This is an easy one to write, because I know its subject will never read it. "I haven't read a review in well over a decade," says John Malkovich in a way that I would have once have described as airily, but which I now realise is just the way he talks. "I never read anything about me."
"I can't even get him to read the announcement," says Russ Smith, his partner in Smith Malkovich productions, waving a copy of Tuesday's Variety Cannes daily, in which the generic headline THESP TAKES HELM blares out across the top of the front page."Perhaps if I sort of left it lying casually open on the table?" I suggest. "It wouldn't work," says Smith.
Malkovich grins - a distinctive process, in which one corner of his mouth opens slightly downwards - and thoughtfully considers the horizon. I remember that long-distance gaze, having once passed the actor on the rue d'Antibes, where he appeared to be risking life, limb and, given the habits of Cannes' canine population, the soles of his shoes, by walking along with his eyes fixed vaguely on the infinite.
It struck me as pretentious at the time. But, after watching Malkovich on the roof terrace of the Savoy the other day - a curiously crowded little world, into which a cafe and a swimming pool and a garden have all been crammed, like some open-air biosphere - I realise that it's just what he does. Some people look down at the table, some obsessively watch the beer mat they are twisting in their fingers and others look you unblinkingly in the eye. Malkovich watches the horizon. Fitting, really, that he was picked to star in Antonioni's Beyond the Clouds.
What Malkovich is doing in Cannes is interviews to promote the announcement of his first two films as a director, The Dancer Upstairs, which will shoot in Argentina this October; and The Libertine, a costume drama starring Johnny Depp, to be shot in London next year.
Malkovich will definitely appear in the former, in the secondary role of the leader of Peru's Shining Path guerrillas - a worthy addition to his gallery of psychotics and obsessives - and may play Charles II in the latter. But that is not the point: the point is that he has finally decided to direct not one but two films, both of which will be fully financed by London-based J&M Entertainment.
"I've actually known them" - Julia Palau and Mike Ryan of J&M - "socially for some time," says Malkovich, "and they have asked me over the years, 'What have you got? What have you got?' These were two things I felt I would be happy spending two years of my life working on."
'Happy' is a word which recurs surprisingly frequently in the conversation, especially on the subject of the star's garden in Provence, where he now lives. "I've been moving some narcissus and doing a bit of weeding," he says with a dreamy stare. But happiness also figures in discussion of Malkovich's working life. "I'm happy doing European films for very little money," he says. "I'm happy doing plays for US$300 a week, and I'm happy making millions doing studio movies." (For the record, The Dancer Upstairs and The Libertine are expected to be in the US$10-15 million range.) "I'm generally pretty happy as a person."
"I've done big movies," he concedes. "And, if they were bad, it wasn't because they were big. It's all a matter of context. What I'm not interested in doing, however, is taking a US$12 million movie and turning it into a US$40 million movie."
So what about Mary Reilly? "Well, no, that was not a happy experience. There were problems with the story that were never resolved, production problems that were never solved. I've done better work because I've had better things to work with. I think that would be an example of a US$12 million movie that turned into a US$40 million movie." If Malkovich has learned anything from a 20-year career in the movies - stretching from an extraordinary performance as a blind man in Robert Benton's Places in the Heart to Volker Schlöndorff's The Ogre, which was to have been here but wasn't ready in time - it is, he says, that telling the story has to come first.
"The power has to be with the story," he says, "and not with the actress or the director. I hope I have learned something from all the directors I have worked with. But, for me, the focus has to be on the story and you have to put in second place anything which does not help the story to communicate itself. "A lot of nonsense has gone into filmmaking and a lot of waste. I think you should shoot the film, not 200 versions of the film. My experience with filmmakers is that they shoot far too much film in the hope that something wonderful will happen. And it won't if there isn't something wonderful in the story in the first place."
So, when he goes on to the set of The Dancer Upstairs for the first time, what sort of a director does he expect to be?"
The lop-sided grin comes back, the horizon resumes its fascination. "I expect," he says, "to be ever so slightly fascistic, but I hope not unpleasantly so."
