Hopkins goes hell for leather

Sir Anthony Hopkins stars in The World's Fastest Indian.

Sir Anthony Hopkins is already calling his latest movie the best thing he's ever done. "I started laughing when I read the script for The World's Fastest Indian," he says. "I thought, this is no way for a 67-year-old man to behave!"

The Indian in question is not a Native American, but a brand of motorcycle which went out of production in 1953. In the film it belongs to a cantankerous old New Zealander, Burt Munro, whom Hopkins portrays.

Munro spent 40 years perfecting and modifying a 1920 model in his shed in Invercargill (a town that even New Zealanders think of as remote). Then, at the age of 63, the determined old man defied logic, the odds and the entire American automotive industry by taking the bike to Utah and setting the world land-speed record in 1970. It has yet to be broken.

When it premiered at Toronto Festival last week, the critics seemed to be as pleased as Hopkins with the film. It has an almost fairytale quality, as the plainspeaking Munro charms his way across the Western US, from Long Beach, California to the Bonneville Salts Flats in Utah, towing the old Indian on a rickety, home-made trailer behind a second-hand banger.

It's an unusual role for Hopkins who, in his time, has played such monsters as Hannibal Lecter, Hitler, Captain Bligh and Bruno Hauptmann, kidnapper of the Lindbergh baby. But he endows the character of Munro with such gentleness and steely determination that you can't help getting caught up in his quest.

Memories of his childhood in South Wales gave Hopkins a way into the role, which is partly what made it so interesting for him. "My father was a baker," he says, "and he used to take me with him in the van. I always remember those summer days. He'd go into town and ... [here, the actor whistles a jaunty little tune] ... we'd be in the van and he'd call out: 'Baker!' Then he'd whistle again. 'Morning, missus, how are you today?' And that's in the movie!"

These warm words are at odds with reports of a diffident, difficult Hopkins,
an actor who claims he never becomes fond of anyone he works with. ("Call me Tony," he says, when we meet.)

More surprising still is the fact that he's back working with writer/director Roger Donaldson. Following their very public falling out during the filming of Donaldson's Hollywood debut, The Bounty, Hopkins declared he would never work with the man again.

At the time, he made no secret of his disdain for the Australian director, whom he regarded as arrogant and inexperienced (it was only Donaldson's third feature). The two of them clashed from day one and, after the film was finished (and opened at Cannes in 1984), they didn't speak for 19 years.

Even as recently as 2001, when Donaldson was at the Berlin Film Festival with his Cuban missile crisis movie, Thirteen Days, while Hopkins was there with Hannibal, they avoided one another.

The completion of The World's Fastest Indian (which we'll see here next year), marks the end of a 30-year labour of love for Donaldson, who first had the idea for the film while making a documentary on Munro, Offerings to the God of Speed. And it marks the end of the feud.

Now Hopkins says Donaldson is the best director he's worked with, and Donaldson has returned the compliment. Indeed, the actor sitting opposite me is almost unrecognisable as the irascible star who, shortly after he became a US citizen four-and-a-half years ago, claims to have told a British journalist who asked him why he had renounced his homeland: "I'm bored of you people. Fuck off back to England!"

These days, he has renounced anger along with alcohol (he has been teetotal since 1975). "As you get older," he says, "you realise it's not worth it. When you're young, you've got the energy to do it. In your prime, you're asserting your authority. It's okay at a certain age, but after a while it becomes tiresome."

In his "prime", Hopkins was indeed fiery, awkward and frequently drunk (on white wine spritzers, vodka and, finally, tequila). This took him through two failed marriages (fathering one daughter he reportedly never sees) and a meteoric stage career which foundered when he abruptly walked off stage in the middle of a National Theatre production of Hamlet, destroying his relationship with his idol, Sir Laurence Olivier.

He has lived in the US since 1987, and married his third wife, antiques dealer Stella Arroyave, 19 years his junior, in 2003. But the new film seems to have reawakened memories of, and a new fondness for, the valleys of mid-Glamorgan in the immediate post-war years.

The real-life Burt built his bike using anything that came to hand. Such mechanical detail is the only bit of The World's Fastest Indian that had no resonance for Hopkins. He admits he's no whizzkid. "I don't understand how to add two and two," he says, which must have caused him a headache during the filming of Proof (out at the end of the year), in which he plays a mathematical genius.

He has a similar cluelessness about pistons and camshafts. "I did used to hang out in my grandfather's shed when I was a little kid," he says, harking back to the days when he was something of a withdrawn loner. "He had a lathe and I used to turn the vice and all that. Nowadays, though, I don't even know what's under the hood of a car."

Hopkins didn't actually ride the tiny, streamlined motorbike in the film, but he did get towed along at 80mph behind the camera car. And, when he crashes on the Bonneville Salt Flats, sliding along, his face millimetres above the salt, that's not a special-effects shot, that's for real.

The film has cured him of his ambition to get behind the camera. "I used to kid myself I was a director," he says. I'd think, ah, it's easy: you just point the camera and do it. But this is more exciting. Roger's the driver. He's got the car, he's got the steering wheel. I've just got to be the passenger and sit back."

Actor and director, friendship rekindled, are now trying to raise money for another joint project: a movie about Hemingway in the final years of his life, called, appropriately enough, Papa. Fidel Castro wants them to shoot it in Cuba.

Hopkins is keen, perhaps because it goes against the grain of the roles in which he is increasingly cast, but also because of Donaldson. "I've worked with a lot of top directors," he says, "but Roger's the best. He's like John Huston.

"He's tough; he's different. I like that. It shakes me out of my kind of British thing that I've done so well. That's why we're attracted to Hemingway; he was a big macho guy, fishing and hunting and all that, but a complex tragic figure, a big personality."

This, he suggests, is as good as it gets when you're 67. Never mind the Oscars. "I mean, playing a madman staring through the glass at Jodie Foster - that's interesting. But this is different; this is far more exciting."

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