Crash landing

There is a quiet intensity that hovers around Matt Dillon, even when he seems to be at his most relaxed, lying across a sofa in Galway's Harbour Hotel as he talks in a low drawl. Yet Dillon feels perfectly at home in the west of Ireland's renowned party town where he was guest of honour at last month's Galway Film Festival.

It's mainly because he is, as he says, 'of pure thoroughbred Irish Catholic stock we go back a few generations.' He was born in February 1964, the second of six children, to Mary Ellen and Paul Dillon, a stockbroker, in New Rochelle, New York.

His black wardrobe of jeans, jacket and T-shirt complement the dark features and heavy brooding brow, the face a little fuller compared with the one we remember from his callow youth in the early Eighties, when he was cast as the thug next door in films such as The Outsiders and Rumble Fish. And, despite his earnest answers, he still has the air of the goofy, yet potentially dangerous guy in class.

Since his days as a teen idol, the 41-year-old actor has had a habit of disappearing off the movie radar. But 2005 is proving to be the year of Dillon's full-blown renaissance. We may have witnessed a few old, reconstructed faces resurfacing this year in particular Mickey Rourke (who, ironically, co-starred with Dillon in 1983's Rumble Fish) in Sin City but Dillon can easily stake his claim as this year's comeback king with three wildly differing high-profile films.

It's doubtful that any screen actor has made such an eclectic series of choices in quick succession, including, to the consternation of some fans and critics, his enjoyable panto villain race-car driver in Herbie: Fully Loaded.

But it is as a racist Los Angeles cop in Paul Haggis's Crash and, later this year, as the reprobate in Charles Bukowski's Factotum, that he comes into his own.

'I'm drawn to play characters who have an edge,' says Dillon.

'Drama is conflict and characters with a dark side are often more interesting and very wilful. That's what I look for. But I try to be as versatile as I can.' In Crash, a collection of disparate characters connect and collide over two days in the sprawling ethnic melting pot of Los Angeles.

In a film that is essentially about race and prejudice, Dillon plays Sergeant Ryan, an LAPD cop who violently harasses a black Hollywood director (Terrence Dashon) and his wife (Thandie Newton). It's a challenging role that elicits little sympathy.

Among a blue-chip cast, including Sandra Bullock, Don Cheadle, Thandie Newton and Brendan Fraser, Dillon stands out as the furious centrifugal force at the centre of a dextrous, multi-layered drama. One of most mature and socially realistic US films of the year, Crash has performed surprisingly well in a summer box office crammed with comic-book blockbusters.

'This guy is an out-and-out racist, and his actions are inexcusable,' says Dillon. 'But the film is really about Los Angeles, about how spread out it is, how segregated people are.

When I read the script I thought it was accurate and courageous. And I wanted to do it because I knew Paul Haggis is a dynamite writer.' Dillon more than holds his own as the hateful, but truthful, figure of the racist in authority and based his character on firsthand experiences when he first arrived in Hollywood.

'I've experienced the aggressive tactics of the LAPD myself,' says Dillon.

'When I was 14, I was arrested for jay walking, they took me down for nothing. So when I read Crash, I thought, OK, here's payback time let's shed some light on what these people are really like. But he's not a two-dimensional bad guy.' Also, when he was 14, Dillon was talentspotted, in time-honoured Hollywood tradition, while dodging classes at junior high school and flown to LA to make his screen debut as a swaggering school bully in Over The Edge. But his breakthrough came with The Outsiders and Rumble Fish. Both made in 1983, and directed by Francis Ford Coppola, the teen-gang films served as the communal launch pad for a remarkable collection of newtalent, including Tom Cruise, Rob Lowe, Mickey Rourke and Patrick Swayze.

But, as the others raced towards superstardom or self- destruction, Dillon slipped into inferior rom-com efforts. 'I never was much of a Brat Pack kind of guy, I never thought of myself as that,' he says. 'I was in New York most of the time and I never hung out with those guys in LA. I only stayed friends with some of the guys from that time.' It wasn't until 1989when he appeared in Gus Van Sant's Drugstore Cowboy, as a junkie, that he recovered his credibility. His role as a vagrant in 1993's The Saint Of Fort Washington established him as a maturing actor and, in 1995's To Die For, he unveiled a true comedic talent playing Nicole Kidman's disastrously dim husband.

As the sleazy private detective in There's Something About Mary and as a preening Hollywood action hero in In Out, he revealed the rare ability to satirise himself and his precious Hollywood fraternity with unpretentious glee.

His ambitions, however, are not restricted to acting, having co- written, directed and starred in City Of Ghosts, set in Cambodia and co-starring Gerard Depardieu and James Caan, which was given a limited release in 2002 but earned him plaudits for an impressive directorial debut.

'Now I want to throw my hat in the ring as director,' says Dillon.

'Directing City Of Ghosts was the highlight of my career.

It was something I've been thinking about since 1983, when I was dissatisfied with a lot of the scripts that had been sent to me, and I thought I could do something a lot better. I've been developing a couple of projects recently. But it takes a while and I don't mess with fate. Things will happen when the time is right.' Crash opens Fri 12 Aug. Herbie: Fully Loaded is on general release now.

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