?); it’s one that continues to haunt her, to her slight chagrin. But she’s also known for rather smart (in both senses of the word) performances – some bearing the mahogany shine of her of her rather grand background. A Harvard graduate, her father was a wealthy shipping magnate until he was financially ruined and died of cancer when Stockard was still young. In another life, Stockard would have been a Society Hostess who summers in Long Island and sits on the Board of the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art.

There’s certainly the clink of diamonds and privilege in many of her roles. She’s convincing, for example, as a wealthy heiress in a ménage-a-trois with Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson in The Fortune (1975). She was Oscar nominated as a trendy Society matron in Six Degree of Separation (1993) and of course we know her best as the US first lady, the President’s prickly physician wife in the huge TV hit The West Wing. Her onscreen chemistry with Martin Sheen saw her tiny early part developed into one of the biggest of the show, and she apparently is the envy of the cast, most of whom have golden handcuffs to the lucrative series, by a contract which allows her out to make a couple of movies a year. Movies like Business of Strangers.

Stettner, a genial Columbia Graduate whose father is a famous photographer and whose uncle is a Beat poet, had made a short graduation film that featured actress Allison Janney – who plays the press attaché at the fictional TV White House (and with delicious inevitability, has been now offered the job in real life). Since Stockard has declared on several occasions that her idea of a nightmare job is anything to do with working in an office (despite and probably because of two failed marriages to businessmen, arranged around two failed marriages to writers) I was intrigued that she should have taken this role as a battle-bruised demented businesswoman in psycho-sexual overdrive (‘when I attack the man it’s like I’m humping him’). An office drone?

‘The West Wing is about people working in the office,’ Stockard counters with a that patrician neutrality to her accent so often mistaken for a monotone, the bespoke linguistics of an East Coat grandee of a certain age (her language peppered with such old-fashioned upper-class English phrases as calling someone ‘a perfect pill’ or further mentioning that as a child he dressed up as characters in Kind Hearts and Coronets like some latterday Edith Sitwell recording a childhood at Knole). But don’t be fooled – this woman has a first class brain. ‘There are these caricatures of female executives and they’re brisk and bitchy, and often semi-villains, and that’s certainly how I begin the film. She’s such a bitch and so neurotic that I had to forgive her, since I realised it made her very human’

How did she respond to the allegations that the film is a man-hating piece of feminist triumphalism? ‘I don’t think it is at all,‘ she says. ‘It could have just as easily been about an older and a younger man ganging up on a woman, a story which seems kind of familiar, doesn’t it? You know I see these male executives on the plane all the time, and hear them talking about how they never even had the chance to drive the last car they bought, how they have to walk the walk and talk the talk. But we just thought it would be more interesting if the characters were women. We never talked about it in feminist terms’.

Actually she’s been a wonderfully vengeful vamp before in an early success, a Joan Rivers-scripted TV movie called Girl Most Likely To.. (1973) in which she plays a Fay Weldon-esque character who after plastic surgery does away with all the people who were nasty to her (‘any Channing fan should hound the airwaves for this one,’ pants David Thomson). ‘That was a rough and tumble comedy,’ she says, positioning a cushion on her lap and drinking her coffee. She has a lovely smoky laugh, which she uses often. ‘I had this Marilyn Monroe wig and I killed everybody, and I was just so green as an actress I just threw myself into it.

‘With Business of Strangers it was like being in a Chabrol movie, and it’s an ancient story, Dionysian and Apollonian, in which this antic person comes in and my character doesn’t look worse at the end of it she looks – refreshed! It’s just this emotional bungee jump, which I wasn’t sure I could pull off. Doing any film is like getting dressed in the dark but this one – well, I wasn’t sure whether the film would ever come together. It was a draining, gruelling experience because of having so little time and so little money to make it with, and a lot of very earnest young people who didn’t have a tremendous amount of experience’.

Perhaps she was still walking around with her character’s traits, despite the purging experience of having just made a Roger Spottiswoode film about the murdered American gay teen Matthew Shepard. Now she’s zooming off to do a Merchant Ivory film in Paris, but first she’s returning to the States for the season finale of West Wing (‘she could go down in a plane crash for all I know, but I hope not’). Would she be prone to a Bacchic frenzy? Defacing hotel mirrors with mad scrawls of lipstick? Did the Covent Garden hotel where she was staying have any idea of her film’s attack on hotels? ‘‘I don’t think I could ever be that bitchy or neurotic,’ she says carefully. ‘I’m sure I have been’.

Then she chuckles, nervously. She feels the need to answer honestly. ‘I like to think I’m not like that all the time – I know there are times when I’ve been short, bitchy and disagreeable, and I know there have been times when I’ve behaved stupidly and neurotically.’ So the effects of the film didn’t linger? ‘I tried to be as nice, polite and congenial as I could for at least a month afterwards!’ Heaven forbid such a phase would last to long. Too much sugar in Stockard Channing and not even a Marilyn Monroe wig (or a reprise of her role as a nurse on Sesame Street saying ‘next’ to a room full of puppets) could save one of our most cherishable actresses.

You can see more of Stockard Channing here and here

An interview with Zhang Ziyi

Who is Zhang Ziyi? Her almond-shaped face and lightning martial arts moves lit up Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and made her an international star. Now she’s been cast as the lead in Memoirs of a Geisha, the long talked-off Japanese epic that was to have been made by Steven Spielberg. Rob Marshall, Oscar-nominated for Chicago, will direct with Spielberg overseeing in the wings as producer. Filming has already started in LA – mere weeks after her latest film Hero (actually two years old, but that’s another Miramax story) astounded industry box-office watchers by going straight to the top slot in the US. In one weekend it virtually made back what Harvey Weinstein paid for it, a cool $20 million according to Peter Biskind’s recent Miramax exposé Down and Dirty Pictures.

Details are very sketchy about this Beijiing-born actress, who until very recently didn’t speak any English. What is she like to work with and what sort of person is she? I flew up to Edinburgh to meet legendary cinematographer Chris Doyle, who photographed her so well in Hero and Wong Kar Wai’s forthcoming 2046, taking time out from giving a masterclass during the Edinburgh Film Festival. Doyle, who has photographed many of the great Chinese actresses, agreed that the camera loves her but try as we might we couldn’t quite get to the essence of her appeal. Words that kept cropping up were to do with freshness and poise – but little to do with acting ability. Was she really, as the Chinese press has been bitching, just a lucky model who stumbled into acting? Zhang Ziyi’s feud with the Chinese media – especially the Hong Kong press who accuse her of all manner of diva-like activities, including huge entourages – has escalated since Cannes this year, which she visited with Wong Kar Wai.

I barely knew anything about Zhang. A dozen drooling fansites on the internet all repeat these few basic facts, endlessly, in that fugue that beauty and celebrity seems to create in some people. They’re mostly taken from the very few interviews she has given to promote films as various and forgettable as Tsui Hark’s Zu: Warriors of the Magic Mountain to Rush Hour II. An elfin 5ft 5in tall and 25 years old, she’s the worldwide face of Maybelline cosmetics and her list of commercial endorsements is vast and growing – including Korean mineral water, Tag Hauer watches and Coca-Cola in Asia. She trained at the China Central Drama College, the Chinese equivalent of RADA, and was clearly an ambitious student. Before she even got there, aged 15, she won a National Dance Competition. But her history is also littered with sudden reversals – quitting dance in disgust at its limitations, and earlier, being so oppressed by the nature of competitive gymnastics at her school that she actually ran away from home.

In order to find out more I tracked down Zhang Yimou – long before he made Hero one of China’s best-known directors in the West with films like Raise the Red Lantern. I had been told he had discovered Zhang Ziyi while casting for a shampoo advert in Beijing and was only too happy to talk about his beautiful protégé, whom he gave a small role in Hero and the lead role in its follow-up House of Flying Daggers (watch out for it at the London Film Festival and a Boxing Day general release). Some years ago tongues were wagging about the exact nature of Yimou’s relationship with Ziyi – after all her predecessor, directorial muse Gong Li, also dated the man – but neither party has ever spoken publicly on the matter. The Asian press ungenerously dubbed her ‘little Gong Li’ – which apparently annoyed the young actress. No diva likes to be compared to another diva. Besides, he’s old enough to be her father.

‘I wanted a girl with long hair,’ Zhang Yimou explained to me through an interpreter at the Dorchester Hotel. ‘And her hair wasn’t long enough for the shampoo advert. But one year later I was about to make A Road Home. I suddenly remembered her at the auditions, since I needed a completely fresh person for the central role, of girl falling for a teacher. I cast her. She couldn’t act very well at first, but she learns fast’.

When a pigtailed and pouty Zhang Ziyi first appears in this debut film, set in 1950’s rural China, the previous monochrome of the film is transformed into rich and luscious colours. It’s quite a trick. Stephen Holden in the New York Times subsequently wrote about his impression of this startling new actress. ‘Ms. Zhang's intensely concentrated performance conveys a current of stubborn, obsessive passion lurking behind girlish wide-eyed innocence’, he gushes. ‘This is a woman who, on recognizing her destiny, will let nothing stand in the way of her seizing it.’ Only a year or so later the actress was telling Time Asia ‘I want to prove to everyone that I have talent’

Zhang Yimou recommended Zhang Ziyi to Ang Lee when the latter was searching for the right actress for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Her appearance as Jen – a supremely skilled swordswoman secretly resisting an arranged marriage – transformed her fortunes. She was – she has admitted – jealous of the attention Ang Lee lavished on Michelle Yeoh thanks to her lack of Chinese and some of that chemistry sparks there with the clashing swords.

Her boyish, androgynous qualities were emphasized – especially in her swordfight with Michelle Yeoh, a brilliantly stylized catfight in all but name. ‘After I watched the film I realized that Ang Lee had made her change,’ remarks Zhang Yimou with obvious admiration. ‘She had changed from simply being a girl, and had matured. She was another person from the one I knew. I gave her a small role in Hero but it was an important, passionate one. I realized she had learnt to express or hold back as she likes – which in China is quite rare. Rare too are actors who can actually fight’.

Zhang Yimou directed Gong Li is seven memorable films. How does Ziyi compare? ‘They are entirely different, representing two generations - Gong Li depicts a classical, traditional Chinese woman and Ziyi is a modern woman, more individual’. But both usually play strong, willful women who won’t take no for an answer? ‘That is true’.

I was really going to have to talk to the woman herself. I had recently just seen House of Flying Daggers – a film that finally makes her seem entirely feminine and combines her twin abilities to play the tumbling tomboy and the delicate flower. I’d talked to people who had worked with her and read about her upcoming roles. An interview was arranged and then called off as Geisha approached its first day of filming. I ended up taking her call sitting in a car in a car-park at midnight, on an Italian cellphone in Venice during the recent Venice Film Festival. You’ve no idea the effect this information has on an awful lot of men aged 17 upwards – even now I have to keep denying I have her phone number.

The immediate impression was of a giggly teenager full of self-confidence and charm. Do you ever get sick of being beautiful? ‘Not often,’ she laughs. Do you enjoy being beautiful? ‘No, I don’t care’. Are many people frightened by your presumed martial arts abilities? ‘No, I need bodyguards – I teach my bodyguards! Hahahah!’

In fact Zhang has adapted her prodigious gymnastic abilities and dance training to give the illusion of martial arts abilities. She’s only been in Hollywood for two weeks now – everything happens fast when it happens in Hollywood – busy learning English as fast as she can. Her Rush Hour II co-star Chris Tucker once said of her ‘I think what makes her so sexy is that she doesn’t speak English’. She manages some conversation with me but regularly has to be helped out with a studio translator. Do you have English words on your fridge and phone and places like that, like regular people learning a language? ‘On my mirror,’ she volunteers. Of course – the mirror. When will you become fluent? ‘It takes forever,’ she sighs.

Gong Li and Michelle Yeoh will act with her in Geisha, where she plays a young woman sold by her poverty-stricken parents to a Geisha house in Kyoto. In fact all the leads have gone to Chinese actresses, to the chagrin of the Japanese. What do you say to the Japanese actresses who feel they should have been cast? ‘They should learn martial arts, hahahah!’

You must have a famous actress you admire. ‘I love Bjork, I love her so much. I love Dancer in the Dark! I’d love to be in a film with her’. Despite her laughter and froth its clear she has a strong work ethic. ‘I need to work harder,’ she says. Do you know anyone in LA? ‘Hardly anyone’. Jet Li who helped you out so much in Hero? ‘He’s gone back to Shanghai’. You mentioned Jet Li taught you how to protect yourself – did he teach you how to protect yourself in Hollywood? ‘No, no, hahahahah!’ If I bump into Steven Spielberg on the Lido tomorrow, what shall I tell him from you? ‘Relax! Hahahah!’

After telling me she’s dying to come to London because she’s heard so much about the clubs, and the London Eye, our conversation ends. I can’t say the experience has been very illuminating but as with many actors what you see onscreen is what you get – she saves herself for the screen. Zhang Ziyi is about to become the most famous Chinese woman on the planet, and it sounds like she’s enjoying the prospect very much.

You can find a fansite with up-to-date information here I talked to Ziyi on the phone, parked in a car in a car-park in Mestre, Venice, 2005, a distinctly surreal experience.

Morgan Freeman is God

In Bruce Almighty he wears a smart white suit and gets to be God. His celebrated roles in The Shawshank Redemption and his omniscient narration in March of the Penguins all add to the perception that Morgan Freeman is a different class of actor, an actor whom the public instinctively warms to as a good man, possibly even a holy man. No wonder that when Nelson Mandela was asked who should represent him in the movies, the first name on his lips was the Tennessee born veteran who at the age of 68 seems at the peak of his game. He won a best supporting Oscar in Million Dollar Baby last year. But now he wants a break from being good. His latest film Lucky Number Slevin features him as a blackhearted gangster boss in a showdown with an equally blackhearted gangster foe played by Ben Kingsley. There is, it’s quite evident, a thirst for playing bad in him. And the ultimate bad guy is high on his list.

Morgan Freeman hasn’t seen Lucky Number Slevin. He has a thing about this. ‘I haven’t seen Shawshank Redemption,’ he also tells me. He’s well known in the industry for refusing to view the final cut of his movies (except, he tells me, Million Dollar Baby, which he has seen in its complete form). It’s almost a superstitious thing, as if to see himself dissembling, acting, taking up a role, is in some way to invite disaster on himself. ‘I find it difficult to watch myself,’ he admits when I ask him. ‘I find it boring’.

Still, this good guy thing seems to bother him. He’s making movies and then reacting to the general public ideal when they walk up to him on the streets. They have almost without exception seen him being dignified and humane in a dozen or more movies, or have been soothed by his remarkable speaking voice as he talks about penguins on their long and urgent trek to reproduce on plains of windswept ice. Do you get annoyed by this, I ask him, people thinking you’re a good guy and somehow better than other people? There’s a wince. ‘I know better, ‘ he says in a resigned way.

But some people see you as sympathetic, I persist. ‘I think I’m a sympathetic person even if I play a bad guy,’ he counters. ‘Whatever character you play you come off better if you admire the character you are playing’.

That careworn, live-in face with all its scarring and skin blemishes. That extraordinarily evocative voice like honey and molasses and mint juleps on the porch by the river. When Morgan Freeman plays the bad guy it has a weird kind of fascination, is if you can’t quite believe he’s actually doing it, as if it’s a beloved relative behaving badly. But underneath it all you get his sense of fun. Its almost a sense of mischief. He’s one of those actors who learns the scripts and turns up on the day. He’s the sort who can play anything and goes home to his wife for dinner after he’s finished.

‘I was talking to Bob Hoskins when we were making Unleashed together,’ he recalls. ‘We were talking about the joy of doing bad guys. And he confirmed exactly what I was thinking. With bad guys you get to let it all out. All those dark places in your psyche? You can let ‘em go. When you play good guys it’s kind of boring. It’s one note’.

He’s talked in the past of how he in some ways regrets Driving Miss Daisy, another Oscar nominated performance which he called ‘a big mistake’ – his all-knowing chauffeur another big favourite of the people who come up to him on the streets and mistake him for his characters. On the whole he’s delicate and cautious about badmouthing his directors and his films, but one the subject of Amistad as well, you sense a certain reticence. He’s a proud man, proud of his performances, eager to talk of his Oscar nominations and what he has achieved. But this stage-trained actor who started out with Shakespeare and Brecht clearly feels there’s a certain kind of unavoidable vulgarity in the movies, and specifically, about having to sell them. He is loved. But he wants to be respected.

I suspect he identifies with his character in Lucky Number Slevin. Did he research the role in any way? ‘I never find that way into a character,’ he says. ‘I read the script. And reading the script is like when you read a book and find the character within that is you. Your sympathies have to lie somewhere. So you watch and see that character’s emotions and motivations. This is a very clever man. Arrogant. Arrogant about the fact of his success. And her exercise a lot of control. You could overlay this on the corporate structure…’

Yes, I say. Your character lives on the top of an office block mere feet away from your rival gangster played by Ben Kinglsey. You have a small army defending you from each other round the clock. Bruce Willis and Josh Harnett are the team who may or may not precipitate a catastrophic standoff. Are you saying that is in some way about a corporate scenario? The smartest guys in their rooms, a few hundred feet away from each other? ‘Exactly,’ says Freeman, but does not add anything to the observation.

The director, the Brit Paul McGuigan, who also made the equally visceral Gangster No1 early in his career, has picked out a scene towards the end as a particular favourite. Without wishing to give two much away, the two men, both hell-belt on destroying the other, are in a room together and are being ‘encouraged’ towards a more truthful state of mind by Bruce Willis (like Freeman a late addition to the casting). Was he intimidated by Kingsley at all, or rather the somewhat obvious revisit to his Sexy Beast persona? What was it like being in the room with that level of hissing, spitting evil? ‘Oh heavens no, we’re actors,’ he smiles. ‘We’re pretenders, we know we’re pretenders. What scares me is actors who forget they are pretending.’

I asked him about his long-trailed project concerning Nelson Mandela, and dramatising the autobiography of the man. It was first mentioned as long back a 2002 with Shekhar Kapur pencilled in as the man to direct. ‘Shekhar has gone on to other projects and he’s no longer associated,’ he confirms. ‘But the film is still in the pipeline somewhere. The biggest problem with major works is that it takes years of hard work to get the script. The book is adapted from is 700 pages and we’re now onto the fourth draft. Even to get a book that length down to three hours is difficult. But we have a young South African writer-director on board now who we feel can handle it’.

Was it true that Mandela asked for him personally? ‘Well he didn’t ask FOR me but when he was asked whom he would like to play the role, he did use my name, yeah’. Had they ever met? ‘Yes I met him on a number of occasions and I told him I was thrilled he wanted me to be him.’ You must have taken the opportunity to study him a little, I venture. ‘The first thing you notice about him is his dedication to his country and the depth of his character, his soul, and that he offers so much of himself. The negative side is the heaviest part, the sense of loss – his mom is dead, his children. Nobody knows this side of him’.

Well, I say. You’ve been the voice of God on so many occasions. You’re going to be God again when the sequel to Bruce Almighty starts principle photography in a few weeks. When your voiceover takes us into War of the Worlds with Tom Cruise there is the sense of an all-seeing eye, a fatalistic and slightly sad one, casting its sweep across the lot of humanity. I’m surprised more of the Emperor Penguins didn’t fall over backwards; surely they heard those amused and dignified tones booming from the white Antarctic skies? It’s just a thought but have you ever thought of playing the devil?

For the first time in the whole interview Morgan Freeman seems to wake up. An energy comes into his voice that is quite different from the diplomatic, by the numbers replies that had thus far characterised our meeting. Its about time, I carry on, you put on the horns and tail. He seems gripped by the idea. ‘I had a fantasy to tell you the truth. That I should do it. If I could interest the right people’. I think you’d make a good Devil, I say, in all honesty. ‘Who do you think God is,’ he whispers. Think about it and tell me who you think the Devil is?’ He paused. The same, I venture, weakly, not sure where this is going. ‘Both sides of the same person,’ he nods, ‘they have to be’.

It seems he had some kind of revelation one morning in his house in Mississippi. ‘It occurred to me about three days ago. I was washing my face. I had this whole dialogue with myself’. What did you say? There’s a pause as the Destroyer of Worlds comes into view. His voice takes on a devilish hue – hubris, pride, power. ‘You people – talking about the world at large – you astound me sometimes how ignorant you are about yourselves. Don’t you know who I really am?’ He lowers his voice to a hush, conspiratorially. ‘And it’s the devil talking’.

Perhaps it’s a reaction to the idea of having to be God again – divinity beckons mere weeks away, and the thought is probably exhausting. It’s a money gig; Bruce Almighty is the most successful film he’s ever been in (he has bitterly observed elsewhere that Dumb and Dumber made three times what the Shawshank Redemption grossed, both made in the same year). He’s rather be working on his pet projects with his own Santa Monica production company, including a low-budget feature for Broadband with Paz Vega.

So you’ll be God yet again, I say. ‘All the more reason to be the Devil!’ he persists thoroughly caught up in the idea. Would he change his appearance to be Old Nick? ‘You wouldn’t be able to tell them apart but for the costumes, which would be my idea’. And the Devil would have to be charming. ‘Extraordinarily charming,’ he agrees with a laugh. Well dressed and wearing Prada? ‘Why don’t you write it?’ he suddenly says, with sly gentility, as we end our conversation on the faintest whiff of sulphur.

I pause. Then move on. The idea of huge amounts of fame and cash float by and then evaporate into the ether. There really is no doubt about it. There’s a bit of the Devil in Mr Morgan Freeman.

The Legendary Mme Huppert

Back in September Isabelle Huppert attended her first US premiere in a decade – joining co-stars Jude Law, Naomi Watts and Dustin Hoffman for the I ♥ Huckabees launch at The Grove in LA. That’s her, looking quite diminutive, in a line up with Mark Wahlberg to her left and director David O Russell to her right. ‘She’s practically a legend in France,’ enthused Russell to the TV cameras about the French actress, little seen in Hollywood since Heavens Gate. ‘She has the most impeccable style and taste but she’s also willing to have her face slammed in the mud’. Looking at her career – six Chabrol films, a Godard, loads of high-end theatrical work and the passionate extremes of recent psychodramas like Ma Mere and La Pianiste – Russell’s summation of this exquisite French grande dame seems fair enough.

In Huckabees Huppert does indeed get her face slammed in the mud in a sexually-charged scene with Jason Schwartzman – she plays the wicked witch of the movie, the philosopher who has gone over to the dark side and whispers sweet nihilisms into the ears of all who will listen. She’s the nemesis of Dustin Hoffman and on-screen wife Lily Tomlin who extend their brand of Buddhist metaphysics and French philosophy to help those having a life crisis – including goofy environmentalist Schwartzman and dazed fireman Wahlberg. It’s an unclassifiable film billed as an ‘existentialist comedy’. In a deleted scene – inexplicably deleted as it happens – Huppert reveals herself to be the victim of an unsuccessful ménage-a-trois with Hoffman and Tomlin. No wonder her character’s dictum is ‘cruelty, manipulation, meaninglessness’.

Russell only signed up Huppert three weeks before filming started, which seems rather remiss of him; if you want a fearlessly intellectual actress, you phone Isabelle Huppert in Paris. No other actress of her generation has managed to push the envelope in the way she has – and because of her experience in classical theatre – those long tours with plays like Euripides Medea – there’s an extraordinary poise and dignity to what she does, even if it is being gang raped in Heavens Gate, drugging and poisoning in Merci pour le Chocolate, indulging in genital self-mutilation and sniffing soiled porn cinema tissues in La Pianiste, or inducting her pliant teenaged son into incest and S & M in Ma Mère

Its surprising to find how tiny she is in the flesh when I met her in London, at the Dorchester. It’s a cliché I know. But she’s the size of a little old woman. In Ma Mère, directed by Christopher Honoré from a Georges Bataille fiction and due for release in the UK next Mothering Sunday, she fairly towers above the camera in some shots like a terrifyingly meaty vixen-haired dominatrix. On the other hand in the flesh she’s exactly as cool and cerebral as you’d expect, until she hears her sons Angelo and Lorenzo running around in the hotel corridors near by (her daughter Lolita – I’ll refrain from commenting on that Nabokovian name – is now 20 years old). La Huppert glances over at where the sounds are coming from, like a dedicated mother cat hearing mews from her kittens, aware that feline order is being disrupted.

Yes, she is amazingly small. Perhaps its just because she’s slumped in her autumnal-coloured clothes, and is whippet-thin, like Parisian women always are, however much steak and pommes dauphinoise they eat. Its hard to reconcile her almost transparent delicacy with the physical presence familiar from the movies, though one hears this with actors like Pacino – to meet them is to meet an empty vessel.

She was a timid as a child. Born in 1955, Huppert was the youngest of five children in a prosperous middle-class environment in suburban Paris. After an education which involved studying Russian she took drama courses at the National Conservatoire D’Arte Dramatique (where she learnt ‘nothing’) and began her acting career in the city’s café-theatres. A number of modest TV roles established her and she finally began to get noticed after appearing in Claude Sautet’s Cesar and Rosalie in 1972, playing Romy Schneider’s younger sister. Bertrand Blier’s La Valseuses in 1974 launched her as an international star - alongside Gerard Depardieu. Claude Chabrol found in her the perfect modern, post-feminist inversion of the Hitchcock heroine – no passive cipher, but a powerful, inscrutable and sometimes dangerous creature. In La Ceremonie she played a psychopathic post mistress. In Madame Bovary she was expertly repressed, expertly sub-carnal. ‘Isabelle Huppert shows us her tongue on only two occasions,’ trilled author Julian Barnes of the movie, who clearly notices such things.

And now La Huppert is back in the thick of the Hollywood A list, taking on a role variously earmarked for Nicole Kidman and Gwyneth Paltrow, depending on which account of its wildly eccentric pre-production you read. Russell did his best, it seems, not to write a comprehensible script, and all the major studios passed on the project until a private UK backer was found (prompting Fox Searchlight to come back on board). Russell nearly lost Jude Law after Christopher Nolan enticed him to a rival project; it’s now the stuff of Hollywood legend that Russell, meeting Nolan at an LA party, put him into a crushing headlock and shouted about directorial solidarity. During the shoot Russell did everything to liven up and confuse his cast – taking his clothes off, and touching and rubbing the actors playfully, at least according to Sharon Waxman of the New York Times. At one point on set Wahlberg grabbed the megaphone and announced of the director ‘this man just grabbed my genitals – it’s my first man on man contact!’. They can’t have been surprised – Russell is also celebrated for fisticuffs with George Clooney on Three Kings, a film that also starred Wahlberg. Waxman also claims Russell whispered ‘lewd’ things into his actresses ears before the takes. ‘He’s fascinating, completely brilliant, intelligent and very annoying sometimes too,’ Huppert confirmed to Waxman on the phone.

I didn’t ask her, but I suspect Russell would have thought twice about being lewd to Huppert – who would either fell him with a basilisk stare or say something back, five times dirtier. ‘I had a good time,’ she tells me. ‘But I was with my family in my own space too. It’s nice to be part of something and have your own space’. I was curious to know what she made of Russell’s debut film Spanking the Monkey, an incest film, to do with mother and son. ‘It shares a similar subject matter to Ma Mere, which is a bit edgy, shall we say…’ She gives a dry chuckle.

Is she consciously aware of taking on controversial roles? ‘I’d rather not take bad roles in bad films,’ he observes coolly. ‘But I don’t take any risk in these films – there’s no risk in more artistically adventurous projects. That’s part of being an actress – trying to get into these different universes.’ Does anyone confuse you with your roles? Do they get frightened meeting you? ‘Maybe they do but I’m not aware of that – if you start being aware of that, then you are in bad shape, you know, and some actors get like that, talking about themselves in the third person. Sometimes I can tell when people are not natural with me and I have to admit that maybe I would be the same.’ Do you draw on your own experiences or are these roles an act of imagination? ‘I think it is both – being an actress is a quest for authenticity and a quest for truth.’ Your roles often deal with extreme mental states – do you have an interest in mental illness on a technical level? ‘I think everyone carries it within themselves. I always feel on the verge of falling into something I don’t want to fall in to, and being an actress helps me to go on. I don’t know what I’d do if I didn’t have this possibility of course’. Do you think you might have gone mad, if it wasn’t for your acting? I don’t think I’m mad – being aware of what I covey and carry around means I am not mad. Had I not become an actor I would have been very unhappy, I do know that. It’s like a protection for me. People ask me about preparing these roles, and isn’t it scary, and I reply it’s the opposite. The more difficult it is the more reassuring it is’.

I week later we talked again on the phone. She was taking a break from rehearsing Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler at the Odeon Theatre in Paris, which opens in January. She was partly in character as she talked to me from the green room (‘what a curse,’ Hedda cries at the end of the play, ‘it is that makes everything I do ludicrous and mean’). I wanted to cast her mind back to Heavens Gate, which despite all the reports to the contrary, was a good experience for her, and she has retained a friendship of sorts with Michael Cimino (‘though I’ve never thought of a director as a friend, I don’t know why’). She says he’s working in a directors cut, to be released shortly, and may be making another film with the director The Human Condition. Was it nightmarish to make, as legend has it? ‘No it was extraordinary – the nightmare was the failure, you know. I still believe the movie is a masterpiece. But it was very anti wild-west and America just didn’t want to hear bad things about their country.’

Plus ca change, I should have said.

Gangsters, Molls and Al Pacino - a profile of Dexter Fletcher

‘I’ve been Al Pacino’s son. I was Diana Dors son. I’ve been Kylie Minogue’s boyfriend. I’ve been the Pope’s boyfriend. I’ve been a woman. Yeah and I’ve played quite a few gangsters over the years.’

I’m sitting in a busy Soho sushi bar with Dexter Fletcher and people have been looking over: he was just imitating ‘Boy Bitten by a Lizard’ – one of several Caravaggio paintings Derek Jarman had him pose for in his film of the same name (and he proved to have perfect recollection of this 1986 National Gallery acquisition – the same year as Jarman’s film - the startled open mouth, the dainty fingers repulsed). We’re really here to talk about his latest film Stander, shortly out on DVD, where he plays the side-kick of a real-life cop turned bank robber in 1980’s South Africa. Like his character in Stander, or like the young Caravaggio for that matter (‘the pope’s boyfriend’ as he puts it), his life and career has been something a wild ride, full of vertiginous highs and real lows.

Raised in Muswell Hill, Dexter followed his aunt and two brothers into the Anna Scher acting school in Islington at a very early age. He was cast as Diana Dors son in the feature film version of Steptoe & Son (he remembers warm and bosomy cuddles) and at the age of nine found himself with Jodie Foster in Bugsy Malone (the female child star scooping up some his hair-clippings from an onset haircut and making a moustache of them on her upper lip). He’s the small boy who wanders round behind John Hurt’s poetically deformed character in David Lynch’s Elephant Man; at the age of 16 he was a member of the RSC during their first production at the Barbican.

A little later he played Al Pacino’s son in Revolution (‘because he’s a method actor he really did treat me like his son’). But by 1996 fifteen years of wild living and reckless partying caught up with him; he was declared bankrupt, lived for a while in his car, and through the help of friends like Alan Rickman kicked the cocaine habit that nearly finished him. Memorable comebacks don’t come much better than his knife-wielding chef character in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. The gods of acting seem to treat him as a favoured son. He’s been on a roll ever since - Spielberg’s Band of Brothers amongst his recent credits.

He doesn’t seem to mind that he’s returned to gangster roles once more – indeed he tells me he is to direct his first feature this year, called The Bank Robber Diaries based on a book by Danny King. He was in The Long, Good Friday. He’s a gangster in a Kylie Minogue video where he also plays her boyfriend – toothpick in mouth, straight out of prison. ‘If you look at Stander it’s a gangster theme too,’ he says. Yes, I say, as Dexter orders more sashimi rolls. It must be the dream of every male actor to re-enact the shoot-out at the end of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, which is precisely what Dexter Fletcher does in Stander. Dexter smiles and nods. ‘Yeah, ever since I was a little boy’. His character Lee McCall, surrounded by the South African police in his big white mansion, decides to come out with all guns blazing. ‘It was actually me who suggested he just use the handguns, rather than anything bigger,’ he recalls. ‘You know they love their guns in South Africa’. There’s something oddly touching about his less-than-beefy character, clad in underpants, taking on a small army armed with machine guns. ‘He wanted to go out in a blaze of glory – he got the girl, the clothes, the lifestyle and he never wanted to go back to jail’.

Dexter tells me that the third member of the Stander gang, played by David O’Hara in the movie, moved to the UK in the 1980’s ‘and was the guy who invented robbing banks wearing a crash helmet’. This is a fact that seemed to escape Guy Ritchie when dreaming up Lock,Stock, a project in which Dexter was associated from a very early stage. ‘I got a call from my agent to go in for a table read in Wardour Street,’ he recalls. ‘ Matthew Vaughn was there and it was Matthew that called me the next day to come in again and read against all the people auditioning. I read every single part and everyone else was nervous – really I always wanted to play the Jason Flemyng role’ (Flemyng is a close friend and is producing Bank Robber Diaries). Matthew Vaughn was later to call him again for a role in Layer Cake.

Dexter Fletcher is unique on the London scene – a man who easily moves between leading man (or woman in the case of Raggedy Rawney) and reliable character actor - a natural and intuitive performer and a veteran of over thirty years in the business. He’s simultaneously modern and old-school – he wouldn’t have seemed out of place in an Ealing Comedy, yet is at the same time perfectly suited for the slick cinema of Lock, Stock and Layer Cake. He’s gone from Steptoe and Son to Doom – the cinema version of the computer game, out next year.

Yet we kept coming back to Caravaggio. His crumpled, youthful beauty was appreciated by Derek Jarman but really Jarman was the first director who perceived something unusual in his acting, something a little haunted, a properly urban sprite, rather than just casting him as a technically proficient child actor. Faintly appalled after seeing Sebastiane, Jarman’s gay love frolic from 1976 conducted in Latin, Dexter took his girlfriend to the meeting with Jarman. He left her outside in the rain of Charing Cross Road, expecting the talk to last ten minutes. Two hours later and he was still there. He still makes the effort to track down rare Caravaggios wherever he is in the world: ‘he had an interest in light and real people – and it’s great to see people with dirty feet, before that they were all so pristine weren’t they?’ That interest in people – and getting his feet dirty – is something you could say about Dexter Fletcher himself.

Ice Maiden Cometh--Kristin Scott Thomas

Not a speck of ice. Not even a dusting of light frost. Kristin Scott Thomas winces at the mention of the word ‘icy’ – the word many have used when trying (and usually failing) to describe her elusive quality as an actress. She’s a rather grand ice-maiden on the outside and a ribald scarlet woman on the inside, isn’t she? It’s a perception that has fascinated French and European directors, and even the odd (odd) American like Prince, who discovered her all those years ago during a routine casting call in Paris.

For Prince she did vampy heiress and sex kitten with a comedy British accent in Under the Cherry Moon; her performance got nominated for a Golden Raspberry. It could have finished her off, but it didn’t. She discovered formality, distance, complexity. Since her subsequent turn as Lady Brenda in A Handful of Dust there’s been a certain froideur to some of her performances, a sense that her leading men, from Harrison Ford in Random Hearts to Robert Redford in The Horse Whisperer, or Sean Penn huffing and puffing at Up At the Villa, might suffer from freezer burn at her every touch. Their lips might stick to her beautifully chiselled face and creamy rose-petal skin like fingertips on an ice-box. The executives of Fox studios thought as much when they clashed with Anthony Minghella over her casting in The English Patient. He went elsewhere.

It’s a perception that doesn’t go away after all the years. Ice and tears. Seriousness, being seized up, the odd vivid thaw of pain and grief. Her fellow thesps sometimes haven’t exactly helped. There’s that ambiguous comment from Hugh Grant that she needed ‘warming up’ every morning after he’d acted with her on Four Weddings and a Funeral and Polanski’s underrated Bitter Moon (when of course it’s his apnoeic, strangulated acting that needs the chilli sauce).

But now she’s truly fed up with the tag. She rolls her eyes at the mention of the word (‘I don’t think I’m particularly icy,’ she complains quietly). It distresses her. She’s known for falling silent for five minutes in interviews, or getting bored and leaving, so I have to be careful not to mention it too directly.

Besides, she doesn’t strike me as icy at all. She’s quite animated and chatty. She’s endlessly self-deprecating. She laughs a lot. People read too much into her immaculate pronunciation, and read it as aloofness. It’s certainly rather old-fashioned for her age-group, even for someone who attended Cheltenham Ladies College. I have a friend who was there two years below her. She certainly doesn’t speak in the same way.

There’s more. People sense, intuitively, there’s more to her that meets the eye. That the clipped accent is a shimmering disguise and the porcelain face a mask. What is it? Perhaps there’s a touch of madness there - the connective tissue between her light and dark sides, her hot and cold. She’s suffered in the past from clotted, heart-palpating depressions that lasted for months. Tragedy lurks in her family background (father and step-father both died in plane crashes, school an alienating experience precipitating an early exit to France, and marriage, never to return).

She would probably be a lot less English if she lived here. She’s been gone for over twenty years and lives in Paris with her obstetrician husband and three children. She’s like one of the colonial English that stayed on in India after its emancipation, and never changed, while England did. Not so long ago Jeremy Clarkson more-or-less made this point in an otherwise disagreeable attack on the actress, noting how she had complained in some newspaper that Britain was stuck in the 1950’s and how we’re all ‘fat, acquisitive telly addicts’. Clarkson, necessarily protecting the Top Gear demographic that pays his inflated wages, was outraged that this emigrant minx, once an object of his lust, could be so scathing of old blighty. Anthony Burgess once remarked how we do hate our own who go and live abroad, the writers and actors, whatever the lifestyle makeover shows might say.

Her candour is refreshing. She says what she thinks. She’s famous for not towing a Hollywood line, of being indiscreet. When an American PR suggested she had plastic surgery around her eyes (at 44 she looks very good indeed), she didn’t have plastic surgery, she sacked the PR. This is not the behaviour of an ice-maiden, one could argue.

There’s a change in the air. Are we about to meet more of the playful Kristin Scott Thomas who briefly lived and died in Under the Cherry Moon? During my conversation with her it became obvious that her films in post-production reveal a retreat from the arctic towards – wait for it - comedy.

Arsène Lupin is the time-hopping 19th century tale of a jewel-thief with a roistering plot recalling The Da Vinci Code (it even involves an art-related murder in the Louvre). She plays an ageless being, one minute ghoulish and murderous in monk’s cowl, with a whiff of the grave about her, the next minute svelte as Audrey Hepburn on a yacht wearing a black polo-neck, or her face covered and veiled in a horse-drawn carriage. Though she has been in better films, you get the sense that she’s enjoying herself. She’s vamping it up a treat, recalling some of the great actresses and performances of Hammer Horror (Ingrid Pitt springs to mind). She looks fantastic – scary, sexy, tricky. She looks like one of those busty types she’s been dismissive of in the past. The camera loves her. Adores and is infatuated by her.

I accused her point blank of having a streak of camp in her soul. This was a high-risk strategy. To her credit she drew herself up to a great height and in a commanding autocratic voice, quivering like Lady Bracknell saying ‘a handbag!’ in The Importance of Being Earnest, boomed out ‘how daaaare you!’.

What of herself is in this character, I wonder? ‘When I read it I thought that teenagers will really love this film,’ she enthuses. ‘I love all the jewellery, the fabulous costumes, the ridiculous – not, not ridiculous – wicked things she does and the knives she conceals about her person. I loved all that! Fun to be able to imagine something so far-fetched, yet my job was to make her believable. That’s what drew me to playing the part. We don’t know whether she’s a figment of people’s imagination. People accuse her of being a witch don’t they?’

It’s a return to the vamp of Under the Cherry Moon, I venture. How was it working with His Purpleness? ‘People are never going to stop asking me about that,’ she sighs. ‘I was a freshly graduated drama student doing a play in a field in Burgundy and I drive back to Paris and I heard about this casting. And then they said would you be interested in auditioning for the lead opposite Prince? So suddenly I was in limousines, and getting phone calls asking me whether I would be bringing my own stylist and make-up artist.’

I was intrigued to know what she thought of Prince, then at the height of his career. She whispers like a naughty girl, conspiratorially. ‘Very very small and very very extraordinary – a bit bonkers. Terribly gentle. At the time everyone was terrified of him, but then they always are, terrified of the boss. He fired the director and rang me up in the middle of the night and said he was going to take over the directing role as well. He asked me if that was all right. What was I going to say?’

Did you find him sexy? ‘He’s a popstar, an idol, and there’s something fascinating about that. You have to be quite careful to keep your hands in the right place and I think I managed to.’ You could have gone quite showbiz, surely? ‘I did try!’ she wails. And failed? ‘Dismally! The film was an absolute – what they call a – turkey in America. I had the worst line I ever had: you’ve painted my life as a picture and now you’ve given me the frame – ghastly! I rather naively and pathetically threw myself at all the newspapers and they wrote the most appalling things and printed my picture. I don’t do that anymore. But you know, Prince gave me my first job. He was the first to say she’s good – fantastic!’

Did it make you realise what you didn’t want? ‘Yes it was defining in that way. Are we going to sit around and feel slightly shabby or are we going to start again? So basically I started from scratch again.’

I was interested to know what role she was first proud of, and it turns out to be her Lady Brenda in A Handful of Dust, the Charles Sturridge adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s bitterest and most personal novel based on the break-up of his marriage. It set the template for her future roles. ‘She was the first in a long line of unsympathetic characters that I fall in love with because I want people to love them because they’re not as horrible as they appear’. So you want to persuade the audience to love them? ‘Yes it’s sad isn’t it,’ she giggles nervously. ‘It’s something I’m guilty of, making judgements about people in a few seconds and then finding out that I’m mistaken. I like to take on someone who is prickly and make people understand what is going on. I quite like that’.

Her career really isn’t bad for someone who has claimed in the past to live on ‘planet Kristin’ and whose career has ended and been revived twice (drama school in England a disaster, and then the debacle of Under the Cherry Moon). At some point or another she’s always asked whether she feels more English or French. She met her husband aged only 21 in Paris, while an au pair going to drama school for the second time, and has joined that select group of smart English-Parisian refugees that includes Charlotte Rampling and Jane Birkin. ‘We’re the three witches of Paris,’ she jokes.

I could see her in a manor house in the Cotswolds, I mention. ‘In my dreams,’ she says. ‘The older I get the more I feel drawn to this country. Driving down country lanes with high hedges either side. But I’m not sure I’d want to live here because life is so good in France’. Haven’t they just given you the Legion D’Honneur, topping your OBE from a few years back. For the first time in our encounter she looks uncomfortable. ‘I don’t know what to say about it really. I’m flabbergasted’. Don’t you think you deserve it? ‘I don’t know!’ she wails with genuine distress. ‘It’s all a bit frightening’. You don’t feel you deserve an OBE and the Legion D’Honneur? ‘I think we’d better talk about something else,’ she announces, briskly. She’s completely spooked. She feels a fraud, I can see.

The way to soothe her, I discover, is to talk about comedy. She’s just done two. One of them, Keeping Mum, features her living with Rowan Atkinson, a vicar (‘I think he has his own kit now – he does a good line in vicars’) and considering running off with golf coach Patrick Swayze. Then Maggie Smith arrives, with an agenda. ‘I’m unsure about comedy because I don’t really know about comedy. Bursting into tears I’m very good at. Recently I did a tour with the Racine play Berenice and it was incredibly difficult and draining and went on for such a long time. By the end of it I was thinking about my career. It gave me lots of time to think. Do I really want to spend my life weeping for camera? I’m more interested in being happier’.

We return to the subject of camp. ‘I don’t know how to say this without sounding completely idiotic,’ she ventures, ‘but I’d like to do things like the Pirandello play [a Jonathan Kent production scheduled for later this year] and acting in comedies. But then I’d also like to make a serious thing from time to time. I don’t want to get too camp too quickly’.

I realise the key to Kristin Scott Thomas isn’t her perceived iciness, or defensiveness, but her very English fear of passion. The way she filters, controls, deflects and uses her extraordinarily passionate personality is what makes her quite so remarkable. She is, as Harvey Weinstein has observed, one of the great actresses of her generation.

Being Kurt Cobain

‘I wasn’t going to turn down the chance to put on a dress,’ laughs Michael Pitt. We’re sitting in a hotel room in the Czech Republic shortly before an air raid siren goes off outside in the town, and turns him white as a sheet. Till that point he’d been more than usually amiable. He wears a dress, looking drugged-up, bedraggled and mad, for some of the scenes in Last Days, the new film directed by Gus Van Sant. It’s a film loosely based on the life of the Nirvana singer whom, conspiracy theories aside, died by his own hand in 1994. It seems the Nirvana front-man really did like wandering round his house in Courtney Love’s wardrobe (not a good look, even on a woman) brandishing a rifle. Except for one thing. This is not a film about Kurt Cobain. The damaged, depressive rock star that Pitt portrays in Last Days is called Blake (‘it’s sort of a poetic reference to Kurt’ claims Van Sant) and consequently all similarities between Blake and Cobain are purely coincidental. Got it?

Michael Pitt is relaxed. This in itself is astonishing. He’s in the spa town of Karlovy Vary for its annual festival, a distinguished but very low-key film festival famous for making visiting Hollywood types slough off their LA paranoia. Usually when journalists meet this rangy 24 year-old New Jersey actor it’s clear that he’d rather be having violent root canal work with veterinary instruments rather than talking about his films and his life in any detail. It’s not that he’s ungracious. Merely confused and discomfited. Those who interviewed him onset for his biggest role to date, in Bertolucci’s The Dreamers, had to get used to him fielding questions while lying on the floor. Others who met him in Cannes or New York junkets recently found him wired, fidgety and chain-smoking all the way through their allotted time.

But there’s an essential, winning sweetness about him that’s hard not to notice and be impressed by. He seems – as ever – slightly frail, etiolated, childlike and ethereal. As he talked and gestured with his slender hands I looked for the self-harming scars that were rumoured to mark his arms. I failed to see any. He’d got up early, had a massage in one of the famous local spas, and then taken a walk in the pine woods that stretch up the hillside to clear his head. ‘I like the forest,’ he says in his soft New Jersey drawl, his nostrils twitching with the memory of the pine scent.

He went to live in the forest while he was making Last Days, the last of a trilogy of films by Van Sant that began with Gerry (2002) and continued with Elephant (2003) (‘they’re each about death,’ Van Sant has observed, who when you think about it, looks like a mortician in Six Foot Under). ‘I had a house in the middle of the woods,’ Pitt recalls, like an imperilled child in a fairytale. ‘I stayed alone the whole time and I tried always to be battling with the things I thought the character was battling with – seclusion, drug addiction, severe chronic depression and suicidal tendencies’. The result is a striking performance that once seen is impossible to forget. It’s creepy, lingering and potent as a draught of deadly nightshade. Pitt, his long locks of yellow hair hanging over his face for much of the time in the film, mumbles incoherently as he stumbles about his dilapidated mansion and nearby woodland gardens, performing small tasks, making macaroni cheese, answering the phone and not saying anything, trying to play songs on his guitar and finally overdosing in the guest house.

Many have complained that the film just isn’t right. Not what they expected. Connoisseurs of standard Hollywood rock and roll movies, who have gone to see the film without actually reading up on it, expecting junkie chic and cool music biz scenes, have been infuriated and angry at this languid and mysterious descent into the deathly and distempered that Van Sant has come up with and called a film. One cinemagoer in Seattle even upbraided Van Sant for allowing Pitt to play guitar with the wrong hand (‘have they tried to play left-handed?’ counters Pitt). They all know that Van Sant knew Kurt Cobain. They all know that Cobain was considering doing a Van Sant film in the last months of his life, and that Cobain had lobbied Van Sant to get a friend a role on Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. They know that Van Sant discussed the idea of the movie with Courtney Love, and has shown it to Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic.

Still, Van Sant has taken a line and everyone is sticking to it. ‘It wasn’t a biopic,’ insists Pitt. ‘It wasn’t based on times and dates. I realised in Cannes when I was doing interviews because I was talking about this so much – it’s not a film about Kurt, it’s a film for Kurt. And I’ve mentioned that to Gus recently. ‘

Pitt has described in the past how he was a latchkey kid to a ‘lower working class family’ who ran away to New York aged fifteen, went to live in a Chinatown squat with artists and poets before ending up in a stage production and, finally, the anodyne TV series Dawson’s Creek which he hated. He’s a classic product of downtown Avenue A culture - the rapidly disappearing milieu of the Beat poets. It’s not surprising then that he should be attracted to alt.culture icons like Larry Clark (he worked with him in Bully) and Van Sant (a chum of William Burroughs after all) and seek to make films with them, since they still give some dim idea of ‘outsider’ culture in a mainstream America that has now turned on the idea.

Its also been suggested that another misfit and outsider called River Phoenix is an inspiration for the film, and that the Blake figure is in some ways an amalgam of both Kurt Cobain and the tragic young actor who overdosed on speedballs in LA in the middle of filming Dark Blood. At the time of their deaths – mere weeks apart – many cultural commentators where speculating whether the suicide of Cobain or the accidental death of Phoenix (real name Bottom) would have a more profound and lasting effect on a certain generation. It soon became clear that Cobain was the man who held the torch for maudlin youth. But for Van Sant Phoenix’s death had a powerful and lasting effect. He wrote the novel Pink in 1997 to exorcise the fitful ghost of Phoenix, who had lit up My Own Private Idaho. I met him when he was promoting Good Will Hunting years later and we talked of nothing else but River Phoenix.

Almost empathetically Michael Pitt confuses the two, Cobain and Phoenix, during the questions. He never talked about the Phoenix connection with Van Sant during filming, he confirms. ‘When I was a kid I really looked up to River,’ he says dreamily. ‘He might have had something to do with why I became an actor’. Another question asks where he was at the time of Phoenix’s death, and he inadvertently starts talking about Cobain. ‘I wasn’t a fan when the whole thing was going on,’ he recalls. ‘I was in sixth grade and one day everyone is school was dressed in black. And they were saying Kurt Cobain just died today! And it really struck me because this was a school primarily where people were into rap and R & B.’

So far I understand there have been no River Phoenix fans sending hatemail to Van Sant because his character doesn’t buy a rain forest during the course of the film, and after all the musical aspect of the Blake figure tilts its interpretation towards a Cobain interpretation. The music in the film is not Nirvana music, much of it is original material by Michael Pitt and his band Pagoda who performed a set at Cannes this year (though the movie does open and close with a recording of Jancquin La Guerre’s 14th century French chorale). Pagoda is something of a preoccupation with the actor right now, who is busy recording an album which should be ready ‘by Fall’. ‘People don’t go out of their way to tell me I suck! Eventually what I want to be doing is directing, but music is a younger beast and I want to tackle that now – I can direct when I’m 60 if I want to’.

The inevitable question is how accurate can Michael Pitt ever be about drug use? ‘I researched it,’ he admits. ‘I have friends who have been in situations…it was something I could re-create. Initially I had the bright idea that I was going to do the whole film drunk or something…which thank god I didn’t. Someone talked to me. I was probably the cleanest I’ve ever been for that film. I didn’t drink beer’.

In fact he deplores the glamorisation of drug use in the movies, even if Trainspotting was a film that galvanised him as a youth. ‘Whenever there’s a junkie played you have a shot of the needle and the arm…What is this romance? Or Requiem for a Dream which is another movie I love. It has this shock thing. Look how I can shock you’.

In fact the most illicit substance in the movie is macaroni cheese made with far too much milk, which is apparently just the way Kurt Cobain used to make it.

He’s asked whether he thinks suicide is selfish. ‘I see why people think it’s selfish and sometimes I do. And sometimes I don’t think it’s selfish. I’m probably an atheist though I was raised a catholic – and that whole religion is based upon the first suicide in many ways’.

He’s spent the last few years avoiding career suicide by steering clear of Hollywood movies, wary of even identifying what the offers were when asked. ‘Because I look up to Kurt and River Phoenix I’ve been fore-warned and a lot of my decisions I’ve made in my career are to counteract my fame’. He recounts with a shudder how he was chased by schoolchildren in the New York subway after appearances in Dawson’s Creek. Fame makes him nervous. Filming in Paris with Bertolucci for The Dreamers he was disturbed when people called him ‘sir’. It seemed surreal and slightly fake. What did people want from him? Could he even give them what they want?

‘If you grow up in a lower working class environment when most people think of you as trash, and then you get to this other place where people who normally wouldn’t be talking to you want something out of you. I could have made decisions to be more known. I’m pretty broke now but I’m sure I could have had a couple of million dollars’.

Pitt talks about filming Last Days with a kind of raptness and hero-worship of Van Sant that is very charming. He is, he thinks, ‘the best American filmmaker we have’ and you feel he really means it. The techniques of improvisation they developed while filming seemed to the young actor a liberating experience. The initial days shooting was just a trudge into the Oregon woods with Van Sant, Pitt, the legendary cameraman Harry Savides and a couple of focus pullers. ‘We had a 12 page script and it was just a map,’ Pitt recalls. ‘Gus would kind of orchestrate everyone’s ideas. Now when I get a script…’ his voice fades away with a grimace.

The air raid siren that went off in the middle of the interview is a strange hangover, a civic exercise lingering on from Soviet-era Czechosolovakia, a terrible wailing noise that filled the room and for a moment seemed to freeze Pitt in terror. But then he laughed about it. He’d been long enough in the pine-woods this morning to orientate himself and feel calm. Last Days may be about a suicide but it seems to have filled this unusual and fragile young actor with hope, whatever threats may fill the skies.