Megastar. Singer-songwriter. Husband. Father of three. Political activist. Campaigner for the abolition of Third World debt. Hand-holder of Trimble and Hume. Presenter of shades to the Pope. Freeman of the city. And now, with The Million Dollar Hotel coming soon to a cinema near you, screenwriter and film producer. Being Bono is a busy business. And he's not even 40 yet, although he will be next month.
"As a band we've done all our best work when we've been out of our depth," he says. "So here I was again with this movie. I was the student and I enjoyed that feeling. It's not bad for your first movie to ride shotgun - even if you don't have any cartridges! I felt I didn't have the experience I would have liked to have had, although I have intuition."
It's 7.30 on a Wednesday evening at a quayside recording studio in Dublin, where U2 are laying down the tracks for their next album. They're working late into the night every night, but they always break for dinner at 7.30 and Bono is enthusiastically discussing his work - and what he calls his nixers - in the downstairs green room while the other boys in the band dine upstairs.
"I thought it would be easy getting this film made, that after the script was finished all you had to do was just go to Hollywood," he says, reflecting on the long gestation period of The Million Dollar Hotel. "We went around the houses with it, going to these power breakfasts they have in LA. And here was this 365lb gorilla who said he loved this story, that he would look after it. That was Mel Gibson and he became the film's bodyguard. That was back in 1993."
The setting for the movie is March 2001 in a rundown hotel in downtown Los Angeles, an edifice which has seen better days, rather like the motley crew of outcasts and misfits who occupy it. It begins at the end, when the most childlike and innocent of those residents (Jeremy Davies) leaps from the roof. The movie cuts to extended flashback and explores the events of the previous fortnight.
Those events hinge on a hardline FBI agent (Mel Gibson) investigating the death of a junkie occupant who, it transpires, was the son of a media multimillionaire. The residents include an introverted young prostitute (Milla Jovovich), a faded Hollywood agent (Bud Cort), and a strung-out character (Peter Stormare) who claims his songwriting for the Beatles remains uncredited.
Ostensibly a murder mystery, The Mil- lion Dollar Hotel gradually reveals itself as a series of inter-connected and stylised character studies which eventually mesh into an absorbing picture of thwarted aspirations and self-destructive behaviour.
The movie's mood is enhanced by a score that includes five new Bono songs, and many striking visual compositions which clearly were inspired by the imagery of Edward Hopper and Norman Rockwell.
In 1987 Bono discovered the Million Dollar Hotel itself, a decaying, once-elegant edifice on the roof of which U2 filmed the video for Where the Streets Have No Name. Nicholas Klein adapted the screenplay from Bono's ideas, and Wim Wenders, who had directed several pop promos for U2 - and for whose movies U2 had provided several songs - came on board as director.
"Wim has a great eye," Bono says. "His father was a surgeon and Wim has the eye of a surgeon. He never puts a foot wrong visually. And he makes this film look so beautiful - even though it was shot in 36 days, which is about the speed of television in America. He is able to produce these rare feelings when you leave the cinema at a deeper level than you had when the Titanic went down. You don't know what it is, or why. That, I suppose, is what he does."
Back in the 1980s, Bono and Wenders were exploring their individual fascinations with America before they ever met. "When I first met Wim I told him that Paris, Texas had been a real influence on The Joshua Tree," Bono says. "And he said that when he was shooting Paris, Texas he was driving around the Mojave desert playing our first album, Boy. Which was a sweet thing for him to say, because I'm sure it had less impact on his work than his did on ours.
"It was Wim who coined the line that America has colonised our unconscious and I feel that U2 had a different take on America than most of our contemporaries in London who saw it as a kind of rival empire. They were saying how much they hated the Yanks even though that's where the music had come from. For Irish people it was a very different thing. There were different sides of America to explore, and that became the dynamic of The Joshua Tree.
"The end of the 1980s was our journey through the landscape of the US - musical and in some ways political. At the time America was the neighbourhood bully, throwing its weight around in Nicaragua. It's different now. Clinton takes a lot of flak in the US and some of it is of his making. But he has done some extraordinary things. We're not as obsessed as Americans are with the scandalous, but we are certainly interested in the foreign policy priorities he has given to Northern Ireland, for example, and to Bosnia. He's done so much, that I would be much more positive about America than I used to be."
Bono mostly stayed away from the Los Angeles sets of The Million Dollar Hotel while it was shooting. "I went over at a few points just to see how they were getting on, and I could see how beautiful it was," he says. "And I was watching tiny scenes swell and push out their walls to become major scenes, and watching other scenes shrink as it developed."
When The Million Dollar Hotel had its world premiere at the Berlin Film Festival in February - where it received the runner-up award, the Silver Bear - Bono was clearly unhappy to hear a journalist describe as sentimental the film's treatment of its theme, the redemptive power of love. "I was hurt by that," he says. "At a time when so many movies are smartass and cerebral it's nice to come back to something so honestly emotional.
"The film is a fable about unconditional love and I think it's a theme in Wim's movies about how hard it is to love and what it is to love truly. It's a very simple fable. The only tricky thing about the film was the weave. We had three stories - a murder, an art scandal, a love story - and Wim was interested in the love story above everything."
I put it to Bono that the movie is weighted down with expository baggage at the outset with so many characters to introduce and establish. "Yes, it makes you wait," he accepts. "That, I suppose, is what is so uninvolving about it at that point. It makes you wait and, you know, modernity is so much about instant pleasure, and Wim takes you around the houses, or around the rooms of the hotel in this case, and you meet all these characters and you're wondering where this is all going.
"So it takes a while, but by the end of the movie you kind of care about these characters. They've moved in, in a way that you can't quite explain. Even people who don't like the movie have said that a few days after seeing it they're still walking around with these people in their heads."
Asked about his own fleeting cameo appearance in the movie, Bono says that he still winces every time he sees it. "Wim tried to get me to play a number of different parts in the film," he says, including the art dealer whom he eventually got Julian Sands to play. But I didn't want to be the rock star who gets to be in his own movie. I think it would have broken the spell of the film, and I think even the few seconds that I'm there break the spell.
"As regards acting, I was interested at one point, for the same reason that I got interested in writing this film script, which was just to get out of the first person, to have a rest from that, because a lot of U2's songs are in the first person. Even if they're not written directly from my own experience, I sing them from the first person. There was a real appeal to me about just disappearing into somebody else and living another life, which is what you do when you are writing a screenplay. It's such a cliche, you know: rock star wants to act." He adds laughing, "But then again I've tried other cliches!"
Anyhow, I suggest, hasn't so much of his performance as a rock singer been a form of acting, as he worked through his various onstage personae? "I've been playing with some masks and that's been good fun," he says. "But for a U2 song to succeed in performance I have to climb right inside it. Or else I can't hit those big notes. I have to be lost in it. So maybe it's a different kind of performance. I was hoping that being an actor would be a holiday from all of that, to get away from your own demons. I suppose method actors would tell you something different."
For the movie's soundtrack he assembled what he terms "the greatest imaginary hotel lobby band" - among them Daniel Lanois, Brian Eno, John Hassell, Bill Frisell and Brad Mehldau - for several tracks, and linked up with the other three members of U2 for three new songs, including Ground Beneath Her Feet, for which Salman Rushdie wrote the lyrics.
Now he is working on the new U2 album, which is as yet untitled and due out in August. "It's a funny one," he says "because it's like the record we've always wanted to make. I think it draws from every stage of our development. With some records, it feels like you're pushing them uphill, whereas with this one it's like we're rolling it down the other side and we're running after it."
I mention Brian Eno's prediction that one of the new tracks, Stuck in a Moment You Can't Get Out Of, will be the biggest U2 song yet. "Do you want to hear it?," Bono asks, leading the way upstairs. "The song is about a friend of mine who's dead and it's a really unsentimental conversation with him." It's a haunting, wholly compelling track. "There are bits missing, scenes missing," Bono notes and, as he plays that track and the moody In a Little While and the funky, improvised Elevation, he suddenly becomes all-consumed and lost in music, singing along with himself or filling in the gaps where more mixing needs to be done.
His voice sounds younger and more soulful, especially on In a Little While. "Well, a big night went on before that," he laughs, "and it sounds like it, but it works in that sense. You know, there's a certain contour in pop music which would suggest that our best work is behind us. That would not apply if you were a film-maker, or a novelist, or a poet. In your late 30s you actually would just be hitting form. In music, so many people burn out so early, whereas with us it hasn't been like that.
"For me, it's still a matter of self-respect, but I don't want that contour, and I don't want our band to have the ending that's been written for us. I want to do our best work now, or else, let's stop. I want to get it out there. I don't want to think about the record after this. I hope there is one. But I don't want to think like that."
There are other important matters to distract him from the new album, principally his active involvement in the Jubilee 2000 campaign to abolish Third World debt. "There's good news on that front today," he beams. "A committee made up of six Republicans and five Democrats in the US is recommending complete cancellation of the debts of 41 countries, which is an improvement from 36. It wasn't enough to have the president in on it, we had to have the president's men. That's where it all got interesting for me, to find out who they were and where they parked their car. And I did.
"I always knew that the idea had its own momentum. It just needed a big mouth, really, and I think I'm probably getting far too much credit for it, but that's what it is being an LV - the lead vocalist. You get too much credit - and you get too much s**t. My real job was not just door-stepping the politicians and the bankers, but actually putting my foot in the door and keeping it in the door, so that the idea got airtime.
"When you're younger you have this idea that the bureaucracy is a dark one and deliberately snares new and bright ideas. But it's not that. These people don't get time. They are running the top of the list of problems. So what we had to do was meet them face-to-face and get them to focus on this and to realise that it was something that was bigger than their administration and would be remembered long after they left office, and they would be remembered for it."
Bono speaks warmly of his recent audience with the Pope. "I just love the idea of this old guy scratching at this prosperity that we hold in such awe," he says. "I was quite moved by his determination to do something with his last few years. He used to be a soccer player and a playwright and a showman - that's why I gave him the glasses.
"His mea culpa recently was very interesting. A lot of Irish people, and Irish women in particular, see him as reactionary, as having set their situation back with regard to contraception and divorce, and you can see their point of view. But oddly enough, you would have been fired for the pronouncements he has been making recently if you were a priest in Latin American in the 1980s.
"And it seems that having focused on the drawing back of the Iron Curtain, his lasting wish, and perhaps his last wish, is to see this much higher wall coming down - the ever-widening gap between the haves and the have-nots. With the Left losing its bite, it seems like - and maybe this is a mad thought - but I would love to think the Church could go back to its proper role as conscience. That's what it should have been, but hasn't been."
It's now 9 p.m. and the other band members are ready in the studio. As Bono goes to join them I ask him about being conferred with the freedom of his home city last month. "I love here, I live here," he says. "So this is great, not to have to be dead before anyone says you're great. We've been spoiled already in that regard, but this kind of caps it."
The Million Dollar Hotel will be released on April 28th