He became a star with Easy Rider and has stayed at the top for over 30 years, winning Oscars for his extraordinary turns in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest and As Good As It Gets. In Something's Gotta Give he satirises his own image, as his young-lady-loving gadabout falls for the more 'mature' Diane Keaton. Jack The Lad tells BBCi FILMS about women, work and voting for himself...

The tabloid image of you suggests you have a lot of elements in common with your character Harry Sanborn. Is that something you recognise?

I don't know about the tabloids, but most characters, I always say, are 85% synonymous, no matter who you're playing. I talked to Nancy Meyers about the script while she was writing and I guess it's got some good pieces of what my life has been like.

How did it feel to be tackling issues of age on screen?

Well, I've been walking pretty slow up stairs for a while, actually. You know, whenever you do a movie that's got a heart attack, a car wreck... There's something superstitious about actors. Every time I had heartburn I thought it was all over.

Do you think Hollywood is in good health these days?

Most of it is about distribution. I'm from the generation who through the 60s to the 70s, because of the distribution of foreign film, we expected to see a masterpiece every week. And we did. It was a phenomenal time. And it's simply not distributed any more.

There's a lot of great fallacies in the movie business. The so-called great unproduced script: that doesn't exist. "They don't want to make good pictures". They do. In fact, as I imagine the head of a studio's job, there are always three or four pictures every year that he'd like to make. And then he has to fill out the program with the rest, which are all pretty much hustled movies. These myths seem to make us want to generalise about the heath of the industry. As long as it's everybody's favourite job, the movie business will do fine.

You once, famously, said you got into films to meet girls. At what stage in your career did you realise you had a gift for acting?

Well, I guess long before anybody else did! I always felt good at it, even before I started working in classes and so forth. I thought there was going to be other things I was gonna do, and then I just kind of got nudged into it and liked it immediately. Still like it.

About Schmidt and Something's Gotta Give show a vulnerability that you haven't necessarily shown before. Did that surprise you about your own performance?

I always like to be surprised. The way that September 11th affected me was I just said, "I don't have much to say about these kinds of things: I want to do comedies only now. I don't want to depress anybody. I don't want to challenge their morality - like in other times in my work." I just decided, I'm going to learn about comedy. I'm going over there to the clowns where I belong.

Other than that, you get a good script or a good opportunity and that's what dictates the choice of what you do. I saw early on that there's no real way to exhaust the possibilities of what you can explore. It's what I like about acting. There's no past or future about it. You don't get credit for your last performance. It doesn't necessarily help you getting your next job. You can't really exhaust the varieties of human behaviour. And that's what I find the most fun about doing the job. When you study acting it's really life study.

Is it true that when you were Oscar-nominated for About Schmidt you actually encouraged people to vote for Adrien Brody?

Absolutely not! When I was a kid they had a painting contest and it was at my local diary where I went and bought my ice cream, and when you bought you voted. And as an idealistic child I didn't vote for my own painting, and lost this thing by one vote. At my own dairy. And at that moment I vowed I would never vote for anyone else but myself in any contest I was in!