The hard life of a movie star

It's not a bad life, being a Hollywood movie star. But it's not all glamour either.

When I first started at Capital, I had the pleasure of being our showbiz reporter. The Dorchester became like a second home as I interviewed a seemingly endless string of stars about their latest film.

But then I was catapulted into the dizzy heights of management and someone else was given my admittedly cushy little gig.

This week, though, for the first time in years, I found myself back in the opulent surroundings of one of London's finest hotels, covering the junket for High School Musical 3.

Click on the "Exclusive Interviews" link above to watch my HSM3 interviews!

Film junkets are weird affairs. In case you're not familiar with them, they're a bit like production lines, except they're in hotels instead of factories. The star sits in their room for several hours, answering the same questions for an endless stream of reporters who are wheeled in and out every few minutes by flustered, clipboard-carrying, earpiece-wearing PR people.

As a journalist you're normally given an exact start time, say 1.48pm. I never see the point in that because they're always late.

You're also given an exact slot for your interview, usually between 3 and 8 minutes. They do stick to those: another flustered, clipboard-carrying, earpiece-wearing PR person actually sits in with a stopwatch and glares at you when your time's up.

Junkets are a bit like speed-dating. You have just a few short minutes to try and have an interesting, entertaining conversation with someone you've never met, who's probably seen 20 other reporters that morning, who's jet-lagged and who's quite frankly fed up with being asked "so, what was it like working with such-and-such" every 10 minutes.

Sometimes the PR people will tell you what you're not allowed to ask. They'll tell you "such-and-such won't answer questions about their divorce" when, of course, that's the only reason you're there because everyone's talking about it. You can ignore their instructions, but at your peril: chances are the interview will be cut short and you'll be blacklisted.

Stars have to do these interviews as part of their contract, and many would clearly prefer not to. But to be honest I don't have much sympathy for them.

After all, they're probably being paid millions of pounds to make their film, so having to spend 2 or 3 days promoting it is hardly that much to ask.

Don't get me wrong: many stars are brilliant. I've interviewed Matt Damon for one of the Bourne movies, Elijah Wood for "Lord of the Rings" and Renee Zellweger for "Chicago", and they were all genuinely lovely, interesting and on top form.

But not all. One well-known male British film star (no names, sorry!) didn't even bother getting up from his bed to be interviewed, gave me one-word answers and made it abundantly clear I was an annoyance.

For the record, the High School Musical cast were all lovely, extremely professional and the junket went like clockwork.