大象传媒

Will you be doing any more stand-up? If so, will it include some dates in England? Laura Norris

If I do do a full tour, I'd have to come to Dublin and to London. I just haven't had the chance to clear the full schedule. To do it in the States, I'm going to need about six months on tour. I have two or three charity gigs per year, but at some point I'd like to do it. I just haven't had the time.

You're one of the few people whose credibility has been enhanced by an advertising campaign (for Holsten Pils). Would you do it again? Jennifer Gaines

I certainly would. I did a campaign for Nike in the States, I did the Holsten Pils in England, and I still do Quaker State in the States. My deal was that I have to use and like the product. And if they ain't going to be funny, I'm not going to do them. I think they were all funny but the Holsten Pils ones were the best, especially the one where I killed the guy over the beer. I couldn't believe they were going to let me do it. I really like doing commercials a lot.

Why do you think comedies do badly at the Oscars? Mark Elshaw

It's snobbery. The only guy who's really won it is Woody Allen with Annie Hall, which is his most commercial film. The only comedies that get nominated now are the animated ones. They've created their own category for that. What they need to do is have a Best Comedy Film category. It's astonishing some of the films that don't get nominated. The fact that There's Something About Mary and Dumb and Dumber never get nominated is amazing. Dumb and Dumber made me laugh my balls off. Basically Ice Age and Shrek are great films, because they're f* funny. They're for kids but you and me can go and laugh our asses off. I'm one of the Academy members so I get to vote. Some of the stuff I get to see, I go, "What is so f** great about this?" If you have a great actor playing a retard, you can be pretty certain they'll get nominated.

Having an Irish mother who seemed to find every conceivable meal to be made up of cabbage, bacon and potatoes, what food did your parents give you which you liked? Craig Penton

I was fed basically the same thing. An Irish friend of mine went back to visit his mother. She cooked him and his brother dinner. His brother turned to him when he was eating, and said, "This tastes like s***", and he replied, "You can taste it?" That sums it up for me. There is no Irish cuisine. It's penance, it's why people leave Ireland.

You seem to give a very bad impression of the Irish when you do stand-up. Do you feel guilty about any of the material you ever do, or do you think, What the hell - if it's funny, I'll go with it? Helen Faherty

I never feel guilty, because it's all true! So whether it paints us as good or bad is not my fault. I'm just telling the truth.

Has your viewpoint changed with respect to No Cure For Cancer? Is is still a case of puffing till you drop? Bob Blainey

I still smoke, yeah. It's funny, I was talking about this to somebody else. Because it's the tenth anniversary of the 'No Cure for Cancer' tour, they were running it like crazy on American television. All these 15-year-old kids who wouldn't have seen the show first time round, are coming up to me on the street. Even here at the hotel in London, while I was checking in, some British kid came up to me, and started quoting the lines to me from No Cure For Cancer, and I thought, wow, people still find it funny. I don't remember most of it. I remember the A**hole song, but the rest of it went straight out of my head. But it's nice to know the rest of it has some staying power.

Is there any chance that a decent DVD of Hostile Hostages will get a release? If so, how about a commentary featuring yourself and Glynis Johns in character? Willy Kennedy

There is one available. I didn't do the commentary thing - we were meant to do it, but Ted Demme the director died about a year and half ago, before we were able to do it. I think that everybody felt they could't go back and do it without Teddy. They ended up just putting some outtakes on it and stuff like that.

When you were making Wag The Dog, did you ever imagine it would be referred to so much in the future, specifically with the current war in Iraq? Jason Cross

There was a lot of improvisation involved in making that movie. The director Barry Levinson was adamant that we kept it as real as possible, based on this fake reality that we were creating. I was talking to Barry recently and he said to me, "Isn't it weird how much of the stuff we talked about in that movie applies to real life?" We didn't set out to be prophets. I think it's funnier today than when it came out in some ways. It did well in the States because Clinton got caught with Monica Lewinsky right when it came out, and he bombed Afghanistan and Sudan. Saddam Hussein - and this was the only good thing he ever did in my opinion - ran a bootleg copy of Wag The Dog on TV in Iraq for 24 hours in a row!.

In a lot of your stand-up shows you mention the state of the music industry and its artists. What do you think of today's music, and what do you listen to yourself? Naveed Ashraf

I have a 13-year-old son who's a drummer, so in the CD player in my truck at home I have The Strokes, the new Radiohead album, The Vines, which I like a lot, and The Afghan Whigs album. So I'm pretty up to date. The Strokes were in the audience for a show I produced recently, and my son got to meet them. It would have been like my dad introducing me to the Rolling Stones.

How would you describe your film career? Has it gone the way you planned?Chris Monkhouse

You can't really plan anything in life. You can plan certain projects, say when you're putting together a smaller, difficult film, you might agree to do a big-budget movie so you can do the smaller thing. That's about as far ahead as you can plan. Wag The Dog happened because Barry Levinson was making a huge movie with Dustin Hoffman and Sharon Stone called Sphere. They were $75 million into it, and they had this huge special effects problem, which they had to take two months off to deal with. Barry shut the production down, De Niro said to him, "You've got two months off. Why don't we shoot this Wag The Dog script? We'll do it in 28 days." And that's how it happened. Trying to plan stuff is impossible.

How did you get involved with Double Whammy? Tyrone Davies

Tom DiCillo had directed the video of the A**hole song for MTV. I really like him and I did a cameo for him in the movie The Real Blonde. He wrote the script for Double Whammy, and I said, "Let's do it." I would do it again tomorrow, as I really like working with him. My whole thing now about making movies, except for a few pet projects in my own back pocket, is that when somebody offers me a movie, I don't like to leave New York. I don't like to work long hours, I don't like to work with people I'm not going to have a good time with. Every movie is a throw of the dice, you don't know how it's going to come out. I'd rather go to work in some place I want to be and have a good time. If you're not going to have fun, what's the point of doing it? Sometimes you have a great time and the movie sucks, sometimes you have a great time and the movie's good. I'd rather that either way, than hating the people I'm working with, earning a s***load of money and being in Utah for 17 weeks, and getting nominated for an Oscar. Life's too short.

What was it like having Elizabeth Hurley straightening out your back on the chiropractor's table in Double Whammy? Gillian Jones

I've gotta give her credit. She learned how to do it all. I took her to this chiropractor who used to work on Tom DiCillo's back, who was located on the Upper West Side, which is where I live. At the beginning she didn't know f*** all about being a chiropractor. She wanted me to be on the table so she could practise all the stuff on me. By the time we got to filming she could crack my neck and my hip the way she does in the movie at a moment's notice, and she could do it pretty well.

Do you think people will perceive you differently now you've played a romantic lead? Joanne Kibble

That's not really my cup of tea. I'm not interested in romantic comedies. I don't go to see them. God love Hugh Grant. Somebody's got to have that job, and he does it really well. It bores the s*** out of me. As does playing the good guy. I'd much prefer to play the bad guy. It's fun. You get the best scenes. Double Whammy is a rare occasion where the role of the good guy or the lead was still fun. I got to the bit in the script when my character, Ray Pluto, starts smoking hash and he watches the videos of the cheerleaders jumping up and down, and I thought, This is great. And I liked the way he discovers information accidentally.

What's the best movie you've made so far, and who is the best actor you've worked with in your career? Martyn King

I know The Ref is still a big favourite. It's people's favourite anti-Christmas movie. To be honest with you, the reason I became an actor was when I saw Mean Streets. That was the first time that I saw guys from my own neighbourhood in a movie. I'd never heard guys in the movies talk like that. Who were these guys? Maybe I could do that. So De Niro was always my favourite guy in terms of growing up and wanting to become an actor. Working with him on Wag The Dog - well, it's not going to get any better than that. Him and Hoffman in the same movie - forget it. Then I was working with Chris Walken on The Suicide Kings at the same time as Wag The Dog, and I was taking messages from Chris to De Niro. After that I did a film with Clint Eastwood [True Crime], and I thought, I'm done. There's nobody bigger than Clint. Unless Paul Newman decides to do a movie with me, I'm not going to work with anyone bigger than Clint Eastwood and Robert De Niro.