BEING the son of a Hollywood legend isn't easy, and some wish nothing more than to get out of the long shadow of their illustrious parent so they can step into the glare of their own klieg lights. "I like to describe my dad as a giant who protects me from the harsh rays of the sun," says Danny Huston. "So I feel rather comfortable in his shadow."
Danny Huston openly adores his father, John Huston, the legendary director of films such as The Maltese Falcon, The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre, The African Queen and The Man Who Would Be King, who lived life as if he were a 19th-century adventurer.
He fished with Clark Gable and hunted with Ernest Hemingway. He directed 46 films and acted in 24 others. He married and divorced five women, and was in love with many others. In an early rough cut of The Bible, according to his son, he scored a hat trick as the voice of God, Noah, and the director.
"The first image I have of my father on the set was in The Bible, as Noah leading animals into the Ark. He had a long white beard and was playing the flute."
John Huston also once described the Edinburgh Film Festival as "the only festival worth a damn" and 50 years on, his son is about to head this year's jury and has already mapped out his regime, "two films a day plus the occasional walk," he says.
Huston took on the job aware of his father's famous quote, and also intrigued because he hasn't visited Edinburgh before, or indeed Scotland – "although I am of course a Celt," he says, alluding to the family's Irish home.
The youngest Huston child was born in Rome, the product of an affair between his father and actress Zoe Sallis. "My standard answer," he says, "is I was conceived in Freud, born during the preproduction of The Bible, and teethed on The Night Of The Iguana."
He grew up visiting his father on his film sets, so it seems inevitable that he fell into directing, and then acting, himself. "I have memories like The Man Who Would Be King as a young boy. I was thrilled to meet Sean Connery, partly because he was James Bond, but also because he has the power and charisma that real stars have, so I very much hope to meet up with him in Edinburgh"
The other link between the Hustons and Edinburgh is that the festival hosted the premiere of Black Hunter, White Heart, Clint Eastwood's study of a maverick hunting-shooting movie director based on John Huston around the time he was directing The African Queen. Eastwood accompanied his picture, and the screening brought Fountainbridge to a halt, with The Man With No Name essaying Huston's irresistible way with women and garrulous vocal stylings.
"I enjoyed that film, but I didn't think it was really dad," says Huston, diplomatically. "I'm not sure what he would have made of it."
He might have liked the fact that he was a very good shot in the movie.
Huston laughs, delighted: "Yes, I think he would have loved that."
Danny Huston is a charmer. He ducks your compliments, absorbs your indelicate questions, jabs back with interest in you and never appears tired of the exchange: he is the middleweight champion of raffish charm, which is why he excels at rather caddish types such as Sandy, the duplicitous British diplomat in The Constant Gardener.
Tall and graceful with slightly greying curls at 46, his grin and his laugh are huge. Growing up he lived on the Via Giulia, perhaps the most elegant street in Rome, but he now roams London, Ireland and LA, where he lives with his wife and child. Previously married to actress Virginia Madsen, he remains close to his half-sister, Anjelica. "I'd love her to direct me in something," he says. "It's something we often talk about."
A late bloomer, until his 20s Danny Huston planned to become an artist. "I was drinking warm white wine, schmoozing," he says. "I realised this was just as bad as the movie scene. It wasn't my father that I wanted to escape. It was that world." By 21, he was doing second-unit direction on his dad's film Under The Volcano in Cuernavaca, Mexico, and shooting the eerie title sequence of masks, to establish the Day Of The Dead mood of the feature.
Nowadays, he's in demand as an actor; this year alone he has completed four films, including Bernard Rose's The Kreutzer Sonata, an update of Tolstoy's novel which debuts in Edinburgh, with Huston playing the morbidly jealous Edgar Hudson, and which features the debut of Danny's two-year-old, Stella, as his screen daughter.
Rose first put him on the acting map by casting him as the lead in Ivansxtc, a shoestring indie shot with an early digital camera. "Bernard and I would spend many a night bitching about not being able to get our pictures going," says Huston. "And his girlfriend, now wife, said, 'Why don't you just go out and make a film instead of complaining?'."
He hopes to direct again at some point. "I'm just waiting for a lull," he says, in which case his return to working behind the camera may be some distance away, but when he does pick up the reins, he thinks he may have become a more compassionate director.
He believes his relationship with his father succeeded because he was the youngest of his father's three children. John Huston was in his 50s when he was born, and in his mid-70s when he acted in the 1988 film Mr North, which his son directed: "The name Huston got us into doors, but it didn't automatically get us the money we needed. It just meant that people were very polite and respectful when they turned us down."
Even when John Huston was dying of emphysema, he intervened to help his son persuade Lauren Bacall to appear in the picture, handing over the screenplay personally while Danny carried his oxygen tank.
"As a young man I met greats like Mitchum, who was a real man's man, but I had this odd point of view where I regarded acting as a vain, self-involved profession. Things like motivation really annoyed me. I just thought, 'You're paid, that's your motivation. Get on with the job'."
The elder Huston wasn't around a lot when his son was growing up, "but his love was always there. There were no bad feelings between my mother, actress Zoe Sallis, and father after the divorce. He was a little tamer when I was around than he was as a young man. There was no Hemingway stuff going on. I thought of him as sort of a pirate returning from faraway countries, bearing gifts and tales."
At times he slips unconsciously into a marvellous imitation of his old man. When he was directing his father in a BBC drama, Mr Corbett's Ghost: "Every now and then, he'd start a line, get it wrong, and call, 'Cut.' I'd say, 'No, Dad, it's my job.' He'd say, 'Of course, of course, so sorry'."
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The Kreutzer Sonata screens at Edinburgh International Film Festival, Cineworld, Friday, 8pm and June 22, 5.45pm
www.edfilmfest.org.uk