It wasn't just cooking style: it was sexual awakening, too," says Daniel Craig, tooling up the Harrow Road in his car.

So is the traffic in NW10, so Craig stops talking for a while.

The film that links cooking and sexual awakening is, of course, Hotel Splendide, which screens in the Panorama today. Craig plays Ronald Blanche, a chef who works in the
hotel which used to be owned by his late mother.

Her spirit having been somehow absorbed into the hotel's heating and waste-disposal system, she still exercises a malign influence over Ronald, his brother Dezmond (played by Stephen Tomkinson) and his sister, Cora (Katrin Cartlidge).

Craig initially took the job because he liked Terence Gross, the director, whose first feature this is after an award-winning short called The Sin Eater.

"He approached me and asked me to do it," says Craig. "We went for a drink and got rather pissed and it was, 'No, of course! I'd love to do it!' I'm a bit of a pushover like that. But I actually had no idea what he was on about when he was explaining the script to me. It was just, 'I quite like you, so let's do it!'"

He has, however, got a much clearer handle on it all now.

"It's a metaphor for a lot of things," he says. "It could be Marxism, it could be Stalinism, it could be family life. It could be Russia in the thirties and forties. Or it could be how they
'fuck you up, your mum and dad', and all that."

Craig, who is one of this year's Shooting Stars and who won the Best Actor Award in Edinburgh in 1998 for playing George Dyer, the young drifter who literally drops in on Derek Jacobi's Francis Bacon in Love Is The Devil, reckons Ronald is the straightest member of the Blanche family.

Well almost.

"He's supposed to be the sanity within the madness, but he's just mad in a different way," he says. "I appear to be very ordinary in comparison with the other characters, some of whom are almost grotesque in the literal sense of the word. Stephen, for instance, has got all this make-up: he's got the works. The only thing he hasn't got is a hump."

Craig avoids a cyclist. "He wanted a hump," he adds, "but they wouldn't give him one. I think he should have had a hump."

Ronald finally breaks free from his mother's influence when his ex-girlfriend (played by Toni Collette) turns up at the hotel, unannounced, after receiving a garbled message. She eventually joins him in the kitchen.

In fact, a lot of Hotel Splendide takes place in the kitchen, Ronald's mother's philosophy having been that properly prepared food was the key to everything else. Except her idea of proper preparation had little to do with gastronomy.

"It's like using jellied eels and aspic and vegetables cooked until they're grey," says Craig. "It's completely the lack of anything: no taste whatsoever. The point about it is that it shouldn't actually touch the sides ­ it should just go straight through you."

But, as far removed as this sounds from haute cuisine, some kitchen training ­ in, of all places, the Savoy Hotel ­ was necessary for the actor to play the role of Roland.

"I used to work in kitchens a lot, as everybody does at some stage," he says. "I used to be a kitchen porter and a salad chef ­ never anything posh! I remember going into the Savoy the first day we arrived and I said, 'I don't want to be here! I don't like it!' It's fucking hard work!

"But, to be a chef, you have to have discipline," he adds. "Just chopping ­ it seems sort of a silly thing to say, but using a knife properly is very important. I can't do it, but I certainly learned to look like I knew how to."

"Using real knives?" I ask.

"Oh yeah," he says. "And we did have one accident. Poor old Toni got it."

"I read somewhere that she has a phobia about knives," I say. Actually, I read it in the press kit.

"Well, if she didn't, she's got one now," notes Craig dryly.

Hotel Splendide, as you will gather, is not your run-of-the-mill modern British film, about clubbing and doing drugs and diamond geezers robbing minicab offices.

"I would rather put needles in my eye," he says of the latter kind of role. "I've got no interest in them at all. They've got no relevance to me and they're not what I'm about. And anyway, I'm 33 now, so I'm a bit long in the tooth for that."

But he does like to take risks. "People always say, 'That stuff you did in Love Is The Devil must have been difficult'," he notes. "But I say, 'No, it wasn't really: that was some of the easier stuff to do', because it was always clear and made a lot of sense. It's when things are unclear and when you don't know what you're doing ­ that's when things are difficult.

"But I actually quite like that process," he adds. "I like being like a rabbit caught in the headlights. If you're not feeling like that, then you've got to question why you're
not feeling like that, because you should be scared.