I met Sam Neill in 2024. He was more beautiful than I expected Sam Neill

Me he was asked Sam Neill in 2024, far away: he was in Vancouver filming the Netflix series, Untamed, but we were there to talk about the Australian crime drama, The Twelve. He immediately spoke out loud. He said that the second season was “much stronger” than the first, which was true, the first was a little less intense, and the second showed more trust in its audience and our tolerance for more.

But actors, in most cases, can’t say anything against any project, it’s not worth bothering with. This would make even the most enlightened of them sound anodyne, and the feeling of having a conversation with a real, three-dimensional person was unfamiliar and warm.

He was quite a free man, by history, self-deprecating by nature. But he had recently been treated for angioimmunoblastic T-cell lymphoma, which inspired his writing and gave him a fresh, non-bullish perspective.

He described himself as “a man of no use”, which I rejected at the same time, from his work – he had the last decade in the late 80s, early 90s, with Dead Calm, The Hunt for Red October, Jurassic Park yes, but this was behind the time of filming at the end of the 70s, which gave the film My Brilliant, My Smart Work, The Work of a Female Magnet, and a very strong magnet. 1981.

“No, I look like I’m working a lot, but I’m really inactive.” He disappeared on Zoom for his book, Did I Ever You This?, and came back with another book, Question 7 by Richard Flanagan. “If I had been a less serious person, or more serious, and I had not written my book in haste, if it had not been for those two things – but haste was important – and if I had had more brains, I would have written this.”

“Don’t worry about my book, this book is good” wrote his modus operandi: young, generous, insightful (he was right, and – Question 7 is smart).

His first feature, Sleeping Dogs, in 1976, was the first from New Zealand to release in the US, and he did not become a full-time actor until he turned 30. Dead Calm shot him and Nicole Kidman to the world record, but Neill did not want to move to Hollywood, the length of his performance in LA was a year and a half. There was no place to raise children, he heard: he left behind his son and actor Lisa Harrow – Tim, born in 1983 – and his daughter, Elena, born in 1991, and actress Noriko Watanabe.

But LA was not the place for the big man. “There was nothing but show business. There were no other conversations, no other interests. It annoys me. That’s why my life now is a little inactive and rural. I farm, I grow wine, and this makes me sane.

Piano may have been his most influential independent film, but it was Possession that he was most proud of and the first film that evokes his memories, somewhere between arthouse, horror and action, “Polish is very brave, and Isabelle Adjani is amazing in it.

By the time his memoir was published, his cancer treatment had ended, all he had left was to tell the truth and the unrefined – that action movies were dumb, that the age of cinema was from the 50s to the 70s. But he wasn’t depressed in any way, and he worked all the time, “maybe more than I should,” he told me, “but that’s because I enjoy it so much.” The thought of not working fills me with dread. Some of it has to do with coming from a small place, the most unknown place in the world, away from everything you can find, and being asked to do something is a big part of it?