FOR a superstar who has a weight problem, is losing his hair and fast approaching three-score years, Jack Nicholson is surprisingly chipper. You might almost call him self-satisfied in a charming kind of way, quite capable of uttering deeply un-PC words about gender - "It's all a matter of glands. Men's glands programme them to get up after sex and go right on to the next one" - etc, etc.
But then, he is entitled to be fairly pleased with himself. Except perhaps for Brando, whom Nicholson so admires that he gave one of his most uncertain performances when he shared the screen with him in Arthur Penn's The Missouri Breaks, he is the best film actor of his generation. Not so long ago, he ate Tom Cruise for breakfast as a cold war colonel in the courtroom drama A Few Good Men; Cruise and Demi Moore were so in awe of him that he said he felt like the Lincoln Memorial.
He has made some bad films where he was a parody of himself, but anyone whose CV includes Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, King Of Marvin Gardens, The Last Detail, Chinatown, The Passenger, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest and The Shining is entitled to take praise as a matter of course and occasional criticism with equanimity.
He is also exceedingly rich, so that when he had finished another week's work on Tim Burton's first Batman, for which he was paid not only a fat salary but a percentage of the profits from highly successful merchandising, he was reported to have turned to a fellow member of the cast and said: "Ah, well, that's another Matisse."
He need never work again if he doesn't want to. But he does want to, and has just completed another movie with Bob Rafelson, with whom he made Five Easy Pieces and The King Of Marvin Gardens.
Then there is the little matter of his women who, even when they leave him or he leaves them, never. seem to criticise him very much. He is generally adored by the female sex, and that's enough to make anyone cheerful, even in late middle age. He says the worst thing he has to do is pretend he hasn't heard the line "I don't just like you because you're Jack Nicholson" before.
Perhaps there is a downside to all this, as his friend Peter Fonda suggests: "There is a real deep hurt inside. and there's no real way of resolving it, ever." It can't have been easy to discover, at the age of 38, that the woman he thought was his mother was, in fact, his grandmother and that the two women he imagined were his sisters turned out to be his mother and his aunt.
This is generally the reason why it is said, often by himself, that he will never have a permanent relationship with a woman, even though his ex-girlfriends all say that he understands them better than most men. He now says he would rather like to be married. But when he comes to it, he almost certainly will not seriously contemplate such a restriction. In the Hollywood world of would-be Don Juans, he still seems to be the king. And with that title, a certain amount of unhappiness is implied.
You wouldn't, however, notice it in interviews. The great thing about Nicholson is that he will talk about any subject you like - women, sex, films, life, art and, of course, Jack Nicholson. Not for him the wary, disciplined answers so many Hollywood stars give to questions either about themselves or the films they are publicising. He's a master of the art of giving away 80 per cent of himself extremely entertainingly in order to prevent anyone even guessing about the 20 per cent he's not talking about.
At the moment he is talking about Sean Penn's The Crossing Guard. It's a film made with some difficulty - it was painstakingly shot, edited and re-edited over months, and was not given a particularly warm welcome by either critics or public in America or at the Venice Festival last year.
He plays the father of a child nearly killed in a road accident who decides on revenge and loses everything as a result. For him, it's about what actually happens when you want an eye for an eye.
HE made the film because he admires Penn and only had a brief moment of hesitation when he was asked to play a scene with Anjelica Huston, his ex-long-term lover who plays his divorced wife - "It only gave me one moment's pause. She's a professional and so am I." Besides, he. thinks the theme of the film is important, quoting the Bible where it says that when a child dies before the parents, even God weeps. He also thinks that Penn is one of the few actor-directors around capable of doing worthy work.
Another, of course, is Nicholson himself, who has so far directed three interesting if not wholly satisfactory movies Drive, He Said (1970), Goin' South (1978) and The Two Jakes (1990). He would like to direct more but says that. even with his reputation, he can't raise the money. "They'll pay me millions to play the fool. But they won't take my advice far free on what's likely to make a good movie, especially if I want to direct it."
What's valuable about Penn's film, he says, even if you don't like it, is that it takes a lot of risks. Very few others are doing that. "Remember, Sean is a big star and could have become a very rich man. But he turned his back on all that, and nowadays that takes courage. This is a period when the market rules and they'd much rather finance a piece of crap that makes money than something worthwhile that might not. I really want the film to succeed because I don't get the chance very often now to do this kind of serious work."
Get Nicholson on to a pet subject - or in this case a pet hate - and it's hard to stop him. He just fills his lungs and talks and talks and talks. So here goes: "In all my experience - and it goes back rather a long way - I've never known a time when there was so much crap around. It makes me very angry because those responsible are mostly idiots and charlatans. They know nothing about the cinema and they care very little, too. They just think in terms of `fast' and `slow' and `where's the rooting interest?'
"But, of course, it isn't just them. It's the audiences, too, and they don't have the background. They don't know anything about the cinema's past and they just kind of accept what it is now. I'm lucky in that I don't have to do it. I don't have to accept 15 million to appear in a movie where I have to say one line looking over my shoulder between a car crash and an explosion. I don't need the money and I don't need the aggravation.
"But a lot of the younger stars have to accept that shit. even if they don't like it. There's too much to lose if they don't. I don't want to get too high-falutin about it because I know that most people making films and actors come to that will follow audiences into the shithole if that's where they want to go. But I just wish every film I liked wasn't either foreign or made in America but with such terrible difficulty.
"It's the worst period ever for trying to do interesting work, and they are wasting an awful lot of talent by making movies where every eight minutes you either f*** somebody or blow them up. So when someone like Sean comes along, it's of great value. It might not have been a brave movie to make when I started. That was a different and I think better time. But it's a hell of a courageous movie to make today. Besides. it" got an excellent cast and I don't mean me. Think about Robin Wright. She's the most underrated actress in America. She's maybe the best thing about Forrest Gump and she didn't even get nominated. And it wasn't easy for Sean to direct her because they had a thing going at the time. But she's great. And frankly I'm OK too. It's as good a job as I can do."