Bijou Phillips has already been famous for a third of her life. Which can be pretty tough when you're only 21. Especially if you were the sort of famous that Bijou Phillips was.
In her teenage years Bijou was New York's very own 'wild child'. She was raised mostly by her father, singer-songwriter John Phillips of The Mamas and the Papas, creator of such definitive pieces of 60s Americana as 'California Dreamin', 'Monday, Monday' and Scott McKenzie's 'San Francisco (Be Sure To Wear Some Flowers In Your Hair)'.
Bijou began to make a name for herself at 13, initially as a model. She was one of the bored, pouty adolescents showing white underwear in a Calvin Klein campaign that was widely condemned as eerily paedophilic. Then, at 14, she quit school, left home and moved into her own apartment just off Fifth Avenue - with her own housekeeper. With predictable results.
Bijou partied. She drank and took drugs - anything from coke and ecstasy up to heroin. She flashed her breasts to photographers on what seemed like a regular basis, and at 15 lost her virginity to the famously drug-bingeing singer Evan Dando. She grew up on the pages of America's tabloids, where readers lapped up stories of her precocious misbehaviour: how she ended an affair with Cher's son Elijah Blue by throwing his belongings out of the window; how she allegedly tried to French kiss one girl interviewer; how she half-sliced a man's finger off with a cigar-cutter in New York's Spy Bar. At 17 she fell apart after her friend - the 20-year-old Manhattan socialite Davide Sorrenti - died after overdosing on heroin. Her father sent her into rehab, a process he knew a little about.
At 21, an older, wiser, soberer Bijou Phillips looks jumpy the moment the subject of her teenage indiscretions are raised. 'Whatever,' she mumbles, tetchily. 'I was 14 years old. What was I supposed to do?'
She reaches for a black plastic lighter. 'If you were 14 years old and able to live on your own in an apartment in New York City, and you got invited to all these clubs, and you got a bank account and you had a car service you could call so that you could go wherever you wanted... what would happen?'
She sits on a sofa in a photographer's studio, two parts nerves to one part feistiness, dressed in a pink shirt and brown mock-sheepskin jacket. Feet tucked under her, she is as jaded as any middle-aged rock star, but with the fragile self-confidence of any post-adolescent. It's an awkward mixture. But like any 21-year-old, she detests being reminded of what she was like when she was a teenager.
All this would be beside the point, only Bijou's latest movie, Bully , is about what happens when American teenagers find themselves too far out of their emotional depth. Bully is based on the true story of the murder of Bobby Kent, killed on 14 July 1993 in a well-off south Florida suburb by a group of nicely brought-up teens whom he had hung around for years. It's a bleak, violent picture, peopled by aimless youths who understand sex, drugs and arcade games, but not much else. That it's so ugly is not particularly surprising; it's directed by Larry Clark, whose attention-grabbing trademark has been the portrayal of nihilistic, oversexualised teenagers set adrift by parents who just don't understand them. His breakthrough was 1995's titillating Kids, about a bunch of skateboarders who competed to deflower as many girls as they could.
Bijou Phillips's performance is one of Bully 's undoubted highlights. Her portrayal of a sexually overconfident yet obviously fragile teenager is electrifying - even if it's dangerously close to type. In fact, it's an acting feat she's pulled off twice before: once as a hiphop-obsessed teen in James Toback's film about racism, Black and White, and then as a groupie in Cameron Crowe's Almost Famous.
Clark may have cast Bijou for her acting talent, but he was also clearly aware of the notoriety she'd bring to the part.
Bijou doesn't like Bully much. She doesn't feel she should even be doing press for it. There's a lot of gratuitous sex in it. The camerawork verges on the creepy. Shots constantly linger on her and her co-star Rachel Miner's bodies. At one point, for no apparent reason, we get a lingering shot up an ill-fitting pair of hotpants to Bijou's half-naked crotch. Bijou rolls her bright brown eyes. 'What the fuck is that bullshit? That's not OK,' she says, angrily. 'I'm sitting there doing a scene and they're shooting down my crotch.'
Maybe she shouldn't have expected more from a Larry Clark movie. Bijou claims she asked to see the dailies and was refused. Only when she saw the final cut did she realise how predatory the camerawork was. She sat in the screening right behind the movie's head of photography, Steve Gainer. He probably wished he'd chosen another seat. Every time a dubious shot appeared she leaned forward and slapped him round the head. 'That's so disrespectful. I think the movie could have been so much better,' she says, pulling on her cigarette and gazing out of the photo-studio windows out over the Hudson. 'It doesn't need that bullshit. It's like, OK Larry, yeah, you're a pervert. The whole fucking world knows you're a creepy pervert. Do you have to rub it in everyone's face?'
If the movie purports to have any moral at all, it's that parents should find out a little about what their children are really up to these days.
Did it make you think about your own past, I ask. 'Yeah,' she answers, guardedly. 'But not really. My dad always knew what I was up to. All he had to do was look at the New York Post. There were no secrets.'
What did it feel like, being that person? 'I don't really want to talk about all that,' she says. 'Basically, what the movie says is that you have to treat your kids like kids. Just because they're old enough to drive a car, they're still kids.'
So, I ask, are you furious at your own parents for not treating you like a kid? 'No,' she says, fiercely. 'The fact of the matter is I'm 21 now. I stay home. I feed my dogs. I don't really go out. I work. Most people my age are out doing the things I was doing at 14. I'm happy that I got all that out of the way, out of my system, when I was a kid.'
It's a bad day. Bijou is coming down with flu. She's feeling sick and needs to lie down. She wants a limo to take her home. So she calls her publicist 2,500 miles away in LA to arrange one. Outside the elevator she slumps down to the floor. Tall leggy models who've just finished shoots in other studios stand and bitch to each other while waiting for the doors to open. Outside, in the cold New York air, Lenny Kravitz strides purposefully down West 26th Street, avoiding all eye contact. Bijou offers to share her limo ride, but warns that she might be sick. 'That would be good for your article though, right?' she smiles.
Bijou Phillips was the product of a passionate, if toxic, love affair. Her mother is the South African model Geneviève Waïte. Phillips wrote the Mamas and Papas song 'Lady Genevieve' for her, and later an entire album released under her name called Romance Is On The Rise . 'It's such a cool record,' says Bijou. 'They were so in love when they made it.' We're sitting on the black-leather seats of a Lincoln Town Car heading north in the Manhattan streets.
By the end of The Mamas and the Papas, John Phillips had developed a voracious appetite for drugs. Geneviève succumbed too. Both would shoot up backstage after shows. Phillips had a history of philandering. Geneviève had her own problems as well. The legendary groupie - and mother of Liv Tyler - Bebe Buell recalls Waïte telling her how to cut her wrists just enough to show a lot of blood but without actually killing herself.
The marriage that produced Bijou couldn't last. Few of Phillips's relationships with women did. Bijou has several half-siblings - including Mackenzie from Phillips's first marriage, and Chynna from his second. Mackenzie first became famous as a troubled teen in American Graffiti. For a while she was a sitcom actress before her high-profile cocaine addiction led to her being sacked from the show - ironically titled One Day At A Time. Chynna was famous as part of the 80s group Wilson Phillips with Beach Boy Brian Wilson's daughters Wendy and Carnie, but gave up showbusiness when she married actor William Baldwin.
Bijou grew up mostly with her father. At 18, she wrote and released a folksy indie-rock album, I'd Rather Eat Glass. Listening to it is so like peering into a precocious teenager's diary it almost makes the listener feel guilty. One track, 'Little Dipper', describes in cold autobiographical detail the visits she paid to her mother: ' I could watch you all night long/ Drinking booze til the break of dawn...' At 21, of course, she's ashamed of having written that. 'I hate that song,' she says, lighting another Marlboro Red. 'When I wrote it, I don't know what I was doing.'
For a while Bijou lived an idyllic existence with her father in Malibu. The best present he ever gave her was a horse called Finnegan's Rainbow. 'I had a bunch of horses,' she says, 'but he was the one I really wanted.' She and Finnegan used to ride for miles across the Californian hillsides. At night she'd leave her window open, and he'd push his head inside and lay it on her face. In the morning she'd wake up and find herself covered in hay and saliva. 'We had,' she grins, 'like, a serious love affair. He was my best friend.'
And it was out of that pre-pubescent idyll that she fell into New York. There have been times she has sounded furious in interviews about the way that her parents unleashed her into the world, but today she doggedly refuses to make any link between her own upbringing and those of the teens in Bully .
There's a reason for this, perhaps. Her father died of heart failure following medical complications that resulted from years of drug abuse when Bijou was just two weeks short of her 21st birthday. The wound is still raw. Just how raw shows when I ask her what songs she's been writing lately. She lifts her head and starts belting out - in a fine, smoky voice - some lines from the last song she wrote: ' Baby I'm not tired/ I miss you Papa/ I'm watching the sun go down in your arms '. I repeat her line: you miss your papa? 'Yes,' she says, unhappily. 'A lot.'
How has your father's death changed you? What has it changed in you? 'Everything,' she says. She turns away to stare out of the window. 'Everything. My life sucks since he went away. I can't talk about it.'
When he died almost a year ago, Bijou stopped work. She went back to riding horses as she had when she was a girl. She says all she did for weeks on end was ride her horse Jupiter in the upper New York state countryside.
Perhaps one thing that has changed since John Phillips died is that Bijou has stopped blaming her dead father for her wayward upbringing. 'My dad was a great dad,' she says. 'An awesome dad. He had his own problems. He took custody of me, he took me to school every single day, made me breakfast, picked me up, made me dinner.
'When I used to be angry at him, it wasn't really my anger. It was more Mackenzie and Chynna's anger, and I was sort of projecting that. They were so pissed off at him, and I thought: "Well, I'll be pissed off, too." If my big sisters are telling me that my dad's an asshole, then OK, he's an asshole. Now it's like, "Wow, he did such a good job."'
The car pulls up outside the building where Bijou stays when she's in New York. It's where her boyfriend lives. He's Sean Lennon. His mother Yoko lives here, too. From the apartment windows you look out over Central Park. It's the park in which her dad, depressed by the grey New York weather, wrote 'California Dreamin'.
Bijou shares his father's antipathy to the Big Apple. 'There's something about everybody living on top of each other in such a cramped little space,' she says. 'It's so dirty and dark. I used to love it, but then all of a sudden I got this bad taste in my mouth.'
I could hazard a guess, I say, that that was about the time you grew out of your teenage outrage phase. 'Yeah,' she says, getting out of the car. 'There's such a dark aspect to this city that I've totally, like, seen.' And she crosses the sidewalk, close to where her boyfriend's father was shot dead, to enter the elevator.
Her gastric flu worsens. She spends the evening throwing up. 'You know, talking to the porcelain god.' Next day she flies out to the sunnier state her dad celebrated. She and Sean have a house on Mulholland Drive in Los Angeles. The house looks out on to the mountains. When she closes the gate she feels like she could be anywhere.
By Thursday, the worst is over, though her stomach is still sore. The family comes around. Bijou feels well enough to go out house-hunting with her big sister Mackenzie. Despite the eccentricities of their upbringings, they remain close.
Now it's afternoon, and she sits in the lounge where her 14-year-old nephew Shane picks up Bijou's pink electric guitar and starts playing - and very well, too. The music gene clearly runs in the family. Mackenzie is playing with Bijou's Chihuahuas in the yard. Sean is out there, too.
Bijou grew up among stars. It's always been that way. She dated Leonardo DiCaprio for a while. It was he who won her the part in Black and White . DiCaprio called up Toback one night and insisted he come to the Bowery Bar where this wild 14-year-old girl was dancing on the tables. 'She's crazy,' DiCaprio shouted down the phone. 'You've got to come and see her.' When they were shooting, she dated actor Elijah Wood. 'Now he's a Hobbit!' she grins. 'Did you see that yet? Lord of the Rings . It's so fun.'
It has been an unusual upbringing. She had experiences most of us don't have until we're years older, if at all. And there are huge gaps, too. She missed out a lot of school. If at times she seems kooky and vague, it's not just that she's Californian. When I make a joke about her being born on April Fool's Day, she bridles. 'Well, let me tell you this: Jesus Christ was born on April Fool's Day.'
He was? Really?
'And the reason it was called April Fool's Day is because when... oh, whatever king whatever-the-fuck-his-name-was, who wrote the, uh, Bible... some guy, decided there wasn't enough holidays in the winter, so he changed Jesus's birthday to December. And he said that anyone who still celebrated it in April was a fool.'
She thinks about this mind-boggling concept for a second, then adds, 'I'm glad Christmas isn't on April First, cos that would really suck when it came to presents.'
She's making up for lost time now, taking a general education degree to try and play catch up. Now she's stopped trying to shock her way into people's hearts, it's easier to like her - even to admire her for surviving everything she's been through. Dippy she may be, and perhaps spoiled, too. But at 21 she's trying hard not to conform to the Larry Clark stereotype of messed-up American brat.
It's no coincidence that many of her friends are, like her, second-generation famous - like Elijah Blue Allman and Sean Lennon. They share the same predicaments.
'We all sort of cling together. We hang out a lot,' Bijou says. 'For people who are - you know - second generation, it's not like every day you find people who you can discuss stuff with.
'I mean, if a bunch of people were from the ghettoes,' she says, wandering out to the yard, 'they'd all talk about that, wouldn't they?'
· Bully is out now on general release.