Jennifer Lopez

God love you, Jennifer, you are very entertaining whether you mean it or not. This is from the Sunday Times, 2002. Again a personal favourite.

Sunday Times, November 17, 2002 

Cover Story: Just call me Jennifer

Whichever name she now prefers, has J.Lo sacrificed her identity to get to the top, asks Jeff Dawson

Jennifer Lopez is no stranger to the fashion police. (Nor, lest we forget, rozzers of the more traditional variety.) Remember that green acrylic bedsheet she wore to the Grammys? Sad to say, today's sartorial transgression is more heinous. Twenty storeys below, amid the exhaust fumes of Manhattan's canyons, a wail of sirens swells. It could be the FP on their way. Not that there's anything wrong with Lopez's outfit per se. "Dolce & Gabbana and Roberto Cavalli," she coos. Which translates as a frilly orange blouse, clinging floral-print skirt and chunky coral jewellery. It's just that there on the telly in the hotel suite, in the video of her new single, she's wearing - shock! - the exact same thing. No self-respecting diva sports the same outfit twice.

The ditty in question - Alive, from the soundtrack of her new film, Enough (let's keep these titles simple, people) - features some computer-tweaked balladeering about "searching for your sooouul" and "the strength to stand aloooooone". The irony is that Lopez wrote it with Cris Judd, the very bloke she recently stiffed after 10 short months of marriage. "I was on my honeymoon, and Cris was, like, tinkering around on the piano, and I just added an intro," she simpers, all whitewashed visions of lace, doves and eternal bliss (not legal separation due to "irreconcilable differences", and divorce proceedings that will render Lopez an eligible spinster on January 26). It's not just Lopez's bottom you have to admire, but her front, too.

At 32, these are interesting times for the bouncing bonita, and not just for the advent of Ben Affleck - of whom more later. The metamorphosis of Jennifer Lopez: Person into J.Lo: Brand is a wonder to behold. There are the studiously offhand plugs for her clothes label. There's her LA restaurant, Madre's; the new perfume, Glow. There is the fact that this interview, in a swish hotel on Park Avenue, is conducted in the company of Benny Medina, the imposing manager who nurtured the careers of Will Smith and Lopez's ex, Puff Daddy/P Diddy/Po Diddley. Yes, the stock at J.Lo Inc is rising fast. Last year, she became the first woman to have a simultaneous US No 1 film (The Wedding Planner) and album (J.Lo). Hard to believe that, just three years ago, she was nudging into the B-list play-offs, with nary a whiff of global domination in the air.

"First I'm an artist, then I'm a businesswoman," she asserts, tossing a mane of highlighted curls. "But everything has to be weighted, you know what I mean? Or they'll have you working seven days a week, 24 hours a day." She adds something about her "creative drive", and the army of elves ready to act when she comes up with a good idea, or bat away the bad ones. "She doesn't have a bad idea," chips in Benny, just to ensure we're on message. Ay caramba! The diversions have come at a cost - the promise of movies like Out of Sight followed by fluff like The Cell, Angel Eyes and others that have assumed a secondary, even tertiary position to other ventures. With two double-platinum solo albums, though, and a third platter of dance remixes, J to tha L-O, recently a US No 1, Lopez's career reprioritisation is hardly in need of vindication. (Her new album, This Is Me ... Then, will be in Woolies for Christmas.)

But you can't help feeling she yearns for a bit of her old self back. "This J.Lo thing is like a nickname," she tuts. "People will get back to Jennifer eventually, you know what I mean? The J.Lo thing is fun, but it was just, like, the name of that album, you know?" Make of Enough what you will. As a revenge thriller, it's not a million miles away from Sleeping with the Enemy, in that a battered wife goes on the run from a hubby (Billy Campbell) so cartoonishly evil, he might as well be wearing a cape and twiddling his moustache. "It's supposed to be fun and keep you on the edge of your seat. But it has some heavy stakes in it," says Lopez. The victim bones up on martial arts to wreak vengeance on the cruel chap. "I read this script, and it was like: 'This is like a female Rocky, this could be cool.'" At the screening I attended, the wife-beating, disturbingly, elicited plenty of cheers. That is hardly Lopez's fault. She is far more capable than much of her recent material.

In person, Lopez is perfectly pleasant. There's a grating tendency to conclude every sentence with some habitual affirmation-seeking (if you know what I mean?), making her Hispanic-Bronx patter veer dangerously into Rosie Perez territory. But she is polite and, judging by Medina's wincing, quite open. It goes without saying that she is also extremely attractive. With that many "world's sexiest woman" awards crammed onto your mantelpiece, it could certainly go to a girl's head. Lopez, though, embraces it in good spirit. "I think all women like to be called sexy," she gurgles. "It's a compliment. I just know that that's not all of me, you know what I mean? I have more to offer than that." Which is true.

To curvy women everywhere, the arrival of "La Guitarra" was a merciful blow against the spiky creatures coming out of Hollywood in the 1990s. "When I was young, my mom, all the women, being Latin, were like that (well-rounded), so that was kind of my ideal. It was never like the magazines - Cheryl Tiegs, very blonde, blue eyes, very thin," she says. "I never looked at that and wanted it, because my mother made me so comfortable with my body. I feel very good to be the advocate for the voluptuous women in the world. I think it's nice, you know?" Heroin chic or Latina chica? Brother, it's no contest. Don't forget, though, that such stuff is relatively new. At $12m a pop, Lopez may now be the highest-paid Latina in the movies, but she's the first since her anglicised forebears, Rita Hayworth (Margarita Carmen Cansino) and Raquel Welch (Jo Raquel Tejada), to have been able to get there fully liberated from the cultural cabana.

She bangs her leg on the table and rubs the ankle just above her gold Gucci pump. "Ouch!" It's all right, I joke, it's insured, though she thinks I mean the table. In case her accountant neglected to tell her, her body is protected by a policy worth $1 billion, her botty $300m. That's $150m a buttock. Only Kylie's bum could be similarly underwritten.

Lopez's career trajectory has been well traced: grew up in the Bronx to Puerto Rican parents, the middle of three daughters; was athletic but not academic ("Nail polish" is what she got on her high-school exams). "I didn't imagine it would be like this, but I was always a performer," she says. After travelling to Manhattan dance schools on the subway (source of her debut album's title, On the 6), she got a break as a hoofer on the TV show In Living Color. A couple of films, Mi Familia and Money Train, displayed her promise. Soon, top directors like Bob Rafelson (Blood and Wine), Francis Ford Coppola (Jack) and Oliver Stone (U Turn) were scrapping for her. There was a lack of clear intention (Anaconda?), but her stellar burst came in 1997, with Out of Sight and the US hit Selena, a biopic of the slain Tejano singer. Before Lopez knew it, she had a musical career of her own.

Her arrival on the dance-pop scene in 1999 brought her into contact with Sean Combs, a gaudy showbiz pairing that culminated in the infamous nightclub shooting, a high-speed car chase and a charge of weapons possession (he was acquitted, and Lopez exonerated). Now, after making two films with Affleck - a crime thriller, Gigli, and a Kevin Smith comedy, Jersey Girl - she's into the high-profile coupling thing again. The allegedly prematurely toupéed action hero is engaged to Lopez now, and makes a cameo in her next pop video. "Love," as Lopez once sang, "don't cost a thing." Though a spot of gift-shopping always helps - a £95,000 Aston Martin for him, a £140,000 Ferrari Spider for her. Bling follows bling. Poor old impecunious Judd, just a humble choreographer (read "backing dancer").

There is an element of déjà vu to this, of course. In 1997-8, Lopez enjoyed a similarly short betrothal (13 months) to a Cuban waiter, Ojani Noa. Added to her wealth and power, this reputation as a man-eater has been apt to strike the fear of God into showbiz minions. Accusations of diva-ish behaviour abound - that she must sleep on sheets with a minimum thread count of 250; that film extras are instructed to avoid eye contact; that, after her arrest, chained to a police-station bench, she demanded a cop procure some cuticle cream. Most of it is rubbish. "There were obviously a lot of rumours about how difficult Jennifer was," admits Enough's director, Michael Apted. "Until I started rehearsing, I could never get hold of her. She would cancel meetings. I learnt that the key to how she manages to stay in this very complicated life is that she only really focuses on what she has in front of her. If you're in her peripheral vision, forget it."

"That's a fair assessment of the situation," concedes Lopez. "I work hard. I have a lot going on, and it's my own fault. I take on a lot of stuff." But she has seemingly set her sights on the movies again. If all goes to plan, the next few months will see her re-established as an A-list actress. The Cinderella fable Maid in Manhattan (co-starring Ralph Fiennes) is tipped to be the big US Christmas hit; then come the two films with Affleck. On the horizon, intriguingly, sits a modern screen version of Carmen, which, Lopez says, will give her the opportunity to merge her career strands, Madonna-style. Talks are also under way for a (fourth) remake of A Star Is Born, with Will Smith.

"Singing is more of an intimate thing, it's more of a kind of personal expression," she says. "And with the acting, you're just playing a character. It is different, but you get a lot out of that too. There's such a satisfaction in that, you know?" For the meantime, though, all ventures will be eclipsed by her love life - the producers of her new movies must be thrilled at all the free publicity. Last time, she spent her honeymoon with the world's press at Donatella Versace's mansion on Lake Como. Word is that decks are now being cleared for a £1m Valentine's Day Puerto Rican extravaganza. She has reportedly booked San Juan's Ritz-Carlton resort for the biggest, baddest nuptials in the history of opulence. After the divorce comes through, of course. "Marriage is hard," says Lopez. "Absolutely. I've been married before, I know how hard it is. You know what I mean? It's a fight, for sure." We hear you, sister, really we do. Let's just hope it's not because you've got a couple of movies to promote. And do remember to change your outfit.

Jerry Seinfeld

Yadda yadda yadda. Gotta love The Sein.

You know he actually pinched one of my jokes for his routine that night. JERRY SEINFELD STOLE MY MATERIAL!

Edition 7GVDSUN 02 DEC 2007, Page Culture 4 

Busy doing nothing;Interview;Jerry Seinfeld;Cover story

JEFF DAWSON

FEATURES 

Jerry Seinfeld was easing down and enjoying life after his hit

sitcom. Then he made a joke about doing a cartoon movie starring a

bee, and Spielberg got serious, he tells JEFF DAWSON

Half an hour with Jerry Seinfeld. How wonderfully apt. Who else has

been able to pack so much, and so consistently, into a 30-minute time slot (23, if you will, minus the ads)? Not for nothing was Seinfeld's eponymous sitcom anointed, officially, The Most Successful Sitcom in Television History. Though today's encounter is also turning slightly surreal. Put it down to the indivisibility of Seinfeld the man from Seinfeld the character, always a problem when the screen persona you have peddled all those years is an extension of your own.

Seinfeld is in Amsterdam to promote his new film, the animated

feature Bee Movie. In his hotel suite, however, all is not well, for Seinfeld -like his alter ego, famously pernickety (and not short on narcissism) –is unhappy with the mineral water at his disposal. Just as TV Jerry was mollycoddled by an overly fussy manager, so Real Jerry is cosseted by his venerable minder, George Shapiro, who has scuttled off in search of alternative hydration. "I hate Evian," goes Seinfeld, in that light New York whine. "It's got the highest particles of mud in it of any other water." 

He looks good at 53, if more jowly, and sporting a pair of wire-framed specs. Mercifully, TV Jerry's high-waisted jeans and pristine sneakers have been binned for the sharpest of suits. Still, there's an overwhelming sense of the familiar. If Kramer were to come swinging, "Giddy up", through the door, or Elaine turned up to mooch some Snapple, or George burst out of the loo, trousers down, jabbering about Vandalay Industries, it would seem entirely reasonable.

We are in Old Amsterdam, rather than the New one of Seinfeld's

(LA-faked) milieu, so I remind him of a typically inane coffee-shop

conversation between Jerry and George, in which the latter gets in a lather over the difference between "Holland", "the Netherlands" and "the Dutch". "I remember we decided to put those moustaches on," Seinfeld chortles. "Over the summer, Jerry and George had decided to grow moustaches." He sips the substitute water - Spa, Belgian. (Me, I'm still quaffing the French muck.) "If you try any other water," he insists, "you'll tell the difference right away."

I must open the vault here and declare that I am a huge fan of

Seinfeld. Clearly, I am not alone. In the USA, nine years ago, 75m

viewers tuned in to the final episode of his show, which rivalled

M*A*S*H's as the biggest adieu in television. Strangely, in the UK, due to the vagaries of BBC2 programming in the 1990s, Seinfeld's profile is lower than elsewhere, the sitcom never afforded the platform Channel 4 later gave to Friends and Frasier. But that's all right, as we can keep it cultish -a Festivus, as you might say, for the rest of us (a season-nine motif).

Seinfeld's cultural influence in America has been profound. In 2004,

he donated the fabled Puffy Shirt, from season five, to the

Smithsonian. Everywhere he goes, people still feel compelled to quote his zingers back to him. "But I don't understand when they think I'm gonna laugh," he says. "I was there. It's like if you go into the office and tell someone a joke. What if, the next day, they came in and told you that joke? You would go, 'I just told you that!'" 

In 1998, preferring not to see his show waddle flaccidly into the

sitcom sunset, he quit, moved back to New York and - professing a

yearning for a connection to an audience -returned to his first love,

stand-up. "What happens when you're a success in show business is they start building scaffolding underneath you, and keep raising it

up," he explains. "The next thing you know, you're sitting on top of

this structure and you don't know what the hell is going on any more, because people are bringing you the water you like."

Alongside an HBO special and more salubrious gigs, Seinfeld has

spent much time getting down and dirty in comedy clubs, cropping up, unannounced, on the beer-sticky boards of obscure Laugh Factories and Ha-Ha Holes, leaving incredulous Tuesday-night audiences in Stink, New Jersey, or wherever, to ponder whether it's the real deal regaling them with tales about airline peanuts, or just some arch impersonator (travails detailed in his 2002 documentary, Comedian). Hollywood, meanwhile, had been wooing him like crazy, but he never felt films would offer much. "I'd done the actors with the scripts and the casting, and 'You stand over here'; 'Am I in focus?'. So it's in a movie theatre? Big deal!" But not even Seinfeld could resist the persuasion of Steven Spielberg.

Four years ago, over dinner (Seinfeld being both an A-list diner and

a serial name-dropper), when he joshed that someone should make a cartoon about bees and call it Bee Movie, the wheels of Spielberg's DreamWorks studio began trundling. "He just got very excited about this, and would not relent until I agreed to make the movie," Seinfeld says. "But there was no movie. I had to make the whole thing up." The challenge, he adds, came in the format. "Creating comedy out of three-dimensional computer-generated characters, that's a whole new sport for me."

He has proved master of his new domain. The result, co-scripted by

him, and with a character, Barry B Benson, modelled on him, recently topped the US box office. Opening here next week, it's the tale of an errant drone who, disillusioned with hive life (working for the Honex corporation), buzzes off to the outside and gets the interspecies hots for a florist, voiced by Renee Zellweger. Superficially, it bears resemblance to a previous DreamWorks offering, Antz, starring a similarly dis-affected Woody Allen.

 "Yes, but what is an ant?" Seinfeld contests. "They're annoying, you just spray 'em. Bees and flowers and honey, it's a whole other

level." Indeed, Barry's mission becomes one of ending human

exploitation of his kind's most famous produce. 

There are big-name cameos -Ray Liotta, Sting, Chris Rock, Oprah Winfrey. "Well, that's one of the fun things about being me -you can call anybody and they'll consider it," Seinfeld says rather nonchalantly. The resultant package has taken $93m in its first three weeks in the USA. Throw in his share from that, and the rakings from the recent Seinfeld DVD box sets, and it's still loose change to a man who, according to Forbes, last year trousered $60m from his show's syndication, making him one of the richest entertainers on the planet.

These days, married with kids, Seinfeld splits his time between his

Long Island spread (bought from Billy Joel for $40m)

 and an apartment on Central Park West, for which he has been

constructing a garage so he can relocate his fleet of vintage

Porsches. Never in his wildest dreams did he think it would end up

like this. "Never, never, ever, ever," he assures me. By the mid-1980s, the Brooklyn-born comic had seemingly reached his potential as a likeable stand-up -a genial variant of the new breed of "observational" funnymen -who had been granted a guest spot by the king of late-night talk, Johnny Carson. 

Legend has it that he was grocery shopping with his pal Larry David (whose Curb Your Enthusiasm has since achieved its own glory), wondering why sitcoms never reflected the kinds of trivial conversations they themselves had. Their 1989 antidote, a pilot called The Seinfeld Chronicles, had Jerry playing himself as a jobbing stand-up. "That was a character I knew better than any other. If I were to have created a character and given him a

job, that would actually have been more risky." David chose to employ his own proxy in the series, in the shape of Jason Alexander's dyspeptic George Costanza, throwing in Michael Richards's manic Kramer, based on a former flatmate, for the hell of it.

Dismissed by one NBC high-up as "too Jewish", and by others as too clever by half, the show required tweaking, and Elaine Benes (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) was added, initially as a love interest.

 It was but a short step to nine seasons, record ratings and

absolutely no hugs whatsoever. "I mean, Larry and I, we had never

done anything like this. We'd never had a show. We had to figure it

out." The self-styled "show about nothing" tag is overblown (what the hell was Cheers?), but they discovered what legions of executives hadn't: that self-absorption, lovelessness and misanthropy were universal themes, celebrated even in the darkest recesses of middle America. "I thought maybe we'd find a small kind of intellectual group that is kind of interested in this wordplay and subtle kind of humour," Seinfeld says. "What happened is that the cast were so strong comedically, they carried what may have been more difficult material to a wider audience."

Sadly, like many winning teams, it proved greater than its con-

stituent parts. The other three principals have since flopped in solo

projects (until Louis-Dreyfus undid the Seinfeld curse with her

mainstream television hit The New Adventures of Old Christine).

"Nobody mentions me," Seinfeld laughs. "I haven't suffered." But

Richards's career might be over, following his weird racist outburst

on stage a year ago, after which Seinfeld acted as a peace-broker,

hauling him onto The Late Show with David Let- terman to make a

public apology. "Obviously, it's a tough thing to deal with," Seinfeld muses. "But I think he's gotta do something else to fully pass through this. A lot of black comedians found it funny. I was talking to Chris Rock the other day, who was telling me Michael Richards was the greatest gift to black comedians, because he gave them so much material." (A sign of the enigma that is Real Jerry: a one-time Bush campaign contributor whose pals are black America's top social satirists.)

Don't harbour any hopes that the Fab Four will reunite, as is

occasionally rumoured. "I haven't heard any numbers," Seinfeld quips. "But that would be pretty sad, wouldn't it?" In his youth, he says, he'd always hoped the Beatles would re-form. "I really understand now why they didn't. When you're lucky enough to have created some magic, you don't want to disturb it, because you didn't even know why it happened. I've met Paul McCartney a few times, and we've talked about it. You realise you're a passenger in this vehicle as much as everyone

else is."

Later, Seinfeld goes on stage at the Expo to talk up Bee Movie to

besuited distributors, an audience absolutely thrilled to have a real

live king of comedy in its midst. "Hello. My first time in Holland...

the Netherlands... Amsterdam... the Dutch," he begins. "What's the deal with all the bicycles?" In your head, you can hear that corny, synthesized slap bass, and TV Jerry's stand-up apprentice, Kenny Bania. "That's gold, Jerry," he's going. "Gold!"

Robert De Niro

How could I not dig out this one? Doesn't get much better as an experience.

Edition 7GVSUN 28 JAN 2007, Page Culture 4

'You better believe it'; Interview;Robert De Niro;Cover story
JEFF DAWSON
FEATURES


In an exclusive interview, the famously reticent Robert De Niro opens up to Jeff Dawson on his silence, the CIA and his new cold war project

If there's one thing you can say about Robert De Niro, it's that he doesn't do things by half measures. To play the young Vito Corleone, he became fluent in Sicilian dialect. There was the filing down of his teeth to perfect the appropriate maniacal snarl in Cape Fear; the proficient jazz sax mastered for New York, New York; the custom-made silk undies insisted upon, but never seen, in The Untouchables, allowing him to swish exactly like Al Capone. Almost no need to mention his fabled 4-stone porkathon for Raging Bull.

In researching The Deer Hunter, it is whispered, he played real Russian roulette. On Awakenings, so authentic were the results of his brain scan, it was feared he had acted himself into a genuine coma. For Angel Heart, he may indeed have taken tea with the devil...

In his new film, The Good Shepherd, in a small but terrific cameo, De Niro plays a double leg amputee. It comes as a great relief, on meeting him, that the dear chap is doddering about on his own two pins -though it could be further evidence critics might present to prove that the old growler isn't taking his craft quite as seriously as he used to.

Is it his purported ability to "become" other people that petrifies everyone so - with those around him unsure as to how much of Jake La Motta, Travis Bickle or mad Max Cady might yet be coursing through his thespian arteries? Perhaps it's just that he always looks so monumentally cheesed off: the awkward mien, that downturned mouth, the fearsome mole and, no kidding, the blackest eyes you've ever seen.

De Niro's discomfort has been central to his media dealings. If, famously, he spoke a mere eight words of English in The Godfather: Part II, then the odd press conference has yielded little more. With no role to hide behind, the actor is notorious for staring at the carpet, fumbling painfully for some monosyllabic answer while onlookers grin inanely. In one of his few significant magazine interviews of the past decade (in American Esquire), so unforthcoming
was he that the journalist tiptoed away early, leaving a morose De Niro alone with his thoughts.

There are signs he might be loosening up. At 63, two years short of a bus pass and with a successful battle against prostate cancer behind him, De Niro, it is said, is slipping into his dotage like it's a nice warm bath. In 2004, the old softie even renewed his marriage vows to his second wife, Grace Hightower, putting to bed a rather turbulent love life. And there are the films. Not for your 21st-century multiplex-goer the burning presence of his 1970s heyday, but the pantomime baddie of Analyze This/That, Meet the Parents/Fockers, a voice in Shark Tale, the bloke from Extras.

"He prefers it if you call him Bob," whispers a PR woman as I am ushered in for a rare one-on-one. Whether this is a fostering of informality or an instruction is not exactly clear. Outside the Manhattan hotel window, way below, the sirens wail, the yellow cabs honk, steam billows from around the manholes. All that's needed is Bernard Herrmann's discordant brass. But it is otherwise unremarkable. You simply go in, shake hands and, soon, the Greatest
Actor of his Generation (it should come with a TM sign) is ushering you to a sofa.

Dressed in a brown suit, his grey hair tousled, he appears in good health, if a little deflated -quite literally, for, slumping uncomfortably in an armchair, shoulders hunched, he looks as if he could do with a bit of air pumping into him. It's easy to forget that he is 27 years on from the hard-bodied middleweight of the early Jake La Motta, 16 from the sinewy jailbird Cady.

I wonder, in the first instance, whether it gets tiresome, all those awestruck people with the fixed, silly expressions? "I don't know especially, er, I... I don't know," he goes. Uh-oh. The eyes dart. They look down. They look up. The voice is gruff, pure Gotham. "Yeah (a shrug), I guess so, yeah." One gets the impression interviews aren't his favourite thing? "Well, it's... sometimes it's okay -whatever," he says, shrugging again, a little more conspiratorially.
"I think sometimes I'd rather just let the movie explain itself."

De Niro's latest is The Good Shepherd, a film he can't really duck ("No, I can't,," he concurs), for he not only appears in it, but directs it. A dense, lush epic about the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency, it stars Matt Damon as Edward Wilson, a factionalised version of the CIA chief James Angleton -a Clark Kent-ish bureaucrat who transformed the agency from a cabal of pre-second world war dilettantes into a team of hard-nosed cold warriors, the shapers of American foreign policy. Significantly, it is De Niro's first time behind the camera since his directing debut,

A Bronx Tale, in 1993 -a film that seemed to promise a profitable alternative career. "Well, I was working on this for about seven, eight years, and I was also acting in movies," he purrs. No point in beating about the bush. "And I never had anything that interested me that much."

The great American/Soviet standoff was the era he grew up in, he explains. "I was interested in intelligence. I thought, well, it would be great if I could do a story about this world." The end result, a $100m epic, with Angelina Jolie on board and character-actor stalwarts populating every nook and cranny (Michael
Gambon, William Hurt, Alec Baldwin, old mucker Joe Pesci, even our own dear John Sessions, a long, long way from Jackanory), marks a return to the sort of heavyweight project De Niro is most associated with, but has not worked on since, what: Heat (1995)? Ronin (1998)? (Don't mention The Score.)

Strange, now, how nobody would touch the project for so long. "I didn't know if the movie would ever get made," he says. "I was having to hold it together myself, putting my money in." The screenplay, by Eric Roth (Munich, The Insider), had been hailed for a decade as one of Hollywood's "best unproduced scripts". But along comes 9/11, and the CIA, beloved bad guys of Oliver Stone, shadowy architects of the new world order, are now the new boy scouts, heroic guarantors of US liberty. Even an old pinko such as De Niro defends some of the agency's more unsavoury tactics, shown in the film in all their glory. "It happened, and that's what it is," he says. "I'd call myself a patriot."

You still can't fault De Niro for detail. He tooled around Afghanistan and Pakistan, speaking with field operatives; he hung out with former adversaries from behind the iron curtain. "We were in Moscow, in a KGB sporting-club sauna, with a bunch of KGB generals," says Milton Bearden, the film's veteran CIA adviser. "I looked at Bob and said, 'I think you know as much about this stuff as I do.'"

With its codes of honour, secrecy and enthusiastic wasting of stool
pigeons, the CIA comes over, curiously, like the mob ("Never rat on a friend; always keep your mouth shut," as De Niro's Jimmy Conway put it in GoodFellas). "You know, there's a load of similarities," De Niro agrees. The director of The Godfather, Francis Ford Coppola, executive-produces.

As ever with De Niro, you just can't escape the whole Italian-American thing, something exploited mercilessly over the years, which he parodied, quite mischievously, in Analyze This/That. But it, too, is part of the mythology. Though he was indeed close to his paternal grandfather, who hailed from Ferrazzano, De Niro is largely of Irish descent, enough to prevent him from becoming a "made man" - as it did Jimmy Conway. Born to the artists Robert De Niro Sr and Virginia Admiral, Junior grew up in the bohemian confines of Greenwich Village.

Despite a brief foray into gang life, where the pale, thin youth was known as "Bobby Milk", his intentions were always artistic. "I wanted to act," he says. "I'd see people in movies and stuff... When I got into it more seriously, it was a different thing. Then I wanted to do something with it. Then it got more complex and more interesting."

He studied Stanislavsky and the method under Stella Adler, did some theatre work and low-budget movies, and got his first rave notices aged 30, as the dying baseball player in 1973's Bang the Drum Slowly. Meanwhile, his old buddy Martin Scorsese had been developing as a director. When he cast De Niro as the wayward hood Johnny Boy in Mean Streets, released that same year, it marked a union - Taxi Driver; New York, New York; Raging Bull; The King of Comedy; GoodFellas; Cape Fear; Casino - that would seal De Niro as a screen icon.

The pair might have added Gangs of New York, The Aviator and the recent The Departed had they got their diaries sorted out. The friendship still runs deep. De Niro screened rough cuts of his movie to get Scorsese's input. They even swapped actors, De Niro surrendering Leonardo DiCaprio, his first choice for The Good Shepherd, and Scorsese trading off by releasing Matt Damon (whom De Niro amusingly refers to, on occasion, as "Matt Dillon") early from The Departed. The films won't be going head to head in the awards sweepstakes. "But I hope Marty gets the Oscar, just because he deserves it for the other films, you know. We'll see, you know."

De Niro's own mantelpiece bears Academy Awards for The Godfather: Part II and Raging Bull, which bookend a decade -the 1970s -of outstanding work. Though he continued to make some exceptional films throughout the 1980s -The King of Comedy, Once Upon a Time in America, Midnight Run -his 1990s output was a bit patchy. It is said De Niro doesn't like to talk about his old movies. "He was absolutely delightful and deeply gracious," says Sessions (who never did manage to wrangle De Niro into Stella Street). "But I remember one day when I asked him something about The Mission, and he just looked very uncomfortable. I rather wished I hadn't."

But does De Niro never sneak a peek at one of his films? "From time to time, yeah. If I catch it on television directly, I'll watch it," he says. Is he self critical? "Well, how could I not be, I guess?" Part of it, he says, is his deep personal involvement in them all: "I remember everything I did." He admits, however, that some recently unearthed footage for Taxi Driver -"Certain rehearsals Marty and I had done with video tape before shooting, which we incorporated into the script" - had escaped even him.

The 30th anniversary of the release of Taxi Driver has just passed. "Really? That's right, yeah," he muses. It's the one, he says, that follows him around the most, with that classic line they all yell at him, hoping he might just quote it back. Which one would that be? "You know what they do," he smirks. There was a rumour of a sequel to Taxi Driver, jumping back into the life of Travis Bickle a decade on. "We talked about that," he says, "(the writer) Paul Schrader and
Marty and myself, but we could never somehow come up with what he would be doing those 10 years later." So, thankfully, the prospect of Meet the Bickles is laid to rest.

It seems an obvious question to ask about his favourites. Maybe there's a hidden gem he treasures -Jacknife, This Boy's Life? "Well, I started saying that whatever people like the most, that's my favourite -if people like Raging Bull or Taxi Driver or Mean Streets. I liked The King of Comedy. I really enjoyed doing that." Scorsese has always maintained that Rupert Pupkin is De Niro's finest acting performance. "Really?" he goes again. Certainly, the film seems ahead
of its time, foretelling the cultural obsession with celebrity (replicated in less edifying fashion in De Niro's sports-nerd flick, The Fan).

The one everyone keeps on coming back to, of course, is the critical darling Raging Bull, a film whose "greatness" tends to be confused with the beauty of its cinematography and De Niro's undeniably consuming performance. Key to it was the physical transformation -athlete to lard-ass - achieved by halting production and his embarking on an eating Tour de France.

Until he was outmunched by Vincent D'Onofrio on Full Metal Jacket (and possibly, unwittingly, by Marlon Brando elsewhere), his 60lb bulk-up had stood as something of a method benchmark, convincing a generation of actors and awards panellists that disfigurement is the noblest thespian sacrifice.

I read that the first role De Niro ever played was the Cowardly Lion in a school production of The Wizard of Oz. "That's right, I was 10, I was 10, yeah," he enthuses. Did he bring to it the same fabled intensity? He chuckles (honest). "God knows, I don't know. My mother couldn't tell." But really, was all that extreme character absorption necessary? If doing those roles again, would he go to such lengths? "I think, as you get older, you reduce the energy you spend on certain things," he says. "It's more a case of what the essentials are for the task at hand."

Every now and again, there's a little chink of light, as if the impenetrable persona De Niro has perfected over the years was another character, there to preserve the sanctity of his private self –the loyal pal, the bon vivant, the playful father who's a little shy. "He loves jokes," says Sessions. "John Turturro (who plays an agent in the film) is very funny, and there was one day when he was taking the mickey out of a scene, a very heavy scene, and I thought De Niro was
going to fall on the floor -he was laughing his head off."

Perhaps it accounts for his recent rash of comedies -the simple prerogative of a man who has reached a certain age and wants to, well, let it all hang out. "Yeah, and I had fun doing them -could be, you know."Perversely, while they have not landed him any acting accolades, the early 2000s have marked the most commercially successful period of De Niro's career. "It's nice to have both, nice to have everything," he smiles. "It's not possible."

De Niro doesn't have to do anything at all, for he is now a wealthy man. He reinvigorated a whole New York neighbourhood, TriBeCa, with his film-production offices, downstairs Grill and patronage of a now huge film festival. (Living just a piece of falling masonry from the Twin Towers, he threw open his eaterie as a refuge, credit he is said to have blown by including a 9/11 reference in his American Express commercial.)

Then there is his partnership in various restaurants, including Nobu, his patronage of the West End musical We Will Rock You and assorted other ventures. "The restaurant stuff has become very successful, and I did that just because I like good food. It just evolved, it happened." Recently, he was in negotiations to buy The New York Observer newspaper -a little ironic, given his antipathy towards the press. "Well, exactly," he grins. "I thought, let's
change, you know. I'll be fair game, you know, the way it should be, the way it's meant to be."

So how the hell did he end up in Extras? "Well, I was doing Stardust (a British fantasy film, directed by Matthew Vaughn), and I had a scene with Ricky Gervais. He had asked me before. And I couldn't do it then. And I liked that movie, so -that was it." And what did he think of the episode? "They sent me a copy," he says, "but I haven't seen it yet."

De Niro has several films lined up, including The Winter of Frankie Machine (about a retired hit man) and What Just Happened? (about a Tinseltown producer). He mentions the younger actors he admires (DiCaprio and Damon, obviously, and his kindred spirit Sean Penn); how he would still like to do something landmark, such as Seven Up!; all those projects unfulfilled.

He has one particular desire above all: to do two more films with Scorsese. "I just think if we can get those two numbers, make an even 10, I'll be happy," he says. "We've started some things, but over the years, you get distracted. We're anxiously waiting to come up with something."

There's a touch of sadness in the way he says it, as if acknowledging that, wellbeing, fortune and all, the clock is inexorably counting down; that his career is officially entering its twilight. But he's not going to get too maudlin.

"Hey," he quips. "You better believe it.

Sir David Frost

Another one of my favourite interviews. Sunday Times again. One where you feel only one degree removed from a significant event in history. A man of immense charm, I remember Frostie phoning me at home around the time of our meeting and us singing (please don't ask why) Jake The Peg together. He's a lot more ruthless as a businessman, I gather. With the Nixon sessions he also birthed chequebook journalism.

Link no longer works. Will add shortly.

George Clooney

Just posting some of my favourite pieces from recent years. I've met Clooney three or four times — first occasion in 1995 in LA on the set of From Dusk Till Dawn when he was in that transitional phase from ER to film star. Back then he was still able to go the local bar and play drinking games. Twelve years later I was fortunate enough get a very rare exclusive. I like George, the handsome bastard.


Sunday Times, September 16, 2007 by Jeff Dawson

George Clooney is Mr Congeniality

Just what is it about George Clooney that people find so irresistible? After seeing him in action, we get the picture

Does the MP for Bethnal Green and Bow seriously fancy himself a claimant to the title Gorgeous George? To judge by the way any mention of my impending rendezvous with the American actor thus nicknamed has induced in several women the sort of hysteria they last experienced when the Osmonds appeared on Ask Aspel, George Galloway would seem to be a rather limp pretender. In the bijou Normandy resort of Deauville, where George Clooney has breezed in for the American Film Festival, even the French have been going ga-ga. Outside his hotel, pressed against the barriers, usually aloof Gallic beauties loiter with lobotomised grins; at the back, mesdemoiselles with mobile phones wave them in the air like lighters during a Johnny Hallyday slow number. 

The most sober departments of the news media are not immune. Bulletins from the preceding Venice jamboree – which premiered Clooney’s latest film, Michael Clayton – have spoken not of a smart legal thriller nor of a sterling lead performance, but of the fact that, in it, poor George, Gorgeous George, looks uncharacteristically “haggard”, “tired” and, heaven forbid, “worn out”. 

For a grey-haired man of 46, whose prime playboy days were in the Reagan era, and who has spent much of the current century doing decidedly unstarry work, is it not irritating that it still comes down to this? “Well, I get to make those movies, so it never really gets in the way, it just becomes a selling tool,” he purrs. “My feeling is, if they’re being nice to you, I don’t care.” It can’t be all bad, though, this ability to send the fairer sex into delirium? “Until they meet me and go, ‘Oh, shit’,” he quips, a statement that is meant to imply disappointment, but just might be a lucky housewife’s final words before exploding in ecstasy. He spins a yarn about the “feeding frenzy” of his first visit to Cannes, with bodies piled on his limo 10 deep, fists pounding away. “It was really sort of nerve-racking, and I remember this one person’s face, screaming like a madman, ‘ Who are you?!’ And you realise it has nothing to do with you. It was simply the event.” 

For the record, Clooney is indeed a handsome devil. Despite several days’ worth of beard, he shows no signs of being haggard, tired or, Lord have mercy, worn out. Tanned and sinewy after months of playing American football on a film he has just directed, Leatherheads, he’s made a full recovery from his onset accident on Syriana, in which he cracked his head and did enough damage for spinal fluid to drip out of his nose. On the final day of Leatherheads – and this is very Clooney – he won a $1,000 basketball shoot-out, taking on, in front of the whole crew, the actor John Krasinski, a 27-year-old, 6ft 3in former college player who had threatened for four months to “kick your ass”. “I’m telling you, it was one of the great days of my life,” Clooney crows. “It’s up there: Oscar, beating him at basketball.” 

In a black short-sleeved shirt and black trousers, and with a contractually obligatory Rolex strapped to his wrist, Clooney is not big physically. His most immediately impressive feature is his voice. American men, apparently, speak a semitone lower than we British males do, an allegedly attractive proposition for womenfolk. Clooney is possessed of a foghorn. Draw your own conclusions. 

The face rug is for his next film, the Coen brothers’ Burn After Reading. It co-stars his big buddy Brad Pitt, sometime habitué of Clooney’s “guy” hangout, his palatial villa on Lake Como. Some years ago, when Clooney was a jobbing television actor, he and Pitt were the last two contenders for the role of the cowboy hitchhiker in Thelma & Louise, the part that set up Pitt’s career. “I remember when he got it. I didn’t know who he was. I was like, ‘F*** that guy,’” Clooney growls. Things were different then. “I went in and read one line on Guarding Tess, underneath Nic Cage,” he recalls. “One line.” 

Since then, Clooney has both attained and eschewed traditional film stardom, preferring instead such independently minded flicks as Out of Sight, Solaris, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Good Night, and Good Luck, Syriana and The Good German, which have all involved, in some capacity, Steven Soderbergh, the director responsible for wheeling him out for the Ocean’s films – their little nod to Tinseltown for indulging their esoteric diversions. Written and directed by Tony Gilroy (who penned the Bourne films), Michael Clayton, too, has Soderbergh’s fingerprints on it, as executive producer. It’s essentially the tale of a crumpled lawyer, a Mr Fix-it: first on the scene when a public figure is caught in a midnight hit-and-run, but a man with enough baggage (gambling, debts) to prevent him from making partner. Jumping in to defend an agrochemical company in a lawsuit, Clayton reaches a moment of epiphany. 

In describing it, Clooney mentions films of the 1970s such as The Candidate and The Parallax View. The implication seems to be that he’s rather disillusioned with modern American cinema. “Not just modern American cinema – I think, modern cinema,”he counters. “I gave as a gift to my friends for Christmas last year 100 DVDs of my favourite films from 1964 to 1976. It was going to be 1965 to 1975, but that meant leaving out Strangelove and Fail-Safe. And Network and All the President’s Men and Taxi Driver and Bound for Glory. But you look at these films – you could find 10 films a year that are masterpieces. And the people who were making them were studios. They don’t make those films any more; you couldn’t come near making those films. This film was taken to a studio. They wouldn’t make it.” 

Michael Clayton, naturally, has certain sympathies. “It ends up playing very well in times that are, politically, about corporate corruption,” he says. “You could take this group of characters and put them into healthcare or into government.” Before getting Clooney started on politics (you suspect that once that button’s pushed, that will be it), I have to ask whether Michael Clayton might actually be a metaphor for his own career – the hack performer who, belatedly, sees the light. He laughs. “The hack part, I understand. The moment of clarity, then, would have been a while ago – Batman & Robin – because at that point I realised I’d better start picking better.” His trashing of Batman & Robin – in which, in 1997, amid considerable hullabaloo, he replaced Val Kilmer as the Caped Crusader – is habitual. I bet he still banked the cheque. He concedes the point. 

Clooney’s personal history is broadly known. The son of the television presenter and newsman Nick Clooney, he grew up on the set of his father’s talk show in Cincinnati. Failing to make a career in baseball, he headed for Beverly Hills and a route into showbiz via his aunt, the singer Rosemary Clooney, and his actor cousin Miguel Ferrer. A good-looking journeyman, Clooney was better known for his off-screen dalliances (still is: too many to list here) and his love of practical jokes. Roseanne Barr, on whose show he made a guest appearance, is said to keep a Polaroid of George’s manhood on her fridge, the result of a prank involving some penile puppetry and a pair of Groucho Marx spectacles. His breakthrough, at 32, came with ER – his Dr Doug Ross is still the diagnostic cause of Clooneymania. By the time he left, in 1999, ungallantly leaving Nurse Hathaway alone to have his twins, he was a household name. 

Does he ever watch ER these days? No. “But my office is right next to the sound stage I spent so much time on, so I see ’em all the time. It’s a different set now – it’s a business,” he says. “When we were there, it was really exciting. People keep forgetting. They talk about American Idol, which is the big hit in America – 22m people watch it. Our reruns were getting 35m. We had 44m people an episode watching.” It was completely unexpected. “We got on this rocket and we didn’t know how to ride it,” he says. “We were hanging on.” Still regarded as a “TV guy”, Clooney found letting go for the movies tough at first. It was not until The Perfect Storm (2000) that he became a bankable screen actor, even though, he says with a grin, "It's a movie about a wave. it's got nothing to do with me." 

You suspect he realised, long ago, his limitations in the thespian department – hence his devotion to good material. Even the Oscar for best supporting actor, as a lumpy, overweight CIA agent in Syriana, seemed less about Clooney’s performance than about the Academy’s love of rewarding pretty people who ugly up in the line of duty (see also Tom Hanks, Nicole Kidman, Charlize Theron et al). That said, his acceptance speech, a rant about being “proud to be out of touch”, was a corker, drawing howls of indignation from the right. Clooney’s superb armchair-theatre piece Good Night, and Good Luck, which he wrote and directed, was ostensibly about Ed Murrow taking on Senator McCarthy, but could be read as a tilt at Fox News and the like, which had branded Clooney a “liberal” and a “traitor”. 

Clooney has form as a politico, from antiwar protester through to supporter of Barack Obama. No disrespect, George, but at the end of the day, do we really care what an actor thinks? “No, no, no. Listen, I agree,” he insists. “There was a period in the 1960s and 1970s when actors were leading the charge in the civil-rights movement, the women’s-rights movement, the Vietnam-war movement. Then it got to this place where it probably wasn’t a good idea.” He couldn’t campaign for his father when he ran for Congress in northern Kentucky in 2004, because it became about “Hollywood versus the heartland”, he explains. “Kerry tried to get me to ride on his train after he won the presidential nomination,” he adds, “and I wrote him a note and said, ‘I’d hurt you. I’d harm you.’” 

Wanting to put something back is part of his Irish-Catholic guilt, he says. A couple of years ago, while shooting Michael Clayton, he was also mounting twin Oscar campaigns. “You’re kissing babies, literally,” he says. “I’m tired as hell, and I feel really unclean, because artists are now somehow in competition. And I didn’t like it. I was like, ‘You know, f*** it – let me go somewhere and do something that makes me feel better.’” He ended up in Darfur, about which he has spoken at the UN. 

His father came with him, as a journalist. “He once went to Honduras to try to get a story. It was a big story. He couldn’t get any airplay because it wasn’t sexy, it wasn’t interesting,” Clooney says. “I said, ‘Well, if you’d got Elizabeth Taylor with you, you’d have gotten play, right? I’ll be Elizabeth Taylor.’” 

It’s hard to imagine Liz being so indulgent. Interview over, I’m permitted to tag along while he works the rooms. He talks about riding his motorbike down Sunset Boulevard, and about his dinner with Matt Damon the night before; I hear him publicly air his belief that France will win the Rugby World Cup (even though he admits that he knows nothing about the game). But, more than that, it’s the way this smoothest of operators presses the flesh, signs autographs and poses for photos, always (for the ladies) with a swoon-guaranteeing “So how do you want me?”. The old rascal. 

“Yeah, I’m lucky,” he says. “My aunt Rosemary was a star, then she wasn’t a star, and it wasn’t because she was any less of a singer. Things change. And so, once you understand that so little of this has to do with you ...” If ER had gone out on a Friday night instead of the prime US slot of Thursday, he reminds me, he wouldn’t be here today. 

“That’s luck, not my own genius.” He smiles. “Though I like to think it was.”

More Tom Hanks

Somebody said online that my Sunday Times interview with Tom Hanks was "like a drunk trying to pick a fight with a stranger but eventually with himself at a bus stop." Can't say I agree but love the image!

Jeffery Deaver

My Sunday Times interview with Jeffery Deaver...

Mr Bond, this is not how I was expecting you

The latest official 007 novel is by the American Jeffery Deaver — and he has reinvented the spy for the 21st century

Jeff Dawson Published: 22 May 2011

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I

n the new James Bond novel, Carte Blanche, the London HQ of the Overseas Development Group — a covert operational unit of British security, 007’s employers — is situated off the furred-up artery of the Euston Road, round the corner from Regent’s Park. It’s more or less where the gleaming edifice of the publisher Hodder & Stoughton is sited, so no need to wonder where Carte Blanche’s author, Jeffery Deaver, got his inspiration.

“Actually, there’s the crescent across from the park, and it’s right behind that, on Devon­shire Street,” he gestures, as if the mythical assassination bureau might yet pop up on Google Earth. As a writer with more than 20m sales to his name, of thrillers couched in the intricacies of forensic analysis and police procedure, Deaver knows the devil is in the details. Throw a spanner in a machine that has pumped out 37 official Bond books, 25 of them after Ian Fleming’s death in 1964, with 100m sales to date, and a symbiotic film franchise that has taken $12 billion (adjusted for inflation), and you may find yourself dangled by Blofeld over a pool of piranhas.

These days, the revelation of the latest author to pen a Bond creates nearly as much buzz as the announcement of the next actor to strap on the celebrated Walther PPK. When, in May 2010, it was announced that Deaver, Jeffery Deaver, was to be in charge of the next mission, it marked the collision of two heavyweight brands. A licence to print money? Deaver laughs. “A licence to thrill.”

Funnily enough, the Bond books convinced Deaver, growing up in Illinois, that he wanted to write. “In my household, my parents had a wonderful rule. My sister and I were allowed to read anything we could get our hands on. Some movies we were not allowed to see, which was ironic, because this was the late 1950s, and there was no sex. But books were sacrosanct.”

He recounts the joy of ploughing through the 25c Bond paperbacks his father brought home. “I liked the hero, the accoutrements. Of course, he kissed a girl occasionally, which was repulsive to an eight-year-old. Later, I went back and got interested.” More than that, Fleming’s style had him rapt: “It was, basically, one-foot-in-front-of-the-next-foot storytelling.”

Since his international breakthrough in 1997, with The Bone Collector — which introduced Lincoln Rhyme, the world’s foremost, probably only, quadriplegic detective — the prolific author has made a killing out of just such breathlessness. He has notched up 30 or so books to date, including the Rhyme hits The Empty Chair, The Twelfth Card and The Burning Wire, as well as his recent series featuring a Californian single-mother detective, Kathryn Dance. Never let it be said, though, that the life of a bestselling crime writer is all glamour. His overnight plane from Washington DC was delayed, affording him a mere couple of hours’ kip. Ensconced in a strip-lit room where books by Hodder stablemates Russell Brand and, er, Peter Crouch leer from the shelf, he will spend the next 48 hours signing hundreds of book inserts, or “tipping sheets”.

I didn’t want to do a period piece. I liked Sebastian Faulks’s book. It was very well done. But it’s not what I wanted to do

He’s a trouper, though. “As I’ve gotten older, I need even less sleep,” chirrups the engaging 61-year-old, a trim man with a corona of hair and thick black Dolce & Gabbana specs. He dresses like the suited lawyer he used to be, though, in a rare concession to comfort, he has removed his tie.

It was his eulogising of Bond while accepting the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award in 2004 that convinced both the estate and Ian Fleming Publications to recruit him. “I said yes, but with caveats, which it turned out were the same caveats they had — that the book would be set in the present day, and that Bond would be rebooted. I didn’t want to do a period piece. I liked Sebastian Faulks’s book. It was very well done. But it’s not what I wanted to do.”

Ah, yes. Mr Faulks, we were expecting you. Three years ago, when Faulks put on the literary tuxedo, “writing as Ian Fleming” in the 1960s-set Devil May Care, he achieved that rare thing — moving the books from the shadow of the films for the first time since the cinematic advent of Dr No, in 1962, something beyond Kingsley Amis, John Gardner or Raymond Benson, who had all penned post-Fleming Bonds. Or Charlie Higson, with his Young Bond adventures.

“I suspect he’s more talented than I — I would be unable to step out of the Deaver novelist mode and write in anyone else’s voice. I simply could not do it,” Deaver adds. He points to my for-your-eyes-only manuscript and its unambiguous declaration of authorship. “What my fans are ­getting is the typical, fast-paced, twisty-turny Deaver book. What Bond fans are getting is their character updated. They are going to expect an appearance by M, an appearance by Moneypenny. They’re going to expect a car, the Bond women — so, yes, there’s a check list. But it’s playing along without being a pastiche.”

Carte Blanche is certainly an entertaining ride, as our international man of mystery embarks on a jet-setting romp, from Serbia to Dubai to Cape Town, to debag a global agent of destruction. The financial potential for a continuation novel, as such ventures are known, is huge — and the reason why, elsewhere, Don Winslow is assuming Trevanian’s mantle and Anthony Horowitz is doing Sherlock Holmes.

The Fleming people had right of veto over his copy, Deaver concedes, “but they accepted 95% of what I had done and tweaked mostly the character”. Bond has been stirred, but not shaken — he’s thirtysomething, an Afghanistan veteran, but conforms to the official description (based on the singer Hoagy Carmichael): “His black hair was parted on one side and a comma of loose strands fell over one eye. A three-inch scar ran down his right cheek.”

Though Deaver loves Sean Connery and Daniel Craig, those damned Bond films (only two of which Fleming lived to see) have skewed the perspective. If Bond 2011 doesn’t smoke for England any more (“We have to like our hero”), he does the rest by the book: driving a Bentley, not an Aston Martin; visiting Q Branch, rather than an individual boffin. Cosily, Her Majesty’s Secret Servant listens to Radio 4 over his scrambled eggs.

Life is ambiguous in some ways, but really, don’t we know good, and don’t we know bad, when we see it?

He is also rather chaste, not discharging his weapon till page 259. “You counted!” Deaver laughs. In print, Bond was married twice, he points out. “He was always looking for a relationship. He was not just jumping from bed to bed.” (Though he’s still a saucy blighter. “Stockings or tights?” Bond ponders across the office over his comely assistant, Ophelia Maidenstone.)

Deaver’s connection with Britain goes back some way. During the second world war, his father was in the US 9th Air Force, stationed in East Anglia. A turret gunner on a Douglas Boston, he was wounded over liberated France, the pilot going down with the plane so that his crew could bail out.

His morality remains uncomplicated. “I don’t like anti­heroes, I like heroes,” he asserts. “Life is ambiguous in some ways, but really, don’t we know good, and don’t we know bad, when we see it?”

Deaver went into law, then legal journalism (with a sideline as a singer-songwriter). He didn’t go full-time as an author until he was 40. “I never believed in the ‘starving artist’ syndrome.” Commercial fiction has no room for self-indulgence, he insists. “I’m a manufacturer. I make no bones about it. And, frankly, I think most serious, successful creators of fiction are manufacturers. You sit down with a tried and tested set of formulae.” He will spend months on the intricate plotting and research. As for the writing, he’ll bash his laptop anywhere: in either of his homes in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, or DC; on a plane; in the car on the M4 (until he started to feel sick).

One can’t help but notice that Carte Blanche is dripping with product placement — Rolex, Bose, Nikon, Emirates. Deaver denies any personal incentive, employing the device, like Fleming, for descriptive purposes. He tells a story about always portraying Lincoln Rhyme drinking Macallan whisky, on the off chance he might cop a free case. He never did. “Now he drinks Glen­morangie. Haven’t heard from them, either.”

Not surprisingly, Lincoln Rhyme — the inaction hero — did not extend his run in Hollywood. Carte Blanche may yet make the transition, but Deaver won’t be involved with the script, he says, as he owes 35 international publishing houses the Kathryn Dance book he had to defer to write it.

Is he a conservative? In the book, Deaver equates the eco-slogan “Reduce, reuse, recycle” with “Arbeit macht frei”. (“That was right on the borderline, wasn’t it?”) In the South African section, he can’t resist a pop at western charitable do-gooders. But it’s the voice, he says, not him: “I’m a Democrat. I voted for Obama.”

On to the big question: James Bond, relevant or relic? A man of Deaver’s talents presumably could have invented his own superspy without getting in hock to the Fleming people. His riveting thriller Edge, about a lone-wolf security operative, is a case in point. “It’s a good question, and the answer to it is that Bond was really the perfect creation,” he muses. “There’s such banality of evil. A terrorist can strap on a suicide vest. The most simple-minded ideo­logy can cause immeasurable harm, but that does not make for compelling emotional resonance.”

To which end, he says, we need our fictional scrap between good and evil — “Villains who are larger than life, more talented, more resourceful, than our hero, so that when the hero prevails, the ultimate victory means something more... That is the essence of Bond. He’s the knight errant going on the quest — someone who’s willing to put his life on the line for us, the innocent. We need Bond today as much as ever.”