Sean Penn on lightning, Aaron Eckhart and the great outdoors

"I've seen a grown man struck by lightning, and let me tell you... it changes you forever. A lot like a backalley sex change in Slovenia or the first time you watch the redux version of Apocalypse Now on mushrooms.

It was 2001 and I was up in British Columbia directing The Pledge with Jack Nicholson, Ben del Toro and Aaron Eckhart. I decided that we had to keep it real. No trailers, just tents. 

There's nothing like the Canadian wilderness to keep that motley crew of pampered Hollywood douchebags on their toes.

One night when we'd wrapped up filming, I was in my yurt, getting the mother of all tugjobs from Patricia Clarkson. A truly lost art in the twenty first century I'm sure you'll agree.

The rain was intense, biblical, like thick sheets of water cascading from the heavens, pounding the earth with all the subtlety of an epileptic fit in a paint factory. Thunder sliced through the night like a post-Grand Slam breakfast at Denny's fart.

Suddenly lightning struck. I heard screaming and I poked my head out of the tent to see Eckhart convulsing on the ground. At first I thought he'd just seen Helen Mirren doing her cleveland steamer thing, but wisps of smoke rose off Eckhart's body like he was some square jawed sausage on the grill.

Bam! Another bolt came down and fried the fucker, like God herself was reaching down to touch Eckhart with a electric finger.

Poor guy was all fucked up after that, even with the best psycho and physio therapy  that Hollywood bucks can buy. He would sign up for infomercials selling pet accessories, forgetting he was already an established film star.

Then there was that romcom abortion with Catherine Zeta Jones, where his behaviour on set was erratic to say the least. He was once caught humping Michael Douglas' leg and trying to sniff his crotch. Douglas of course was game for it, the creepy geriatric fuck.

So I guess what I'm saying is that you dance with mother Nature, she calls the tune... it's all fun and games until you get an electrical current course through your entire body, rearranging your meatloaf to the point where you actually think you're a fuckin' dog."

Sean Penn on a pre-Giuliani New York

"You wanna know how New York was back in the nineties, well I'll tell you whippersnappers what it was like. It was cold and grim, with the chance of extreme violence and genital mutilation, a lot like sharing a bed with my ex-wife Robin Wright after a drunken 2am booty call that ends prematurely. 


That's right, you just heard a white man say booty call. 

Well ... all this ethnically confused jibber jabber and nostalgic talk of the Big Apple takes me back to 1993 when I was shooting Carlito's Way, when me and some of the other cast members got a taste of what New York was really like. 

It started one day on the set up in Spanish Harlem. I was in 'the zone' as drug-addled mob lawyer David Kleinfeld, with my seventies nylon suits and candyfloss jewfro in tact. I was nervous just being around Penelope Ann Miller, and at any moment I expected Arnie to pop out from behind a door and scream "it's NOT a tumour!" in his steroid-tinged Nazified accent. 

Yeah I just dropped a KC reference. Deal with it.

Pacino was doing his usual Method acting schtick, which just meant he was shouting at inanimate objects with his trademark googly eyes darting around like two field mice on crank. De Palma starting throwing a hissy fit about the lighting, so we all broke for lunch. Guzman suggested we go get some hogies from a place he knew round the corner.

Bad move. We came down 115th and were set upon by some gangsters from the barrio dressed like rejects from a Furious Five video. No talking, no reasoning. This was just a straight up G.A.N.K. Pacino was off down the street quicker than a Vietnamese shopkeeper down to the track with a hot tip on the ponies.

Thankfully in my Kleinfeld guise they didn't recognise me as the star of acclaimed films such as Colors, State Of Grace or Shanghai Surprise, but they jumped on Guzman and beat him down hard for "killing Swayze in Ghost" then stomped my good friend John Leguizamo cowboy style and stabbed him in the cock for "ruining the Mario Brothers film".

I guess what I'm trying to say is that sometimes we look at the past with rose-tinted spectacles, sort of like the ones I wore as David Kleinfeld, but really there's no escaping the fact that New York was a fucking dump back then."

Sean Penn on jetski safety and the sexual appetites of George Clooney

"Lemme give you the 411 on jetskis buddy. They are not to be trifled with ... quite frankly they are the Michael Jackson of aquatic leisure equipment. Thrilling at first but then bad, dangerous and prone to fucking a kid right up.

My first and last experience on one was back in 1997 when I was filming The Thin Red Line down under. Malick gave us a few days off while he did some post pro editing, so Clooney and I took off for the Gold Coast in search of sun, sand and snatch.

What we got instead was blood, sweat and tears.

It started going south when we reached Surfers Paradise. Clooney was slipping it to some leathered up skank named Tracy he met at Cavill Mall who enjoyed his performance as smouldering doctor Doug Ross from TV's ER.

She really couldn't have been a day over 15, but Clooney's approach is that if there's grass on the wicket, he'll fuck it. God damn she was rough too, skin like an elephant with sunspots the size of overcoat buttons and that goosehonk Queenslander accent that could cut through Plexiglas.

Anyway, Clooney wanted to show off his moves so he rented us some jetskis. Off we set that fateful morning, out into the choppy Pacific like a trio of intrepid explorers.

Straight away Clooney was showboating, hitting the breaks with gusto, doing burnouts and spins, trying his darndest to look cool on what is essentially an overgrown scooter but with no wheels.

Unfortunately the guy has the co-ordination skills of a drunk toddler on roofies and he slipped over the handlebars, the jetski ploughing straight into Tracy and practically severing her head from her shoulders.

Neither of us could have survived the inevitable media scrutiny resulting from a 'death by misadventure' adventure with some underage Australian whoo-er, so we wrapped her body up in tarpaulin and buried her somewhere around Coolangatta."