No one who saw The Usual Suspects will need reminding of the closing frames: a closeup of a pair of feet limping down an LA sidewalk. Then the feet speeding up. And not limping. Only in this crystallising moment do we realise not only "who did it" but what an exceptional performance we have been watching, a performance that won Kevin Spacey, the owner of those feet, an Academy Award for the geek-cum-master-criminal Verbal Kint (or was it Keyser Soze?).
We meet in a London hotel suite. The curtains are drawn against the heat and my eyes take a while to grow accustomed to the gloom. Spacey is on the phone. A brief smile (I think) and he motions me to sit. The mercury may be pushing 90 but Spacey is not a man to be taken hostage by the weather. He's dressed in black trousers, white cotton shirt, black tie, black shoes. Unsettling. Disconcerting. Even in these salubrious surroundings I cannot shrug off the sensation of reined-in menace that won this man that Oscar.
The same quality pervades Albino Alligator, his first outing as director. A psychological thriller set in a New Orleans bar after a bungled heist, its cast includes Matt Dillon, Faye Dunaway, Gary Sinese and Joe Mantegna.
For a film star, a directorial credit is often the summit of a screen career, the equivalent of a long-service medal. Yet in Hollywood terms Kevin Spacey is little more than a new boy. Until two years ago few people outside Broadway had heard of him, and then only followers of serious theatre. His credits include Ibsen, Shakespeare, Chekhov, Athol Fugard and Eugene O'Neill.
In 1991, he won a Tony for his performance in Neil Simon's Lost In Yon- kers. Slowly, film work built up (spot him in Working Girl). But the big break came in 1992 with Alan J. Pakula's Consenting Adults showcasing perfectly Spacey's talent for manipulative menace, as the salesman who breaks up Kevin Kline's marriage.
Hollywood is not good on imaginative casting, and from then on it was damaged psychos all the way. Quite different, he points out, from his roles in the theatre, where the characters he plays are usually "the moral centre of the plays and characters that are in some kind of personal crisis in trying to better themselves or better the society around them. But it just so happens that the way it's evolved is the way it's evolved." He smiles that sardonic smile that can slip so easily into a sneer.
The film that marked him out as potential director material, however, was Swimming With Sharks, in which he not only starred as an exceptionally unpleasant meglomaniac studio executive, but which he also produced. A low-budget movie that crackles with wit, menace and ruthless-in-Hollywood humour, it rapidly achieved cult status.
Although written and directed by George Huang, Swimming With Sharks was very much Spacey's baby. "It was one of the damned funniest things I'd ever read, a great examination of ambition in a way I had not seen before - with the possible exception of The Player - and I just thought this is a movie I want to be involved in: this is a movie that's worth doing. So we made the movie in 18 days. Shot it for under $1 million."
Impressive by anybody's standards. Verging on the miraculous by Hollywood's. "It can be done," he tells me, switching to hell-fire-preacher mode. "We shot Albino in 34 days. The whole film. So that was pretty fast as well, considering that when I do a larger movie like LA Confidential, or A Time To Kill or Midnight In The Garden Of Good And Evil, which is a film I just did with Clint Eastwood, these films have pretty lengthy schedules of 10 weeks or more. In some cases much more.
"I think there's something great about only having a certain amount of time to do a film. You become resourceful in a way that you perhaps wouldn't if you just had more money and more time."
He's clearly a hard taskmaster and doesn't believe in wasting either of these resources. With the exception of former Brat Packer Matt Dillon, Spacey's cast on Albino Alligator is all experienced theatre actors, he says. "It was very important for me to create a working environment in which there was a certain ethic at work about being on time, about being ready, about . . . about being prepared. Knowing the dialogue" - qualities he has found lacking among movie actors.
`I also wanted in a big way to support Matt. I knew that I needed to surround him with enormously strong actors. Even though it's primarily an ensemble, it's really his journey and I was asking him to play a character that he had never quite played before."
He describes Dillon's character as "a kind of ambiguous nature of a character you can't quite get your hands on. He kind of keeps you off-balance for the whole film.
"The film had in its nature a certain theatricality: one set, real time," he explains. "I knew that I wanted to bring to it what I think is the best process of theatre, which is rehearse it like a play and then to shoot it in sequence. I felt that would be valuable not just for the actors but for me as well, because it was my first time out and I wasn't saddling myself with a great number of logistical problems.
"The trick was convincing my producers to have the set built, pre-lit and pre-dressed for six days and not shoot." For 10 days he rehearsed one-to-one. "When I thought we were all in the same movie I brought them together and we did a read-through, which wasn't great. But okay."
Then on to the set - the bar - for six days of blocking and fine-tuning. Kevin Spacey is an intensely private man. No Hollywood gossip adheres to him, unless you count him taking his mother to the Oscars. This afternoon's performance (film-maker with a mission to an audience of one) is like Albino Alligator itself - "dialogue heavy".
Words are his armour and his armoury. He talks without drawing breath about the techniques he used to choreograph the film, to build on the claustrophobia inherent in a one-room movie yet at the same time to maximise movement within it.
Before shooting began he telephoned Sidney Lumet, director of Twelve Angry Men, for advice. "He, very clever man that he is, actually built the walls of that jury room on wheels. And he literally over the course of the film is bringing the walls in. You don't know, but what's happening to you psychologically is that the room is getting smaller. Now I didn't have the money or the time to build a set like that. So we made the reverse decision.
"We said, all right, let's build a bar big enough to get our equipment in, to be able to build tracks, to be able to do 360s, to be able to do moving shots without having to take the walls out."
But everything costs, and Spacey's obsession with getting it perfect on a pittance nearly cost him the crew. "A week and a half into shooting my script supervisor took me outside and said `You don't know how difficult these shots are that you're asking them to do. You've never directed a movie and you are asking for very difficult shots. They all signed on because they believe in you but you're going to lose them if you don't do something.' And it was a really great moment for me to realise that I didn't know. I would just say, it's just not right. It's got to feel natural. I don't want to see the mechanics of it. So I went and said, `look guys maybe I need to take a little chill pill'. And we just had this incredible experience and they worked so hard and satisfied so many of my dreams."
Clint Eastwood and Robert Redford have shown that great actors can make great directors. And Spacey has no intention of giving up the day-job. He's not even prepared to give up theatre: later this year he will be in London to play in O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh. But Mr Sinister's days are definitely over.
"I'm trying to make a little bit of a shift in the kind of characters that I play for the simple reason that I don't want audiences to become bored by showing up and continuing to do the same stuff or do lesser films that have lesser scripts but I am sort of exploring the same territory. I am now beginning to try to make a turn toward playing characters which are much more vulnerable, much closer to who I am, much closer to what I do in the theatre."
The shift has already begun, he says, with LA Confidential, a James Ellroy adaptation in which he plays a "shady but basically okay" private eye, followed by Midnight In The Garden Of Good And Evil, a real-life murder case. ("My character is very complex and very rich and yet I think very vulnerable, and ultimately audiences will make up their minds about his guilt or innocence.")
"I feel you have to do it gradually, because audiences as well as critics tend to like the way they discovered you and if you try to do the big switcheroo they'll generally laugh you off the screen. It's not that I want to play a romantic role in such and such a movie, but I would like to be able to find certain levels of complexity in that kind of character. If I was able to find a great Preston Sturges comedy I'd be there in a flash and not miss a heartbeat doing it."
Albino Alligator opens in Ireland on Friday