Voyage around Mr Big

Michael Crichton is big. Big in books, big in movies, big in television, big in person. At six feet, nine inches, in his crisp white shirt and conservative tie, he looks like the Mormon on whom you wouldn't dare shut your front door, an impression reinforced by his youthful appearance - he's 56 but looks at least 10 years younger. And size matters.

At best, his prose could be politely described as functional, and it's been remarked that, in 30 years of novel-writing, he has yet to create a believable, three-dimensional character, but, as someone in one of his technology-driven thrillers might point out, you can't argue with the numbers.

In a 1998 survey of the word's wealthiest entertainers, Forbes magazine put Crichton at number seven. He is the only individual ever to see his creations simultaneously top those three indices of American popular taste: the New York Times best-seller lists, the movie box office charts and the Nielsen TV ratings. More than 100 million copies of his books have been published, and the movies based on them have grossed well over a billion dollars.

Almost as a side thought, his concept for a fast-moving drama set in a Chicago hospital (an idea in gestation since his own days as a promising student at Harvard Medical School in the 1960s) became ER, the most successful TV series of the 1990s. As if that weren't enough, he was a successful director himself in the 1970s, with such films as the dystopian theme-park chiller Westworld and the medical conspiracy drama, Coma.

Other sidelines include writing a biography of the painter Jasper Johns and developing his own range of software for producing and budgeting films. This man, wry and slightly diffident as he folds his basketball players' frame over a chair that - like most chairs - is a little too small for him, is the over-achiever's over-achiever.

Since his first blockbuster success, The Andromeda Strain in 1969, Crichton has specialised in technothrillers, books based on exhaustive research, and more often than not plumbing our fears of an uncertain future. Today, though, he's here to promote The 13th Warrior, the movie version of Eaters of the Dead, one of the few Crichton books not adapted for the screen within a couple of years of publication. Reading the book, you can see why.

Growing out of Crichton's fascination with the Norse epic of Beowulf, the novel, first published in 1976, re-tells the story through the eyes of a 10th-century cosmopolitan Muslim, Ahmed Ibn Fahdlan, who travels with a band of Norse warriors to their homeland to battle a nameless force which is terrorising their people. Written in a (not particularly successful) cod-medieval style, Eaters of the Dead, despite its promisingly trashy title, is a rather turgid read, and Viking epics had already been out of fashion for a while by the time it came out.

"This movie is kind of sui generis," says Crichton, who produced The 13th Warrior. "It derives from my memories of travelling to Scandinavia when I was a teenager and being deeply impressed by what I saw in the museums there. There were artefacts of incredible delicacy and subtlety, which had to be part of a highly complex culture, but that's not the impression we usually are given of the Vikings. There was a time I was interested in directing it myself, around 1978, but it just didn't happen. Then John McTiernan came to me, a few years ago, expressing an interest in turning it into a movie."

McTiernan, director of such macho, bonecrunching exercises as Die Hard and The Hunt for Red October, obviously saw the potential for some Dark Ages mayhem in Crichton's story, but The 13th Warrior, with Antonio Banderas looking rather lost in the central role, bears all the signs of a troubled production, suffering so many delays that the director's next movie, The Thomas Crown Affair, made it into cinemas first.

There have been reports that McTiernan was less than impressed by the drastic surgery performed in post-production by Crichton, and has distanced himself from the finished product. For those of us who have fond memories of such blood-and-chainmail entertainments as The Vikings, though, the movie has a certain cheesy charm, populated as it is by huge, hairy characters with names like Helfdane the Large and Hyglak the Quarrelsome who like nothing better than a spot of brainless mayhem.

"Audiences have developed an enormously high appetite for gore," says Crichton with a dry smile. "But one of the things I'm proud of with this is that it's not driven by special effects."

This seems a bit rich, coming from the man who gave us Jurassic Park, which is less a movie than a 40-minute effects extravaganza prefaced by an hour of ultra-dull plotting. But Crichton, who hasn't directed a movie in 10 years, gives the impression of not being particularly enthusiastic about the process of film-making. "I think about it a lot," he says when I ask him whether he plans to direct again. "Each time it comes up, I ask myself whether I'm willing to devote a year of my life to it, and end up saying no. But my feeling is that I will do it again at some stage. My experience of making movies has been mixed. There's something about it that drains your sense of pleasure. Everyone who works within the industry has to deal with that."

After a fallow period in the 1980s, when he seemed to have lost his connection to the popular pulse, the 1990s have been a triumphant procession for Crichton. He himself believes that he was "too far ahead" of his public for a while, and that it took the rest of us some time to catch up with his fascination with such issues as genetic engineering. In the past few years, he has aimed squarely at the nervous underbelly of America with such books as Disclosure, about sexual harassment, and Rising Sun, about fears of Japanese economic domination, both of which were turned into lucrative but uninspired movies. He denies that these choices of subject were quite as calculated as they appear. "I don't have a plan of that sort. With Rising Sun, I had just finished Jurassic Park, which we knew was going to be huge, and I just thought, now for something completely different. The Japanese were maintaining this completely closed market. The idea seemed to be that we couldn't bring it up because they were such refined and sensitive people. But I perceived it entirely as a book about the US, and so did the Japanese. There was a substantial group within Japanese society which had been wondering for a long time as to when we were going to turn around and seriously look at this.

"I have these ongoing interests, but it's true that often, after I've written a book, that those interests come to an end after a period of maybe 15 or 20 years. At the conclusion of my writing, when I take my hands off the keyboard, the rest of it has nothing to do with me, whether it finds favour or antagonism."

Crichton seems uncomfortable with any suggestion that he has a Midas touch, although he doesn't quite deny it. "But I don't know how to expand on it either. Well, I can tell you a story to illustrate what I mean. Some friends of mine were running United Artists studio, which they left to form a company called Orion Pictures. Their first movie was a hit, and everyone was very happy; their second movie was a hit, and everyone was extremely happy. Their fifth, sixth, seventh . . . eventually they had nine hits in a row, and you couldn't talk to them anymore. They knew they could do nothing wrong, and they still could do nothing wrong after the 11 failures that followed. If you have a string of successes, you'll start to feel like that. But even Spielberg has had his share of failures."

His books have often been criticised as being nothing more than blueprints for screenplays, and he certainly seems highly adept at exploiting their commercial potential for the screen, but he disagrees with the description of film as the art form of the 20th century. "I don't really believe in that. I think of narrative as something that isn't peculiar to any one medium. When I think of the main influences on narrative in the 20th century, I think of the TV commercial and the cartoon, both of them very compressed, very exaggerated. Movies are becoming more cartoon-like: there's so much digitisation nowadays, that they really are live-action cartoons.

"But I feel that it's going to move onward into some other kind of medium, because I'm very aware of the limitations of it at the moment. Film is extraordinarily good at conveying emotion, but not much good at intelligent thought. I do think that movies are stupid. My sense is that in the post-Freudian West, there's already too much reliance on the emotions, and I wonder how much the popularity of movies is due to that."

The 13th Warrior is on general release