After all those years playing the gigolo is it harder to play the cuckold this time round?

"Olivier Martinez is much better at playing that role than I ever was, so I’m very happy to hand him the gigolo mantle. In reality I actually have quite a normal life – I’ve got a wife, I’ve got kids, I’ve got a mortgage, all those things. From my character’s point of view this is a story of a man who has all these things too. So it was a role that at this point in my life I felt I could bring something to that maybe I couldn’t have done 10 or 15 years ago."

"When a scene is well written, 99% of it is right there. It just flows and if you’re an actor that’s what you do, you let yourself go with the writing. Adrian had a very clear idea from the first meeting that we had about the movie. He talked about this interesting sense of menace, which is in the scene that is something both of us had seen in it at the very beginning. In terms of the rage, you don’t start a scene like that knowing you’re going to go to that place because it stops a lot of other possibilities. Certainly I knew what was going to happen in the scene but I didn’t know exactly how it would happen.

"But I also didn’t want it to be about Olivier’s character, I wanted it to be something larger than that. I had no real animus towards him. It was much larger than that, it was a universal issue. There was a line that was in the first draft of the script that’s not in there now where his character said it was nobody’s fault here, nothing in the universe could have stopped her from coming to him. That is Edward’s rage, at the universe itself. You play by the rules but the universe has its own rules that screw you up every time. So it was important for me to keep something larger, some resonance that was accurate in the scene and not just a kind of stupid jealous revenge thing."

"I think they’re obviously much closer at the end of the film than they were at the beginning. The thing is these people lack self-knowledge about their shadow sides. They don’t know how far they can go out of control. These are two people who are like us, who go wildly out of control. We can all do that, you see that in the world constantly, in romantic situations and political situations and ethnic situations. Any kind of conflict people can get out of control. Edward and Connie understand the depths of possibilities inside them that are brought out in this film, and that self-knowledge relates to empathy for the other, which is the basis for real intimacy.

And therefore you have forgiveness, because they are able to forgive each other knowing they have it inside themselves. In a larger sense that these are people who are going to be better citizens now, ironically. They can understand other people who are out of control."

Is there a particular pattern to the sort of roles that appeal to you?

"All sorts of roles appeal to me. I keep describing it like falling in love, you can’t start a relationship unless there’s a spark in the beginning. I read a script like this and there’s a spark. Good material, two good characters, and for me the interesting one is the one I played in the picture because it was such new territory for me. And the character changes so radically, he’s surprised himself in the course of the story. That’s how I approach pretty much any project I take on. I don’t know when it happens or how it happens but I read something, I have a moment of falling in love, and a connection with it. Then it becomes a harder decision, a more intellectual choice in evaluating if it’s something I really want to spend the next year of my life maybe working on. But I’ve never gone out and said I was going to play the gigolo now, or the husband, or the fireman, or the lion tamer."

How does your Buddhist faith effect your approach to your work?

"How long do you have? Obviously your faith changes everything. To be a Buddhist is to look at your mind, and to look at your mind is to look at your emotions. Relating it to this film, there’s none of us that doesn’t have all these emotions: love, hate, ignorance, envy, jealousy, the whole thing. Some of us, because we’ve worked at it, can stop it from becoming full-blown ‘operas’ of thought and action and anything else. Hopefully at some point you can transform that energy, hatred becomes love, and that’s the path I’m working on."

Do you think audiences will be surprised to see you as the wronged husband here, and then singing and dancing in Chicago in your next role?

"Yeah, I’m sure people are going to be surprised to see me singing and tap dancing. I’ve done musicals before, but never sung in the Broadway style. It was great fun to learn how to do that, but the tap dancing was extremely painful. There were days I wanted to chainsaw my feet off!"

Diane Lane (Connie Sumner)

Is it tough doing those intimate scenes?

"We had a lot of discussions about them and as I told Olivier after we did the first love scene, my bark is a lot worse than my bite because you can have a lot of courageous talk but between action and cut a lot of other things go on. You can’t really prepare terribly much. Adrian was very specific that he didn’t want us to be coy, even though my character has a conflict with what’s going on. I’ve said it was like we were holding hands through the trenches of the war, and had this wonderful experience that nobody could take away from us. Fortunately it’s on film so people can believe how brave we really were. That’s how I feel about it. Adrian was very clear, he’s be very specific and we’d have long talks in trailers about it before we went in to ‘take Normandy’."

How have audiences related to the betrayal at the heart of the film?

"I think the reaction to the film was interesting in that even when we read it the larger issue that was touched upon was that the betrayal of trust was the greater crime, even in comparison to all the other things that go on in the story. That’s what everybody identified with. It does bring people together, when you’ve been through something even the audience watching it understands what’s worth fighting for. And being honest with yourself first so that you can do your homework and bring that to your relationship. To find excitement within your relationship and avoid a disaster like theirs."

"I think as far as the trust that they had, it’s become something else, and the question is really what they build from there. I never saw the original French film this is based on, but there is something perversely romantic about what Edward does. You could interpret that as fighting for Connie’s love in some animalistic way. In the end we see them wanting the same thing, and if two people want the same thing and are willing to adhere to that then anything’s possible."

Adrian Lyne

Why do you think it is that you see constantly drawn to the subject of infidelity?

"It’s funny but I was talking to my daughter this morning and I said that if someone asked me this question what should I say. I never quite know what to say. I like relationship pieces, and in this particular case I liked a film of Claude Chabrol called La femme infidel. I loosely based this film on it with Alvin Sargent. I don’t know why though, I don’t have the slightest idea. I wish I had some clever answer. I do think I’ve done some films that are pretty different. Flashdance is very different from Jacob’s Ladder and Lolita is very different from this movie. Obviously with relationships sex is involved, infidelity is involved sometimes and murder is involved. But nobody seems to be so interested in that."

"I’ve always sort of loathed the filmmaking process, I think it combines to make people frightened, the idea of the clapperboard going and the red light and the bell and all of this crap. What I try to do, especially in love scenes, is to make it as informal as possible. I try to put the clapperboard on at the end, so that you sort of segue into the scene instead of having this moment of terror that everybody goes through when the clapperboard goes on. Also when I get to the end, quite often I’ll start again without stopping the camera, so that you don’t have that moment of false drama that frightens everybody.

"To Diane’s chagrin I would sometimes be kind of vocal in my enthusiasm. She would hear my voice, and wonder what was going on. I’ve tended to do that in scenes like that because I always have a horror of a couple going at it in total silence and not knowing if they’re doing good or looking good with the camera churning away. That must be very depressing. So I venture in now and then."

Is it difficult to portray these characters, who all commit some sin or other, as sympathetic?

"Well the one thing I will say is that I was very anxious for Edward and Connie to have a happy marriage. I wanted them to have a nice place and a nice kid and be happy together and for the sex to be good. And no possible reason for her to go and have an affair. There was a lot of discussion with the studio at the beginning about making this a marriage that wasn’t working, but where’s the drama in that? Of course she should have an affair then. If it’s a crappy marriage and the sex is no good, of course she should. What I thought was interesting was that she had no possible reason for it, and occasionally that does happen, you don’t necessarily have to have a ghastly marriage."

"Maybe I’m a hopeless romantic but I’ve always thought you could love someone for two minutes, you know, meet them and be hopelessly in love and then BANG! they’re gone. I think this was a little bit like that maybe. When Paul is at the top of the steps with those books, although everything in her head was saying don’t even think about going up there, she did. I think lots of people would have done, and that doesn’t necessarily makes them bad people."

Were there any difficulties over the certification of the film, either in the US or UK?

"No, no problems which surprised me really. I’m a little bit spooked by that whole process because of my experience on Lolita. That was such a nightmare, I guess because of the subject matter. But I’m surprised there wasn’t any comment on this one at all."