If you don't already know whose son Danny Huston is, the fastest way to figure it out is to close your eyes and listen to him speak. The words waft towards you on a breathy cloud, lent colour and character by a detectable lifelong smoking habit (no emphysema like the Old Man had, though, not yet). In a faded American accent that sounds as if it's been acquired or borrowed or even half-forgotten in exile. All inflected with an Irishman's love of words-as-song and a bullshitter's devotion to the art of speech. Every so often a story – and they're all well-told, like dad's were – will resolve itself into a generous, wheezy burst of laughter that's like an invitation to intimacy and friendship. For an actor, it's a priceless gift of the genes, to be nourished with all the cigarettes at hand.
"Yes, the voice and the smoking … My daughter asked me to give her one particular thing for Christmas and I said, 'Of course, whatever you'd like.' And she said, 'Will you promise you'll get it for me?' I said sure …" A pause, a drag then two ostrich-feathers of smoke pour from his nostrils and bounce off the table between us. "'Will you stop smoking, dad?' And I said, 'Oooh, you tricked me! You're no daughter of mine!'"
He leans in, eyes a-twinkle, a handsome, long and lean face well etched by lines, and just like his father, one side of the mouth pulls up into a friendly vulpine leer to reveal white teeth, one eye almost closing. Like Noah Cross, in Chinatown, telling JJ Gittes he prefers his fish served with the head still on. It's eerie. He can't be anyone's son but John Huston's.
We meet in a quintessentially Hollywood locale – the patio of the Chateau Marmont hotel – ostensibly to talk about his new movie, Bernard Rose's contemporary retailing of Tolstoy's The Kreutzer Sonata. Like Ivansxtc, another Tolstoy adaptation by Rose (of The Death of Ivan Illych) from a decade ago – and, he says, the movie that persuaded him he could make a career of acting when directing had become too enervating – it hauls out the central import of the tale and relocates it in California. In Ivan, Huston was a dying Hollywood agent rediscovering his soul on his deathbed, now in Kreutzer, he's another broken Californian, this time eaten alive by sexual jealousy (and Huston has more nude scenes and grunty sex than you'll find in 15 Nicolas Roeg movies).
"About 10 years ago, I was caught in that seasonless 'LA Wait' for the greenlight on something that never happened. Bernard Rose had just finished Anna Karenina, which was an awful hassle to make, so we would just sit and bitch and moan and groan over wine. His girlfriend at the time said, 'Why don't you guys just shut the fuck up and make a movie?' And we said, 'Yeah, it's a little more complicated than that.' But she put her foot down, made us look at the calendar and, before we knew it, we were filming in the back yard. Bernard shoots, directs, writes it and edits, and it has a certain kind of homemade, family feel to it. I mean, my sister is played by my own sister, Anjelica, in Kreutzer, and in Ivan, her then, now late, husband [sculptor Robert Graham, who died in 2008] also played my father.
"And the next thing I knew, I was an actor – and a leading actor. Which was not at all what I had planned. I was still thinking I would soon get back to my real job. And, to use surfer talk, I thought, 'I'll just ride this wave for a while and see what happens.'"
What happened was that Danny Huston became one of the most interesting and watchable character actors around, emerging fully formed, at the age of 38, no less. In the years since, he has made indelible impressions in successively larger roles until this year, when he has found himself acting opposite Russell Crowe and Cate Blanchett (Ridley Scott's Robin Hood), Ray Winstone and Mel Gibson (Edge of Darkness) – and Al Pacino (and better yet, Pacino as Jack "Dr Death" Kervorkian, in an HBO TV movie about the right-to-die champion). "Suddenly I was working with people like Scorsese [in The Aviator] and others that I really admired. And the roles are still coming in."
Roles rich and various, in ambitious movies including Children of Men, The Constant Gardener, Marie Antoinette and 21 Grams, and in crowd-pleasers like The Kingdom and How to Lose Friends and Alienate People. It's all the more impressive considering he never took an acting lesson in his life – you finally have to believe in the power of that bloodline, what with Walter Huston, his grandfather, having been guided to Oscar victory by John in 1948's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and ditto Anjelica, in Prizzi's Honour 40-odd years later. Danny's about the only Huston left standing without a statuette to clutch.
He was born in Rome, in 1962, the product of a brief liaison between John and the actress Zoe Sallis. I tell him that what springs to my mind of that time and place – Cinecittà Studios – is the Burton-Taylor Cleopatra and Vincente Minnelli's Two Weeks in Another Town (a melodrama about filming a melodrama), both being shot there that year. Huston goes me one better. "Actually, The Bible, that was what my father was directing at that time – as you can imagine from the title, it was a long preproduction and postproduction, with Dino de Laurentiis in charge of the money side, and all that entailed. It took up several years of my dad's life, and that was the time when I was being born."
He recalls one splendidly Oedipal moment involving his father's many roles in that movie besides directing it (the film wasn't released until 1966). "He does the voiceover for God – as well as playing Noah. And it was one of the first rough cuts of a film of his I went to see. And I remember being profoundly confused. Plus my mother was playing Hagar [Abraham's second wife] and she has another child that's dying of thirst, and I don't know if I've ever quite recovered from all that! I suppose everybody's father is God to their sons. And here he was, literally playing God."
I tell him I've just read A Way of Life, Like Any Other, Darcy O'Brien's roman à clef about his own Hollywood parents, silent cowboy-movie star George O'Brien and actress Marguerite Churchill, and I have to ask: did he have a glittering, sun-kissed childhood like that?
He breathes deeply, in and out, "Weeeell … there was the Irish house of my father's. I grew up there and in Rome, I went to school in both places and also later in London. I never spent much time in Los Angeles itself, though I live here now part-time. And I was never really deeply aware I was a movie director's kid – in terms of fabulous glamour and so on. I spent a lot of time on his film sets, but the time away from sets was a pretty ordinary time. I mean, it's not normal, I suppose, to fall in love with Ava Gardner when you're a little boy." That was on The Night of the Iguana, which Huston senior filmed with Gardner and Richard Burton in Mexico in 1964, where he had a hideaway near Puerto Vallarta which could only be reached by boat. "It was remote all right, and he was often ill – I remember once we literally carried him out of there in like, a … chair" He mimes hoisting sedan-chair poles on to his shoulders.
His father, lest we forget, was a genuine Hollywood legend, a true buccaneering imbiber of the wine of life, a friend of Hawks and Hemingway and Mitchum, a big-game hunter, a serious artist and gifted writer who renounced his US citizenship after political hassles from HUAC, and a serial husband and an epic philanderer. How does a son live up to that? "Well, you don't even try, really. For me he existed on more of a human scale, still a grand gentleman with great panache and style, but also a dear friend to me. My favourite memories are of us playing backgammon together in Mexico, both of us just being really quiet."
Is there a downside to it? "I haven't really come across it. There's a certain amount of pressure not to let 'The Name' down – we're practically a brand at this point. A couple of reviews that jab a little bit – early on I got told my dad dropped the baton, and I picked it up and fell on my face. But mainly it's an advantage, it gets your foot in the door. Then again, once your foot is in the door, you really have to deliver, but yes, it gives you one or two extra opportunities."
He reminds me that he's worked with Sofia Coppola, with whom he has things in common; she flunked out as an actress for daddy then made big waves as a director; and he did the opposite: "On Marie Antoinette, I remember thinking it was almost like working with a cousin!" He does his father's exhalation thing again: "Strange parallels …"
The Kreutzer Sonata is released on 12 March
The following note was added to this article on Monday 15 March 2010
Lisa Enos has told us that she wrote the first treatment of The Kreutzer Sonata, that she co-wrote, produced and arranged finance for the film Ivansxtc and that, together with Bernard Rose, she cast Danny Huston in Ivansxtc. She was Bernard Rose's girlfriend at the time that Ivansxtc was made and disputes Danny Huston's report of his conversation with her and Bernard Rose about planning Ivansxtc.