"Is it true you'd like to have sex with everyone in the world?" Even by the not-very-high standards of film journalists, the questioner is not a pretty guy. German, with greasy straggling hair, an acne problem which two decades of adulthood have failed to clear up, and a chin that, well, just isn't there. So, given that he's talking to one of Hollywood's hottest new sex symbols, you have to guess there's a certain amount of wish-fulfilment going on here.
Angelina Jolie raises her eyes slightly to Heaven and says the quote was taken out of context, that she had been talking about her Oscar-winning performance in Girl, Interrupted. "It doesn't take much to shock people. It was just too early in the morning and I hadn't had my coffee."
We're sitting around a table in an Athens hotel room, on the publicity weekend for Gone in 60 Seconds, the latest action blockbuster from producer Jerry Bruckheimer (The Rock, Con-Air, Enemy of the State). Athens because the movie's star, Nicolas Cage, who plays, according to the press bumpf, "a car thief of legendary proportion" is currently in the middle of shooting Captain Corelli's Mandolin, and can only get away from the set for a day or so. At his press conference, one journalist asks him what it was like to have Jolie "sitting on his gearstick". Hur, hur, hur . . .
This is boys' stuff - the obsession with flash cars, the slam-bang action sequences, the sheer inanity of the whole thing. There's a wonderful scene in Don DeLillo's novel, White Noise, where a bunch of (male, dorkish) pop-culture theorists sit around discussing the meaning of car chases and car explosions in American movies, coming to the conclusion that they are the ultimate expression of national self-confidence, that the destruction and mayhem is an affirmation of macho US industrial power.
As it happens, White Noise was written in the mid-1970s, at a time when the car chase had just passed its marvellous peak - think of the roller-coaster brilliance of Bullitt or the nerve-jangling elevated railway sequence in The French Connection. At the same time, the behemoths of Detroit were being replaced by new, unfamiliar names - Toyota, Nissan, Honda. Not surprisingly, Hollywood has had difficulty surpassing those moments since, relying on jokey excess (the 100-car pile-ups of The Blues Brothers) or sci-fi effects (the thundering juggernaut of Terminator 2). There have been plenty of car chases, of course, but they've all seemed a little dull.
Gone in 60 Seconds attempts to revive the glory days. In fact, it's a souped-up, drag-wheeled, turbo-charged version, complete with go-faster stripes, of a little-known cult action movie made in 1974 by actor-director-stuntman H.B. Halicki (who died with his boots on some years later while performing a stunt for the sequel).
Shot by top commercials director Dominic Sena in the colour-saturated, filter-heavy style familiar from countless car ads, it tells the story of reformed car robber Cage embarking on one last job (ho, hum) to save the life of his younger brother (Giovanni Ribisi) from the evil clutches of an implausible Cockney villain, played with little conviction by Christopher Ecclestone. ("You always try to do something different with the villains to make them interesting," says Bruckheimer. "And television's chewed up all the American actors as villains, so we thought a Cockney bad guy would be fresh.") To rescue his brother, Cage and his gang must steal 50 of the world's most coveted cars within a couple of days.
Like most Bruckheimer productions, Gone in 60 Seconds (the title supposedly refers to the amount of time it takes an experienced thief to drive off in your motor) will not find much favour with those who like a bit of art or subtlety in their movies, but its producer isn't bothered. "I wouldn't be here sitting with you if the films hadn't been a success," he says in his low, slightly creepy monotone. As for the critics who haven't been kind to his films: "Things change with time. Ten years later they come back and say that was a pretty good movie. That's happened to me with films like Flashdance and Top Gun." One wonders whether he can distinguish between critical reappraisal and gleeful so-bad-it's-good kitsch appropriation. But some Bruckheimer movies are better than others; last year's Enemy of the State, for example, was a slick and stylish thriller.
Gone in 60 Seconds, however, is a terrible load of old tosh, which criminally wastes its talented cast, including Robert Duvall, Grace Zabriskie and, um, Vinnie Jones. (Jones on stage two of his mission to do for thug footballers what Arnold Schwarzenegger did for Austrian bodybuilders. Luckily for him, he has an almost entirely non-speaking role, saving him the embarrassment of trying out what he admits is a far-from-perfect American accent.) As for Jolie, she's reduced to a decorative cipher, little more than a grunged-up, big-screen version of the blonde lovelies employed to drape themselves over cars at motor shows.
"Jerry's a good guy," says Jolie loyally. "His films are about good guys and bad guys and there's nothing dirty about them. The character and what she stands for are very similar to other characters I play. I chose this job because I'd just finished Girl, Interrupted and I was exhausted and emotionally screwed up. I needed something focused and simpler. Everybody told me not to do it, because I was a `serious actor' and should not do things like this. But I thought if I ever take myself too seriously I'll go out of my mind, and I wanted to go and put myself back together and have some fun."
So, does she prefer spending some of her time on less demanding work? "Well, yeah, obviously it's simpler, but on the other hand I enjoy going to the edge and getting extremely emotional and expressing everything to get an emotional release. This movie was hard for me because I didn't have many outlets - she's very contained and six months of that is not very good for me. But afterwards I went off to do a period piece, and it was good for me to be doing heavy, heavy scenes again."
AS the German journalist's question suggests, 25-year-old Jolie's reputation as a wild child, combined with her drop-dead looks and taste for bad-girl roles, have made her something of a dream for males of the species. The tattoos! The pick-up truck! The drug overdose! The first marriage (to British actor Jonny Lee Miller) when, dressed in black rubber pants, she wrote her new husband's name in blood across her shirt. The sudden second marriage, to actor-writer-director Billy Bob Thornton, whom she met on last year's Pushing Tin (to the chagrin of Thornton's then wife-to-be, Laura Dern). She's a gossip columnist's dream, she admits.
"I don't believe in guilt. I believe in living on impulse, as long as you don't intentionally hurt another person and don't judge people. It's part of an actor's job to live completely free and explore every part of themselves and share it with an audience, even if you get in trouble with the press for being too honest. That's how I live. There are things I've done which, in retrospect, might somehow have hurt someone else, but I don't regret my first marriage. We were meant to spend time together. I saw Jonny two days ago and we watched TV all night on the couch."
As for Billy Bob Thornton: "The first time I met him I walked smack into a wall. I knew as soon as I met him that even if I couldn't be with him, I was just happy that he was alive. I suddenly was grounded for the first time in my life."
Jolie tends to talk like this, almost like a parody of the insecure movie stars of the 1940s and 1950s. Like the prominent tattoo with Thornton's name on her arm, everything seems devoted to proving that, in this most transient of worlds, permanent physical marks can ensure that things will last. She's intent, she says, on getting her Oscar statuette and Thornton's (for Slingblade) welded together (which should make for interesting negotiations if there's a divorce).
She's currently enduring "two months of army training in England. I'm off cigarettes and alcohol and sugar and everything else and I'm away from my husband. I'm doing kick boxing and yoga and bungee-jumping and deep-sea diving and everything else." All this punishment is for her next role, as super-heroine Lara Croft in the movie version of the video game, Tomb Raider. She insists that, despite what one might think, it won't be a computer effects-driven film, and that she will have to get out of the studio and into the wilderness.
"It's so physically demanding and I can't cheat it, because I just won't make it through the movie. We get to go to Iceland and Cambodia and lots of other places, which is not a life you can complain about." This last part is said with the dry self-deprecation that undercuts some of her kookier pronouncements. Jolie is no fool and she knows how to say what she wants to say, while giving her audience what it desires. "I've been fortunate enough to play women who are vulnerable," she says. "But I think Lara's a great role model. We're not making her overly sexy, we're taking the breasts down a bit." Down, boys, down . . .
Gone in 60 Seconds opens next Friday