Bruce says 'the world can wait'

I have only read three scripts that I immediately wanted to do. Breakfast Of Champions was one. I loved it because it was a great story but also because it's not about fireballs, fiery wrecks, big exploding buildings - it's about people. I loved it so much I kicked in some of my own cash to help finance this film.

It's a low-budget black comedy based on Kurt Vonnegut's chronicle of post-Vietnam malaise and twisted American dreams. The director, Alan Rudolph, and I convinced a cast of labour-of-love-struck big-name actors - including Albert Finney, Nick Nolte and Barbara Hershey - to work for scale.

I play suicidal millionaire car shark Dwayne Hoover, who becomes convinced he's surrounded by robots after reading a sci-fi novel. Really it's about a businessman who begins to question the meaning of life and his own sanity. Regular everyday American stuff, in that ferociously humorous Vonnegut style, crazy but brilliant, satirising the horrors of disposable America.

Alan originally wrote a screenplay adaptation of Vonnegut's book while apprenticing with Robert Altman in the Seventies but he lost the script, found it, rewrote it twice and 20 years later decided to make another pass at it, apparently with me in mind to play the lead - which positively blew me away.

In America it's almost as though my name is now in the Yellow Pages under the World-Saver section. It's like I have an 0800 number and people just call up as soon as there's a film where one man has to accomplish the impossible. So, courtesy of interesting films like this, I can take time off from saving the world and have some quiet moments.