Tell me about getting involved in the project...

I came from the screenplay, Steve Clovis wrote the screenplay - maybe your viewers know him from "Fabulous Baker Boys" - he's a wonderful, wonderful writer. And it was just a sort of magically quirky, funny, poignant, story, more character-driven than a lot of the kind of pictures that I've been involved with. And I saw a chance to do something a little different, you know, a little less aggressive, a little less intense than some of the other parts I've played. And with some humour.

You enjoyed success very early on, is there that element of autobiography running through the film?

I won the Oscar for Cuckoos Nest for best picture when I was 30 and that's considered a wonder boy, and there was definitely a moment afterwards you are saying, well that's it, it's all downhill from here, I am never going to have the kind of success I had here, this is it. And, that's the same quality that runs through Grady Trip's character, the character that I'm playing who had a very successful novel early in his career and has been frozen in time trying to repeat it, and basically a lot of it comes from his chronic pot smoking, he cannot make any choices, so that his new novel, which is running over 1,200 pages with no ending in sight, just isn't cutting it.

To actually cast him as a tremendous sympathetic and likeable character, even though he is flawed obviously but the whole academia, the life that he leads seems also very attractive, is that something that tempts you?

No, but I understand it, I mean it is a timewarp, and that was I think what we were trying to say. There are a lot of professors, a lot of graduate students who sort of hide behind the university walls and the ivory towers, an unreal sort of world, particularly as my character says "I have tenure, so they can't get rid of me". I think it is protection particularly if you had a commercial success in writing a novel, you could hide behind your teaching position and it's comfortable.

What about the rest of the cast, because you are surrounded without exception by tremendous actors, all of them doing some of their finest work, I mean Frances McDormand, of course, and Robert Downey Jr...

Curtis put together this great cast, it was again so much fun to be involved in a piece that was sort of character-driven, we got down to Pittsburgh, we had about two weeks of rehearsal, and you've interviewed Curtis already so you know he has a warmth about him and he likes actors. You are always surprised how many directors do not really like the actors.

Why is that do you think, what's that envy?

I think it's a combination, it is just the control factor, that they have a picture in their brain exactly how it should go, and any interpretations an actor might make upsets that. Secondly, actors can be a pain in the neck sometimes and they are self-involved and indulgent and your patience runs short, and then thirdly, yeah, they’d like to be up there on the screen, you know, the actor is the one that's getting the attention, but Curtis doesn't have any of that, he just loves actors. And he created in the rehearsal time our own literal liberal arts university in which all of these characters could act out their weird lives.

A lot of your movies really hit the moment dead on the button, but here you are playing a character in a film which is, is far less easy to describe in just a sentence. Is it more interesting, more of a challenge to you because of that?

Oh it definitely was, and it definitely was for the studio marketing, as you know this picture first opened in the States in February of this year, with the best reviews I have ever got in my life, and Curtis got and everything else, but nobody went to the movie because the marketing campaign was so strange. This is not a predictable film. This is not one of those things that you can say in one line. But as one of the character's says "the movie takes you on one hell of a trip".