JOHN MALKOVICH is perhaps the most unlikely action movie star since Meryl Streep took to the rapids in The River Wild. He chews the scenery in the explosion packed, hyper active, new movie, Con Air, delivering his nasty one liners with relish. As the sinister and cunning convict, Cyrus "The Virus" Grissom, he is the mastermind behind a plot to hijack a plane transporting himself and a motley crew of notorious criminals to a new maximum security prison.
Opening here simultaneously with its US release on June 6th, Con Air is the latest big budget action extravaganza from Jerry Bruckheimer, the producer of Beverly Hills Cop, Top Gun and The Rock. Directed bye Simon West, Con Air is slickly assembled as a rollercoaster ride of big action set pieces piled one atop the other.
Women are peripheral to the action, beyond the token casting of Rachel Ticotin as a US marshal on board. Malkovich's fellow convicts are played by, among others, Nicolas Cage, Ving Rhames and Steve Buscemi, with John Cusack and the Irish actor Colm Meaney (clearly having fun) as agents dealing with the emergency on the ground.
For John Malkovich, it's all far removed from the intense, serious dramas he has made for directors such as Michelangelo Antonioni, Jane Campion, Stephen Frears and Votker Schtondorff and even further removed from his renowned work in the theatre as an actor and director working from plays by Sam Shepard, Lanford Wilson and Arthur Miller.
"It's very amusing to be around all those men in Con Air," he says when we talk at the Cannes Film Festival.
"It's not my normal milieu, you know, but it was realty entertaining nonetheless, working with those exfootbalters, exboxers and exhockey players, and even exprisoners.
Our interview is at the chic, expensive Hotel du Cap out on the tip of Antibes. Sitting before a panorama of the Mediterranean, Malkovich is smartly dressed in a tight grey suit, wine red cardigan, white shirt and patterned tie. The only hair on his head and face is the goatee bordering the lips through which he speaks in quiet, measured tones.
"Whether it's Con Air or Portrait Of A Lady, my work is the same, meaning how I go about my work never changes," he says. "The situations may change, the directors wilt change, the way they direct wilt change, but I'm completely comfortable. I don't realty mind any genre. I'm completely unelitist about that. When the cameras roll, I always enjoy myself.
"I have learned over the years to have fun in front of the camera. I've always had that in the theatre. It's harder in cinema because there are so many distractions, a lot of waiting, a lot of technical details which can be absolutely maddening, and very little bursts of activity. But now I am where I am. As Popeye says, I yam what I yam."
Unlike many other actors, Malkovich is not very interested in extensively researching his roles. "My feeling is that, you end up doing Con Air, you're in a cage in the middle of a plane and you start singing Dead Skunk In The Middle Of The Road. You don't know why. It doesn't matter. Of course, you could steal ideas from real life, which is why so many actors do it. There's an ever so slight paucity of imagination, I imagine. But I'm not interested in that. A tot of actors do it, and they're very good at it and it helps them and that's great. But it's not my interest. Acting is the only thing I know how to do. If I wanted to be a researcher, I would have been that. But I'd rather just make it up."
NOW 43, John Malkovich was raised in the Illinois town of Benton. By coincidence, it was Robert Benton who directed him in his first cinema film, as a blind war veteran in Places In The Heart, which earned Malkovich his first Oscar nomination in 1984. His grandmother was the publisher of the local newspaper in Benton and his father was the head of the State Conservation Department.
John Malkovich began acting at the Illinois State University, and with Gary Sinise an actordirector most recently seen as the villain in another commercial blockbuster, Ransom he cofounded Chicago's widely respected Steppenwolf Theatre where, between 1976 and 1982, he acted in, directed and designed sets for more than 50 productions.
For all the acclaim for his work in the cinema, Malkovich says his preference is for the theatre. "On stage I'm free and in control or more accurately, I'm free and not being controlled.
"If you get an idea to stand up on the third take of a scene while you're making a film, it's too late because they've already shot you sitting down and you can't go back because that takes two hours.
"So the idea of refining ideas, or adapting or developing things - the idea that things have an evolutionary arc or path from here to there is absolutely out of the question in the cinema. It's speed painting and I'm not a speed painter. I can draw, but I'm not a natural."
In 1983 Malkovich made his New York debut in an off Broadway production of Sam Shepard's True West and won an Obie award for his performance. This led to him being cast in the plum role of Biff in the 1984 Broadway revival of Arthur Miller's Death Of A Salesman, which starred Dustin Hoffman as Witty Loman. The haunting performances of Hoffman and Malkovich were captured for posterity in a film version by Votker Schlondorff a year later.
Last year Malkovich reunited with Schtondorff for The Ogre, a European coproduction which presents Germany's Nazi past as a kind of grotesque fairy tale and features Malkovich as a Forrest Gump type in the second World War. His character ends up working at Hermann Goring's country estate where he discovers a talent for introducing trusting children into the Hitler Youth.
However, the film has rarely been screened outside Germany and the festival circuit.
"I like The Ogre very much," Malkovich says before checking himself, as he does. "I would be hesitant to say that I'm ever satisfied. I don't know what that means, anyway. I think The Ogre was very unappreciated not seen anywhere, not liked when it was seen. I know that movies I hate make $400 million, so I understand why movies I make in Europe don't ever get released in America, because they're not going to get an audience.
"It's very hard to make an art film, well. The story has to be so good. The technical aspects have to be so clinically accomplished. It has to be fresh. It has to be new. It has to have so many elements that big films like, say Con Air, don't really need to have. Of course, it helps if they have."
Malkovich received his second Oscar nomination in 1993 for a mainstream Hollywood production which combined those values with the classical ingredients of a thriller. The film, In The Line Of Fire, was directed by another German, Wolfgang Petersen, and starred Clint Eastwood as a bodyguard to the US president, with Malkovich as a single mindedly determined presidential assassin.
John Malkovich, the man who says acting is the only thing he knows how to do, is now about to direct his first feature film, an adaptation of the novel The Dancer Upstairs by the English writer, Nicholas Shakespeare. "It's sort of a romantic thriller, I guess, though it doesn't realty have a genre, he says, explaining that it deals with a Peruvian policeman's pursuit of a terrorist.
"It's a terrific novel, a very good yarn, as they say. I've always had an interest in Peru and a little interest in terrorism in general. Not an attraction, just an interest. I grew up with it, it's everywhere Israel, Palestine, Ireland, Italy. It's all shite to me, but people of my age have been force fed it all our lives."
Will he act in the film? "That's my worst nightmare," he says.
But doesn't his Steppenwolf colleague, Gary Sinise, act in the movies he directs? "That doesn't make it right," says Malkovich.
"Gary's very different to me. And I don't think Gary wilt ever do both again. Generally, and it seems to me this is true, people do both for one of two reasons. Because nobody would give them a part like that, or because that's the only way they can get the movie made, by being in it. I don't want either of those, although, as they say, you should never say never.
"I'm not out to make people forget Hitchcock. There are just two or three film subjects I would like to direct over the course of my career outside the theatre. I've probably directed 50 plays, so I'm a very experienced director, but movie making is a bit much for me. It seems excruciatingly boring and fitted with the kind of pressure that, not that I can't take it, but I don't abide very well. After five minutes of lighting a set, I'm prepared to put people in jail. My set will be run slightly differently, I think."
As we talk, Malkovich is on a break from shooting The Man In The Iron Mask on location in France. It features Leonardo DiCaprio in the title role with Gerard Depardieu; Jeremy Irons and Malkovich as the Three Musketeers. "This is not Dumas," he says. "It's an American movie. I've had a lot of experience of literary adaptations - Dangerous Liaisons, The Accidental Tourist, Portrait Of A Lady, and so on and it's not the same as doing the novel.
"You'll only make yourself cry if you I don't use the word, deconstruct if you take a novel apart to find what it is you're looking for. You sort of debone it and then you have to reconstruct the whole thing. I also think you can get too hung up on it. Henry James is a writer I don't like at all and Portrait Of A Lady is Jane Campion's favourite novel. I think Jane did an incredible job - a kind of distillation or alchemy but it's very hard and rarely successful.
Whatever his film commitments, John Malkovich says he believes in returning to the theatre "at least every 18 months". Next year he hopes to direct his "favourite play of the century", Waiting For Godot, at Steppenwolf.
Why is it his favourite? "It does all three of the really hard things it's ridiculously intelligent, it's terribly, terribly tragic, and it's so funny that any kind of vulgar idiot could appreciate it. And those three things are almost impossible to work in tandem. It's almost never done. Once a century, maybe, and Beckett did it. He only did it once, but most people never do it."