He's sitting under a sun umbrella on a patio at the edge of a shimmering Lake Maggiore in Switzerland. He's with his third wife, Colombian-born Stella Arroyave, who stars in his directorial debut Slipstream, which received an openair screening before an audience of 7,000 people in the Piazza Grande at Locarno Film Festival the previous night. Although he lives in Malibu, he's uncomfortable in the heat. "I think we'll move inside, " he says. So we do.

It's nearly 40 years since he made his screen debut as Richard I in The Lion in Winter, which was filmed in Ireland. "Ah, Dublin's fair city, " he says.

"Haven't been there for some years. You want to go there, don't you?" he adds, putting his hand on his wife's hand.

"You have to understand, I don't take it all seriously, " he says "When I was making Proof a couple of years ago, I was pretty tired. It was very depressing. It rained outside day in day out.

Everyone was exhausted. Afterwards I thought I've had enough of this. Then we went off to New Zealand to do The World's Fastest Indian and I was riding a motorcycle and sitting in a trailer in the middle of a field in the rain every day. Stella said I don't think this is a good life for you any more. So I said, no."

He'd already started writing Slipstream, a stream-ofconsciousness screenplay about a man caught in a state of confusion where time is falling back on itself and he remembers his own future. "I didn't have any expectations of it. It's not good to have huge expectations of anything or you're always going to be disappointed. So I just wrote it as an experiment. I'd no idea where it was going. There was no seeming logic to it. I'd never written anything before. I let it more or less write itself. And here we are."

Hopkins plays the partly autobiographical role of screenwriter Felix Bonhoffer, whose life begins to implode during the filming of a murder thriller in the middle of the Mojave desert. It's a film within a film in which characters in the movie begin to appear in Felix's life, and vice versa, driving him to a point where he loses all contact with reality. "I see the world that way. I've experienced that crisis." There was a time in the early 1970s when his drinking had become such a problem he could no longer work. "My last days of complete craziness before I got my act together were in the Palm Springs desert."

After coming to in Arizona with no idea how he got there, he finally gave up drink.

"Slipstream isn't really about that but it is informed by the state of my mind. The desert symbolically is the place you find your spiritual truth, the 40 days in the wilderness thing. Bonhoffer has landed in some sort of strange but real world. I've experienced that sort of limbo. . .So it's all very personal."

Whether as cannibalistic serial killer Hannibal Lector in The Silence of the Lambs or the reticent man-servant in The Remains of the Day, Hopkins exudes on the screen a sense of repressed emotion about to erupt. "Tony is permanently in the grip of feelings he cannot control, " says playwright David Hare, whose 1985 play Pravda gave Hopkins one of his greatest stage roles.

"He doesn't let you see anything that's going on inside. But he looks at you as though he knew everything."

With Slipstream, Hopkins lifts his guard just a little, perhaps because he has nothing to lose any more. "I just wanted to experiment with images that would be disturbing. I wanted to confuse everyone. I'm a rebel. I have a very light-hearted approach to everything. I watch actors who take themselves very seriously. And the film industry takes itself very seriously. And I thought I just want to throw a wrench into the works and do something so unconventional, not for its own sake but simply because I'm interested in the notion of the subconscious mind or the dream world and the strange arbitrary nature of life itself. I'm coming to the conclusion in my late years that all of life is an illusion because I've had experiences in my life that have quite stunned me by the synchronicity of everything. That's what I wanted to tap into."

Watching Slipstream has the surreal sensation of being in a David Lynch movie. Although Hopkins has been an admirer of Lynch since he played the doctor who befriends the hideously deformed John Hurt in The Elephant Man, he says this hasn't really been an influence. "If anyone inspired me it's Oliver Stone. But this is my movie. It comes out of my own experiences."

Apart from a television version of Uncle Vanya, Hopkins has never directed before. "It's wonderful to be ignorant. I'd a really fine editor . . . Michael Miller . . . who'd worked with Woody Allen, to help me. I said you'll have to warn me if I'm stepping out of line. No, let's go for it, he said. I said I want to do something outrageous and off the wall. Have no fear, he said. And I didn't. What's to be afraid of? It's only a film. Are they going to shoot you? People may not like it.

That's not my problem. Once you're free of fear, you're virtually free to do anything within human limitations."

On the third day of shooting he tore his achilles tendon in his right leg. "They put me in a cast.

I had to be in a wheelchair." Stella laughs and puts her hand on his leg. "It didn't stop him, " she says.

"Well, I've got a lot of energy, " he says. "I'm very strong. I don't believe in being ill. You can yield very easily if you choose to. If you walk around being miserable, you're going to be ill. So I said, screw it."

Christian Slater, who plays the egotistical lead actor who keeps changing the script, joins us for a few moments. "Tony was in the wheelchair for a lot of the stuff we were filming, " he says. "So it made him much more vulnerable and sweeter. When he'd get excited about a particular scene or shot he would jump out of the chair with great excitement and start dancing around."

As a boy in Port Talbot . . . he was known as Mad Hopkins at school because of his dyslexia . . .Hopkins thought of being a musician or a painter. Meeting local hero Richard Burton when he was 15 prompted him to try acting. But he remains an accomplished pianist. He's been composing music all his life just for pleasure. On the first day of shooting in the desert he played some of it on speakers. "Just to put people in the mood, " he says.

Producer Robert Katz suggested that he write the music for the movie. "So okay, I did it, " he says.

"I asked a musician who was working with me, is this okay? You're breaking all the rules, he said, I wish I could break the rules like you. He was stuck in academia. But I envy that. I never had any training. I don't have structure. That's why the film doesn't have any structure. I don't have any structure in my life either. Because finally there's no structure in anything we do. If you try to structure your life, you're dead."

That's why when he first followed Richard Burton onto the stage, becoming an overnight sensation standing in for Laurence Olivier in Strindberg's The Dance Of Death . . . "he walked away with the part of Edgar like a cat with a mouse between his teeth, " marvelled Olivier . . . he never really felt it was where he belonged. "The National Theatre was very structured, " he says. "I found it so boring, so tiresome, all that repetition. How many times can you see Hamlet? Who cares?

I wanted to break away from that, break out on my own. I looked to James Dean and Marlon Brando and in later years Klaus Kinski. That's what I love.

But I don't go wrecking hotels and destroying things. I like to use that kind of energy in a creative way. The British are great at saying you can't do this, you can't do that. But why not?"

Slipstream is spiced with fleeting references to his life, to Nixon (whom he portrayed in the Oliver Stone biopic: "Nixon had just resigned as president when I first came to the US in 1973") and to James Dean ("I started as an actor the year he was killed").

Like Felix Bonhoffer, there have been times when he has blacked out. "Usually through stress or overwork, " he says.

"Making a movie with Alec Baldwin, I suffered hypothermia in a freezing lake and had amnesia for maybe five hours. It wasn't severe but was enough to really scare me. I can't describe it but you lose grip of time. Time seems to slip away from you. You don't know where you are. That's happened three or four times in the past 30 years, like when I was doing The Mark of Zorro in Mexico, at 8000 feet. It's not lifethreatening, but it's pretty devastating."

Does he fear death? "At three o'clock in the morning, perhaps. When you get to a certain point, time goes by fast. We're all getting there. We're all in the same coach heading to the same destination. When I was writing Slipstream I realised that there's no one else around in my family. That makes you think. But I don't worry about it. I think it's the underlying hidden anxiety that is in every human being. There's nothing you can do about it. Life is a terminal condition."