Tinseltown's rainbow warrior

Matthew Modine may be famous for his roles in Birdy and Full Metal Jacket, but, he tells John Harris, he'd rather be known as the man who slashed Hollywood's paper consumption
Matthew Modine
Matthew Modine: 'Why don't we make double-sided scripts?' Photograph: Graeme Robertson Public domain

'I'm one of those people who thinks we rose up out of the earth and the sea," says Matthew Modine, "so to lose that connection, as so many people growing up in cities do, means you get cut off from something really important." It's Sunday afternoon, and the slightly jetlagged star of such movies as Birdy, Full Metal Jacket, Married to the Mob and - oh, yes - Cutthroat Island is making his way across the fields from Hay-on-Wye to the nearby hamlet of Clyro. The sheep, buttercups and fruity-smelling mud seem to put him in his element - though as it turns out, 47-year-old Modine's bucolic side is not as strong as it used to be. Until a couple of years ago, he and his family (wife Caridad and two children) split their time between a house in Greenwich Village and a farm in upstate New York, until a run of mishaps convinced them they should go completely urban. In 2001, Modine contracted Lyme disease - "a very debilitating, crippling thing; you get memory loss, Bell's palsy, arthritis, vision problems" - from a tick. A year later, his wife survived a 40ft fall from a rope swing into a ravine. "The next summer," he says, "we sold the house. We said, 'The country's killing us.' "

Still, in the context of what he has come here to do, the undulating meadows are a pretty good backdrop. Tomorrow, Modine will preview his just-about-finished environmental documentary, 1,000 Suns, a "global story" in which the camera wanders across the planet, seeing the ecological crisis through the eyes of children, and Modine eventually implores the corporations making money out of the problem to take stock, reinvent themselves and find ways of profiting from the possible solutions.

"If George Bush or Tony Blair is Pinocchio," he considers, "then who the hell is Geppetto? Geppetto [the woodcarver who creates the puppet-boy] has to be Big Oil, the automobile industry, Wal-Mart - the big corporations that are making huge financial choices. I splash the heads of those corporations over the film and say, 'What do you want to inherit? What do you want your legacy to be? What do you hope to gain by having all these billions of dollars? You've proven to the world that you're the most successful businessmen in the history of the world; now, here's an opportunity to take all that money, influence and intelligence, and do something with it.' "

This, to cynical British ears, might sound ever so slightly David Cameronesque. Perhaps, I suggest, he might be trying to make saints of the terminally evil.

"Oh, I don't agree," Modine says. "Effectively, I'm saying, 'You're in love with money, and this is an opportunity to make more of it.' It's like, 'Mr General Motors: stop making Hummers, and work on light railways instead.' "

Two hours in his company is something of a conversational blitz. Whereas so many actors - especially jetlagged ones - tend to treat the interview ritual with weary disdain, Modine pours out his thoughts in torrents, rushing through subjects as diverse as oceanography, vegetarianism, his admiration for London cabbies and his recent role in the blighted Old Vic production of Resurrection Blues ("difficult", but also "a tremendous experience"). Time and again, however, he returns to his treasured theme: the ethos of thinking globally and acting locally, and the flak you get for trying.

Ten years ago, for example, Modine surveyed his weekly consignment of film proposals and wondered how many trees were being unnecessarily hacked down to produce scripts that were only printed on one side of the paper. "I went to the William Morris Agency and said, 'Why don't we make double-sided scripts?' " he recalls. "And the president of the company said, 'What are you talking about? How will we read them?' I said, 'The same way you read a book.' And he goes, 'Sorry - that's the way it's always been done.'

"So I got pissed off, and I went down to the mail room, where they make the scripts. And I said, 'Look, you guys - how difficult would it be to make a double-sided script?' They said, 'Oh, it's easy.' They had this huge copying machine, and you just had to push a button. Then I was furious. We figured how much paper they used in a year. Let's say it was a million sheets: immediately, they could cut it to 500,000. And they've been doing it for more than 10 years, so they've saved five million sheets of paper. That's now become an industry standard. But what did they do to me? There were cartoons of me hugging a tree - like, 'What a fag, saving paper.' "

If his green convictions have occasionally seen him marked down as a lettuce-eating liberal, he has one item on his CV that allows him to transcend all that: his role as Private Joker, the hero of Stanley Kubrick's Vietnam meisterwerk Full Metal Jacket. It's an alter ego that he seems only too happy to periodically revive: last year, he published Full Metal Jacket Diary, a sumptuous text-and-pictures account of the vexatious year he spent making the film, and the role partly lies behind his work for a charity called the Wounded Warrior Project, and his habit of visiting injured American servicemen - as in January 2005, when he poetically split a day between disconsolately watching the second Bush inauguration and then spending time at Washington's Walter Reed Army Medical Centre.

"It makes the soldiers happy to have the guy from Full Metal Jacket come and see them," he says. "But this was completely different from any other visit I've ever done. Because they're able to get people out quick, get them on a helicopter and get them back to America, they're surviving things that in Vietnam would have killed them. You can't believe the number of kids that have no arms and no legs. I got through the place without crying, and just as I was leaving, a girl said, 'My brother just came out of surgery - would you go back and see him?' And I went back, and he was just fucked. He was on God knows what kind of drugs, and they'd just taken both his legs off above the knee. And suddenly, because they were the same age, I was looking at my son.

"The thing is," he says, "if, say, a gas station blew up, and you and I got killed, our families would probably sue for millions of dollars. The soldiers get something like $10,000 for a leg and $15,000 for an arm. It's insane. It's, 'See you. Thanks. You served your country.' "

Once Modine has finished at Hay, he's off to London where - undaunted by the Resurrection Blues experience - he's scouting for more theatre work. After that, he has to see to the promotion of three new movies, finish 1,000 Suns, and then find a place for it in either cinema or television. As we exit the fields and hit the Tarmac again, I wonder where he finds the time. His answer once again refers to that aching decision to call time on his rural dream.

"I did a debate with [author, radio host and politico] Ariana Huffington a couple of years ago," he says, "and she said, 'In a day, in a week, in a lifetime, you have a certain amount of energy, and what you choose to put your energy into will prevent you from putting energy into something else.' When she said that, I thought, 'I've got to get rid of this fucking farm.' Unless you're making a tremendous amount of money, which most of us don't, things like that prevent you from pursuing other things. And right now, they're more important".