Look up, it's Tim Robbins. As he strolls into the garden of his Paris hotel and looks down from a great height, the first thing that strikes one about Robbins is just how tall he is - at least six foot five. In an industry where so many of his fellow actors are so much smaller, surely his height must cause him some problems when it comes to casting? "With certain actors it is a problem," he says, proffering some creme brulee. So we're not likely to see him in a movie with, say, Al Pacino? "Probably not, but there are a lot of short actors. I guess it depends on the movie - if you're in the central role and you're the guy, you don't want your co-star towering over you. I can understand that. Though I don't have that problem!"
Unless, I suggest, he's cast opposite Michael Jordan in Space Jam II. "But there are ways to trick it, you know," he adds. "Like Jennifer Jason Leigh is five two, I think, and we did Hudsucker Proxy together, and it worked by shooting us very carefully from different angles and points of view. It all depends where you put the camera."
Casting against type is always interesting, he says, and this is one of the reasons why he and the provocative American comedian, Martin Lawrence, work so well together in his latest movie, Nothing To Lose, which opens here next Friday. Robbins plays a slick advertising executive whose world is turned upside-down when he believes he has caught his wife in bed with his boss. Martin Lawrence plays a desperate carjacker who has the misfortune to target Robbins as his victim on that fateful day.
"I think there's a really good chemistry there between us," says Robbins, "You know what it is? I think we're just so unlike each other. The mistake people make in casting comedies like this is putting together actors who are so similar." I mention the movie's pressbook, which claims that Nothing To Lose follows "in the tradition of such great screen teamings as Newman and Redford in Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid, Nick Nolte and Eddie Murphy in 48 HRS, and Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis in Thelma & Louise." "Yeah, I heard about that," grins Robbins, who is married to Sarandon. "The things these people write!" The same pressbook quotes Robbins himself as describing the teaming of himself and Lawrence as "sort of Laurel and Hardy with attitude". "And you know, I never said that," he replies. "But it's alright, it's fine. It's not a bad line."
Like so many other actors, Tim Robbins worked his way up through a lot of dross when he started out in movies - No Small Affair (his debut in 1984), Toy Soldiers, Fraternity Vacation, Erik The Viking and even the notoriously awful Howard The Duck.
In 1988 came the movie which changed his life - Ron Shelton's sharp, wry-humoured baseball picture and romantic comedy, Bull Durham, not only gave Robbins his meatiest role to date, it brought him together with the movie's leading actress, Susan Sarandon; they married and have three children.
"This is the time to be with the kids, and I don't want to regret it later," he says, explaining why he took 15 months off from filmmaking since acting in Nothing To Lose last year. "I did some writing, but I also decided to take stock and re-evaluate some big things in my life. It's been great. In that time, as well as writing I've quit smoking cigarettes. I've got my health back - I cured a back problem I had for about 15 years. Things I've been waiting to do for a while and I just didn't have time to do. And of course, the major thing was I able to be with my family more."
Tim Robbins turned director four years ago with Bob Roberts, an acerbically satirical pseudodocumentary in which he himself played the title role, a right-wing folk singer running for the US Senate and smearing his Democratic opponent played by Gore Vidal. Robbins stayed behind the camera for his second film as a director, the anti-capital punishment drama, Dead Man Walking, which earned him an Oscar nomination and won Susan Sarandon the best actress Oscar last year. At a time when so many actors have turned director with indifferent results or worse, Robbins has firmly made his mark on both sides of the camera, something he credits to his background in theatre. Encouraged by his father - Gill Robbins, a Greenwich Village folk singer - he joined a New York experimental theatre company at the age of 12 and worked with them through his high school years. Moving to Los Angeles in his late teens he studied theatre at UCLA and co-founded The Actors' Gang, an innovative theatre ensemble for whom he wrote and directed six plays in addition to directing award-winning productions of Albert Jarry's Ubi Roi and Brecht's The Good Woman Of Setzuan.
His third film as a director will be The Cradle Will Rock, which he hopes to start shooting in April. A factually-based drama, it deals with the attempts by John Houseman and Orson Welles to stage the eponymous Brechtian play in New York in the mid-1930s. "You have to understand that it's set in the month after a major labour riot in the United States that left many people killed," Tim Robbins says.
"It's a play with music and it's about a labour strike. The government, I guess, thought it was too hot a topic and they effectively cancelled the performance by sending armed guards to close down the theatre. Welles and Houseman try to find a different theatre to do it in and in the course of the day they find one. The show's supposed to start at eight o'clock and the audience is out front and growing. They see the guards and it's becoming a real event. But the actors' union tells the actors they can't perform the play. It's a great story."
While Orson Welles is a key character in the scenario, Robbins insists the movie does not revolve around Welles. "It's really five different stories and one of them is about Welles and his company. It's ultimately about freedom of expression and about the courage it takes to embrace your freedom."
Has he anyone on mind to play Welles? "That's probably going to be the hardest part to cast," he says. "Welles was only 20 years old at the time. He had just come from Ireland where he told everyone `I'm the famous actor from America' and when he came back he told everyone `I'm the famous actor from Ireland'!"
TIM Robbins's finest work to date as an actor remains his sensitive and engaging portrayal of Andy, the young banker convicted of murdering his wife and her lover and sentenced to life in prison, where he's befriended by an older and wiser inmate (memorably played by Morgan Freeman), in The Shawshank Redemption, which is showing on Channel 4 tomorrow night.
"Something about that movie has really touched so many people in a profound way," says Robbins. "You know it when you get stopped in the street and people want to talk to you about it. I think it's because it's a movie
which men with a certain masculine identity can relate to and understand that there can be a friendship and love between two men - and it's not sexual, or two guys with guns.
"It's a romantic connection and it's something we would all love to see, I think. In any other prison movie there would be a breakout or a violent altercation with a guard and the character would prove himself in the story by fighting. There would be a series of abuses and then he finally stands up and kicks ass. There was none of that in Shawshank. "The other reason why it touched a nerve, I think, is that it's a movie about freedom and how we all to some extent have built walls around ourselves. And freedom is in the mind. A lot of people are enslaved in the free world - in jobs they don't like, in relationships they're not happy with. What Andy is able to do in the movie is create the freedom in his mind. That notion is a really important one for people to accept."
As for movies touching a nerve, one which certainly caused consternation in Hollywood was Robert Altman's The Player in which Tim Robbins headed the stellar cast as the smooth, unscrupulous executive, Griffin Mill. Did Robbins base his character on anyone in particular? "It was a composite," he says, "but there was one guy, a top executive in town, who recognised himself in it and was so proud of it he went around bragging that he was the model for my character."
If he were to make The Player today Robbins says he would concentrate on what he perceives as "the real scam in Hollywood today" - independent movies. "The scam is they're not independent movies at all," he says, warming to the subject. "Almost all those companies are now owned by the Hollywood studios - little boutique companies owned by major multi-national corporations.
"I fear what's happening more and more with certain studios is they're getting out of the business of producing thematic films. They're giving them to their little production companies, calling them independent films and not paying anyone. You get actors to work for you real cheap if it's an independent film, but not if it's a studio film. So how do you not pay those actors? You create these little independent companies. Big scam!"
Robbins is dismayed by the media coverage accorded Hollywood stars such as Bruce Willis and Sylvester Stallone when they worked for a fraction of their usual fees on, respectively, Pulp Fiction and Copland. "It's like they're some kind of heroes," he says. "I resent that because at the heart of it is a very cynical statement. It's basically saying, `If it's good, if it's quality, it's not worth money; if it's quality, no one will see it'. It's just being so cynical and disrespectful and hateful of the audience. It's saying that the only thing worth paying any money to see is something big and mindless and loud, as if that's the only thing people want.
"I'm fine, I'm well set-up and I've got a healthy career. What worries me is that so many midlevel actors are being screwed by that scam. They're giving their best, but not getting paid for it. And look at some of the movies that are coming out calling themselves independent. What's so new or daring about The Truth About Cats & Dogs?
"On the good side, they get a lot of new directors started. As a new director I was very happy to get $4 million to make Bob Roberts. But I think as you progress in your career you have to be responsible to what got you there. What got me where I am is help from other actors, but now I'm about to do my third movie as a director, I'm not asking actors to work for scale. There would be something wrong with that."
Nothing To Lose is released next Friday.