When I was told I was going to interview Bob Hoskins, I shrugged it off at first, thinking it would be a piece of cake. Then I got to thinking about his career and how many wonderful performances he's given. There were the terrific ones in British TV series: the offbeat sheet music salesman in Pennies From Heaven and the aspiring filmmaker in Flickers. And his film roles: the gangster in The Long Good Friday and his Oscar-nominated role as a two-bit hood chauffeuring a call girl and falling in love with her in Mona Lisa. Then I remembered his screenwriter in Sweet Liberty, the detective in the live action-animation combo Who Framed Roger Rabbit and on and on. I came to realize just how varied his career was; this man has seemingly done everything, from playing Americans to Russians to Brits. And I started to get nervous.

Well, it was all for naught. Meeting Bob Hoskins proved to be an unexpected pleasure. Thinner and looking younger than his 55 years, he was gracious and engaging. Promoting his new film TwentyFourSeven, in which he gives a superb performance as a man who tries to inspire and unite the disaffected youth of Nottinghamshire by forming a boxing club. It is a meaty role, written by the film's neophyte director Shane Meadows expressly for Hoskins. Meadows was to have accompanied the actor on the press junket but ill health prevented his appearance, so it was left to Hoskins to meet the press, as it were. It was a bit of a shame because after listening to the actor speak of the director, I wanted to meet him as well.

"How much do you know about Shane?" the actor asked. "Well, it's a pretty extraordinary story. That sort of project housing estate that you see in the film, that's where he comes from. He left school at 15 and most of the cast are his friends from that area, with the same background. He just took a camera out -- took a video, a high-8 on the street -- and just started making movies with his friends. Like no training. Nothing. He made about 30 of these movies. And these movies are starting to win prizes. Eventually [producer] Steve Woolley sent me a tape and said what do you think of them and I said this kid's amazing. You've really got to develop this guy. And he said we're going to back him for a full-length feature but the thing is, he's written it for you. Well, I walked into that one. Oh, great! Then they sent me the script and I was just astonished. That a kid, he must of been 21, 22 when he wrote and from his background. I was astonished at the sort of compassion and the insight and the poetry. It was just amazing. And then I met him. He's 5 foot 6 cubic, with a shaved head. And I thought 'Hello, there's my boy!. Another cube, we stick together.'"

The film clearly left its mark on Hoskins, who has also directed two features. "I was fascinated with the way Shane put things together. I learned more from him than he has from me. Much more." And the actor went on to explain how the director elicited such performances from the cast: "There was an awful lot of it improvised. Shane would encourage it. Most of the guys in the film were Shane's friends from the streets of Nottingham and what you see onscreen is what they are of. And you start any sort of like fancy footwork or clever acting and 'what are you doing?' If it wasn't coming from the heart, no one was listening. " He went on to describe how they coalesced into an ensemble: "We had a week's rehearsal before we started [shooting] but we didn't rehearse anything. What we did, we took over a cinema and all the cast were there and what we would do is in character, you would go up in front of the rest of the cast and they would question you on your character, your background, your motivations, so you had to create a life, you had to create a history . . . everybody was a part of that history so by the time we got on the set, we all knew where we were, where we were coming from, who we were. It was extraordinary. We were a community. We were a family. In Shane's way, he actually imposed that on us. He made us create a history."

When asked if he played a similar role off-screen [as mentor to these relative novices], Hoskins replied, "What was wonderful for me was that fact that I was terrified when I went up there. I thought they were going to see me as this right old fogey. But they didn't. They weren't impressed with me and they didn't try and impress me. I was sort of one of the chaps. And I'll tell you at my age, when you realize you've still got street cred[ibility] and you run with a gang, that does your ego a hell of a lot of good."

I asked him how the period of the film's story (set during the early 1990s) had differed from when he was a young man and the eloquent actor explained, "When we came out of the war, we were a broken country, but we had a lot of spirit because we'd won, we'd beaten them. Then there was health care. There was education. People were rebuilding the country and building houses and stuff. There was hope and optimism and then we got through the 50s and at the end of the 50s, they scrapped the call-up, you know they didn't call up the boys to be soldiers. For the first time in centuries, there were young men on the streets of 18 years of age with money in their pockets and rock-and-roll took off and the only thing you had to worry about then was sort of getting you girl pregnant and then they brought out the Pill. Talk about opening Pandora's Box, they threw the lid away. I think that could happen again in England, but let's face it, the kids have got so much to face now, so much to put up with. AIDS, can you imagine? Drugs, crack, all that rubbish. It's universal now. Everywhere you go there's -- you see kids on the street, ten years old sniffing glue out of paper bags. Oh, give me a break. You're little life is so bad that you have to get out of it this way."

So what does he see as the message of TwentyFourSeven?

"It's hopeful. I think the film is about control. About taking control of your life. Having self-control. I think by the end of the movie, you see that they have taken control of their lives."

Before we parted, the discussion turned to the current state of British films. Again, Hoskins proved opinionated. "As an investment now, an English film is not a bad investment. Before, you think it was just throwing money away. There's room in this business for everyone. There's a lot of culture in England that hasn't been allowed to get through for about 20 years. Now it's coming through. I'm afraid you're going to get quite a lot of this. We'll go back to period pieces after a while . . . I think for a while though we're going to get a lot of things about deprivation. Because there's more encouragement and there's more chance of actually doing an independent film. Opportunities for young people to make movies is better and a lot of these young people come from these kind of backgrounds so they want to do films about their own lives. "

Coming up for the actor is a leading role opposite Jessica Lange and Elisabeth Shue in Cousin Bette, the based-on-fact role of an 18th Century sea captain who sets sail for the Arctic in An Inch Over the Horizon and a role as a porno director in the comedy Live Virgin. TwentyFourSeven opens in limited release on April 15, 1998.

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