Hopkins goes hell for leather

The completion of The World's Fastest Indian (which we'll see here next year), marks the end of a 30-year labour of love for Donaldson, who first had the idea for the film while making a documentary on Munro, Offerings to the God of Speed. And it marks the end of the feud.

Now Hopkins says Donaldson is the best director he's worked with, and Donaldson has returned the compliment. Indeed, the actor sitting opposite me is almost unrecognisable as the irascible star who, shortly after he became a US citizen four-and-a-half years ago, claims to have told a British journalist who asked him why he had renounced his homeland: "I'm bored of you people. Fuck off back to England!"

These days, he has renounced anger along with alcohol (he has been teetotal since 1975). "As you get older," he says, "you realise it's not worth it. When you're young, you've got the energy to do it. In your prime, you're asserting your authority. It's okay at a certain age, but after a while it becomes tiresome."

In his "prime", Hopkins was indeed fiery, awkward and frequently drunk (on white wine spritzers, vodka and, finally, tequila). This took him through two failed marriages (fathering one daughter he reportedly never sees) and a meteoric stage career which foundered when he abruptly walked off stage in the middle of a National Theatre production of Hamlet, destroying his relationship with his idol, Sir Laurence Olivier.

He has lived in the US since 1987, and married his third wife, antiques dealer Stella Arroyave, 19 years his junior, in 2003. But the new film seems to have reawakened memories of, and a new fondness for, the valleys of mid-Glamorgan in the immediate post-war years.

The real-life Burt built his bike using anything that came to hand. Such mechanical detail is the only bit of The World's Fastest Indian that had no resonance for Hopkins. He admits he's no whizzkid. "I don't understand how to add two and two," he says, which must have caused him a headache during the filming of Proof (out at the end of the year), in which he plays a mathematical genius.

He has a similar cluelessness about pistons and camshafts. "I did used to hang out in my grandfather's shed when I was a little kid," he says, harking back to the days when he was something of a withdrawn loner. "He had a lathe and I used to turn the vice and all that. Nowadays, though, I don't even know what's under the hood of a car."

Hopkins didn't actually ride the tiny, streamlined motorbike in the film, but he did get towed along at 80mph behind the camera car. And, when he crashes on the Bonneville Salt Flats, sliding along, his face millimetres above the salt, that's not a special-effects shot, that's for real.

The film has cured him of his ambition to get behind the camera. "I used to kid myself I was a director," he says. I'd think, ah, it's easy: you just point the camera and do it. But this is more exciting. Roger's the driver. He's got the car, he's got the steering wheel. I've just got to be the passenger and sit back."

Actor and director, friendship rekindled, are now trying to raise money for another joint project: a movie about Hemingway in the final years of his life, called, appropriately enough, Papa. Fidel Castro wants them to shoot it in Cuba.

Hopkins is keen, perhaps because it goes against the grain of the roles in which he is increasingly cast, but also because of Donaldson. "I've worked with a lot of top directors," he says, "but Roger's the best. He's like John Huston.

"He's tough; he's different. I like that. It shakes me out of my kind of British thing that I've done so well. That's why we're attracted to Hemingway; he was a big macho guy, fishing and hunting and all that, but a complex tragic figure, a big personality."

This, he suggests, is as good as it gets when you're 67. Never mind the Oscars. "I mean, playing a madman staring through the glass at Jodie Foster - that's interesting. But this is different; this is far more exciting."