The press books issued to the media on a film's release are padded out with enough gushing compliments from the stars and the film-makers about each other to fill entire issues of Pri- vate Eye with fodder for its fun-poking Luvvies column. Wisely, most of those actors and film-makers don't take a word of this piffle seriously. Like Matthew Broderick. Jon Avnet, the film director who is one of the eight producers of Inspector Gadget, declares that Broderick was the first choice to play the title character. "I don't want to discredit Matthew by making an analogy of someone else, but I love the actor Jimmy Stewart so much, and Matthew Broderick is very reminiscent of Jimmy Stewart," Avnet says in the press book. "He has a nobility of personal character. He is the common man mixed with a wild, fun, inventive comedic ability."
Broderick looks on in wide-eyed bemusement on hearing this read to him. "Really?," he asks. "Jon Avnet said that? He was never around. But, of course, it's all true! It's exactly right. I couldn't have put it better myself. Well, I guess they have to say something. I don't know what to make of that. I think Tom Hanks is Jimmy Stewart. I think I'm more Mickey Rooney. But then, I don't know what I am."
Part of that confusion about what Matthew Broderick is derives from his refusal to be pigeon-holed. After his engagingly sly turn in the highly successful Ferris Bueller's Day Off in 1986, he easily could have moved to Hollywood and turned out a succession of assembly-line comedies. Instead, he stayed home in New York and continued to work in plays on and off-Broadway, and his first film after playing Ferris Bueller could hardly have been more different - Torch Song Trilogy, in which Broderick was cast as the gay lover of the drag queen played by Harvey Fierstein.
In recent years Broderick has moved from starring in the hit Broadway revival of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, to co-starring with Jim Carrey in the dark comedy movie, The Cable Guy, to topping the bill in the effects-driven Godzilla, to starring in the jaggedly satirical movie, Election, to playing Inspector Gadget - and returning to Broadway to take the lead in the recent production of Emlyn Williams's Night Must Fall.
"Yeah, I have been mixing it up, maybe too much," he says. "Maybe I should have more of a plan. But I like the variety of it all. This has been a year of very different things. No consistency, but it's fun. I guess that's my personality, or something. A lot of it is luck, of course, and out of my control. I didn't expect Inspector Gadget to come along. I had just finished Election, which is such a good movie, and the script just came in the mail."
How do his fellow stage actors react to him doing big-budget, well-paid movies such as Godzilla and Inspector Gadget? Do they resent the multi-million-dollar paydays those movies earn him as against what they get paid for a play?
"I'm sure they must resent that," he says. "I know I would. I was doing Night Must Fall when Election came out. Gadget hadn't come out yet, but there was a full page ad for each of the two films in the Times one day, and the stage manager put them both up on the board backstage. After a while I said we should take those down because it wasn't fair to all the other actors walking by."
He cites the example of his late actor father, James Broderick: "My father was a stage actor primarily. When I was growing up we didn't have very much money or anything. He worked pretty much all the time. So I'm familiar with what it's like to not do movies, to be more of a stage actor. "I admire those actors a lot, but pretty well all of them are trying to do TV and movies whenever they can. It's not a choice. Most of them would like to have a series. They have children to raise and it's getting difficult to make a living if you're only doing stage work. There's less stage work than there used to be, and it doesn't pay very well, even on Broadway."
Really? "A very experienced actor in a Broadway show, and you really can't get much better than that, probably makes $1,000 to $1,200 a week," he says. Even when tickets are costing up to $80 each? "Well, if you're in a big musical and you're starring in it, then you will make some more money. But actors doing, say, Night Must Fall, are not getting paid very much and to live anywhere near the theatre district in Manhattan is pretty much impossible on that pay.
"I'm pretty rich now, I suppose, so the nice thing about having made money is that I don't have a job if I don't like something, and, if I want to take off, I can just take off. My father had to do things because I had two sisters who were in college and I was getting up to high school age. So he did a TV series, Family, which worked out very well for him, but, I think the decision was more of an economic one than anything else."
Now 37, Matthew Broderick was raised by his actor father and writer mother, Patricia, in New York. When he was 10, the family bought a house in Donegal and he has been spending holidays there ever since, most recently in September with his wife, Sarah Jessica Parker, the star of the TV series, Sex and the City.
"We go back there a lot," he says. "The house is near Killybegs. It's beautiful up there. It's changed a lot. When I first went there we had phones that you cranked. Now there are more people using mobile phones there than in New York. And there was gaslight when I first went there. But that's nearly 30 years ago."
He made his stage debut when he was 17 and joined his father in a workshop production of Horton Foote's play, On Valentine's Day. Four years later, in 1983, he made his movie debut in a supporting role of the Neil Simon-scripted Max Dugan Returns, followed by his first starring role as the young computer hacker in WarGames.
"My career began with a play, which got me two movies and a play," he says, "and so it went ever since - play, movie, play, movie. I did the Neil Simon play, Brighton Beach Memoirs, and then he wrote a sequel to it, Biloxi Blues, and I was in that too. Because both sides of my career started at about the same time, I 've always just felt I wanted to do both theatre and movies, and I never felt I was doing a movie in order to pay for a play, or that I was doing a play in order to charge up my batteries for a movie. I think they're both important, but having said that, secretly I find plays more enjoyable.
Broderick got his first Tony award for his performance in Brighton Beach Memoirs and was awarded his second Tony for the revival of How to Succeed in Business With- out Really Trying. In that production he found himself working on stage with his wife for the first time. "Sarah wasn't in the show when we opened it," he says. "Then I left after eight months or so to do a movie, The Cable Guy, and when I came back into it Sarah came in with me and we worked together on it for about four months. It was fun. And strange - when you've known someone for so long and we had lived together for a few years at that stage, and to suddenly be working together on a stage night after night took some adjustment. "She was very different from the actor she replaced and she was really good, but it was a different show with her and I had to adjust to that. But it just took a little while before it became a lot of fun. We got to know everybody in the cast very well, which was nice, so our social circles became the same. When we got married three years ago the whole cast came to the wedding."
He is a member of the Making Angels theatre company and he has directed a lot of short plays there and one full-length play, The Suffering Colonel, all of them written by Kenny Lonergan, a friend of his since high school. "The full-length play didn't come off that all that well," he says. "But when we did it as a short play everybody loved it. It just didn't work out when we stretched it out."
He plays a small role in You Can Count On Me, Lonergan's first feature film as writer-director. "I play a bank manager and I have an affair with a woman who works there, and she's played by Laura Linney. The movie is really about her character." Three years ago Broderick himself directed his first feature, Infinity, written by his mother and based on the memoirs of the mercurial Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Richard Feynman, whom Broderick also played in the film. Though critically well-regarded in the US and on the festival circuit, the film was not widely released. "It's a good movie, I think," he says. "I would like to direct again. I would love to take all the stuff I learned making that one and try again. But I haven't really thought of anything yet."
HE has been enjoying one of the biggest hits of his career with Inspector Gadget, which has made just under $100m. in the US. Based on a cartoon character, it features Broderick as rather naive and inept security guard whose dreams of being the world's greatest police officer seem impossible - until he is supplied with a vast array of grafted-on gizmos and transformed into Inspector Gadget.
The role stretches Broderick literally - his neck extends 10 feet into the air, his arms reach all around a room, and he is propelled by springs which pop out of his shoes. Working with effects is about as tedious a task as a serious actor can get, but Broderick says he has been through much worse. "It was really boring to do Godzilla because it was all digital," he says. "It looks great, but it's not much fun to do. In Inspector Gadget the effects were more mechanical and more to with make-up. It takes forever, so you need a lot of patience, but at least you're reacting to what the audience is seeing.
"Before we started filming I had to spend two weeks getting moulds taken of my body. They took moulds of my head in 10 different positions, five of my face. Each cast took about 40 minutes, so it was quite a big job. I also had a life cast and digital scannings of my face with different expressions. They visually scanned my body. Every morning I would go to Stan Winston's studio and sit around with plaster and goo all over me."
On the more positive side, he says, was working with and getting to know Rupert Everett who plays the movie's villain, the nefarious Claw. "He's very funny and very acerbic, although not so acerbic when you've known him for a while," says Broderick. "He's a little bit bitter, which is good, I think. He's probably as negative as I am, which is always helpful - it's always good to meet someone else as sure as I am that failure is just around the corner at any time. Partly it's just a habit. We both enjoy saying how terrible everything is all the time. I like that. So the two of us made a good combination."
Inspector Gadget goes on general release in Ireland next Friday