It's clear, though, that Russell thinks it's still true, and pretty much always has been. It's not something that he has made happen, or can claim particular credit for; it just is.

"Inherent likeability, or inherent dislikeability," he considers, "is something I think we all carry with us."

Still, he's aware that this conversation has taken a worrying turn.

"Now when you talk about yourself in those terms," he says. "I find that unlikeable. 'Stop! You idiot! There's millions of people who can't stand the fucking sight of you!' And that may be true."

Prudently, he moves to change the subject.

"It's like listening to actors talk about acting," he says. "Hoy, is there anything worse?"

G_uardians of The Galaxy_ director James Gunn tells me that when he was a kid he used to run around his back yard pretending he was Snake Plissken. "So he was always an iconic figure for me," he says. Then, more recently, Quentin Tarantino showed him an early cut of The Hateful Eight. Russell, Gunn says, "just blew me away in the movie. I thought he was amazing. And I thought he was the guy to play Chris Pratt's father."

What were the qualities required?

"The main thing is, the character is very talky. He speaks a lot. He's the centerpiece of Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 2. He's really the emotional core of the story. He's a guy who we have to really like, but he also has a bit of a darker side. And we need to see all those facets right there. He just needs to be a very energizing, charismatic individual. And I think that's something that Kurt did. I think even in the script, it was described as 'he has an almost self-empowerment seminar type of feel.' The other thing I would say is that I'm really harsh in terms of who I will work with in a movie. I do a lot of investigation into actors because there are a lot of bullshit actors in Hollywood, and there are a lot of people that are difficult to work with. And even if they come off good on screen, that doesn't mean they're not really hurting the film overall by being divas or being pains in the asses to work with. Also, I only have so much life in me and I don't wanna have to spend my time surrounded by assholes. So I checked around and Kurt…you know, people love him. He's a tough guy, but, if you come at it in a serious matter and respect him as a craftsman, you're going to love working with him."

What did he find easiest and hardest about this part?

"Listen, working with Kurt is like wrestling a circus bear. It's a constant struggle in which I work extremely well because I'm a very, uh, strong willed guy. And Kurt is a very strong willed guy, which meant there's a lot of really challenging each other to be at our very best. In fact, I don't know if I've ever been as challenged by an actor as I was by Kurt. And I don't think that there are many directors that have challenged him as much as I did in terms of making him do things dozens and dozens and dozens of times until I wore him out and got him to exactly the real place that I wanted him to be. So I would say the greatest, the most difficult thing about Kurt is that he does not settle for second best. I mean, if there's a question left in his head, he'll ask it. And he'll ask it again and again and again. And a lot of actors just kind of blindly listen to what I have to say—and I like that, so it's okay. But Kurt really needs to have all of the answers in before he can move forward."

As for the character's "I've got a penis" declaration, Gunn says it's still decided whether the final cut will go with "penis" or "dick"—in the current cut, Gunn has chosen "dick". "I just don't know which one's funnier, frankly," he says. "It's a PG-13 film so we can get away with either."

Along with Escape From New York, the two other movies that Russell made with John Carpenter in the 1980s, The Thing and Big Trouble In Little China, are the ones that film buffs (and Russell) most often bring up now—but the latter two flopped badly. At one point, Russell mentions that he has to do something soon for Big Trouble In Little China's 30 # th anniversary; there are talks of a remake with Dwayne Johnson. But the week of its release in July 1986, it ranked twelfth at the box office, a position it never improved upon. And it was reviewed venomously: "You can surely find better things to do with your time than suffer through this 100-minute disaster" (The Chicago Tribune), "How could the mind of mortal man concoct such foolishness?" (The Los Angeles Times), "a bad marriage of martial and action spoofery, bungled by director John Carpenter working from the world's worst screenplay" (The Washington Post).

Not until a few years later did Russell have a run of movies that were successful right away, and not just in retrospect. And his position as a bankable movie star was only cemented by Stargate in 1994_,_ which he says had the biggest opening ever for its studio, MGM. Afterward, he says, the studio leaked to a gossip columnist some results from their internal research, which showed that 66 percent of respondents went to see the movie specifically because Russell was in it. "That changed my financial position in the movie business," he says. "I'd been paid a lot to do that movie, and then I got paid a lot to do movies after that. For the first time I realized, hey, I have a future here—not just in the business, but to make some money." After that, he went on a lucrative run - "I joined the big parade there by pulling the lottery chain" – one that ended with a movie that you probably don't remember, called Soldier. It was as much as Russell would ever earn for a role: "15 million bucks," he confirms. He played a near-emotionless robot warrior. A fairly taciturn one, too. "By the way" he says, "I think I have the record. Divide 69 words by $15 million. I don't think anyone will ever top that—$278,000 thousand per word, or something." (Just over $217,000, in fact, by his word count, but still pretty good by the sentence.)

It was a tricky shoot. Russell had to do most of it on a broken left ankle and broken right foot, though he persevered. "Come hell or high water," he admits, "I wasn't gonna let that payday go away." And while Russell has an old-school diplomacy about trying not to criticize coworkers or projects, he clearly knows that the end result was a mess of a movie. After that he decided to pull back—but not, he insists, because the offers dried up: "There were a couple I turned down that were really, really big — $20 million." But money wasn't sufficient lure. "I had enough," he says, smiling. "I just said, I've got the things I want—I don't need this. My wife and I, my family, can live our lives pretty much the way we want to. From time to time I'll do something, but it'll only be because I want to buy something, I wanna do something, or I wanna work with somebody."

At one point during our time together, Russell and I are deep into a conversation about bullshit and personal honesty, I make the mistake of asserting: "Everyone has some percentage of bullshit." This, it turns out, may be the kind of assertion that Russell exists to disagree with:

"I don't." No-one… [firmly] "I don't. I don't." But you must have… [insistently] "I really don't!" I'm saying it might be 0.03%… "I got zero." Okay.

"And I can tell you how to get to zero. Learn to fly. And here's why. Here's my story on that."

Russell begins his story about flying and bullshit by telling me about his grandfather Buddy, a pilot in the early years of aviation who he says had license number 192; it was actually signed by Orville Wright. "Buddy," says Russell, "was the shit." When he was 34, Russell decided he wanted to fly, just like Buddy.

According to Russell, he drove everyone in his aviation class nuts by refusing to settle for knowing just enough—he would insist upon staying on each topic until he understood it perfectly. At one point the instructor said, "Mr. Russell, we're never going to get through this class if you keep it up," and Russell replied, "Sir, I'm going to be up there in that airplane and if I don't know the answer to all these questions, I'm going to get killed." He was told they had to get 70 out of a hundred on the test to pass, but that didn't make sense to him. He memorized the whole manual ("now, that I can do—I can memorize") and got 100. "The only person in the state of California," he says, "who got a hundred on the test."