Pierce Brosnan, interview for Love Is All You Need In the film, Brosnan plays a widower and a big noise on the Copenhagen fruit and veg wholesale scene, who travels to Capri for his son's impending wedding and falls for his future daughter-in-law's mother, played by the Danish actress Trine Dyrholm. In Denmark, the film's title is The Bald-Headed Hairdresser: Dyrholm's character is suffering from cancer and has undergone both chemotherapy and a mastectomy. This is painfully familiar territory for Brosnan, who lost his first wife, the actress Cassandra Harris, to ovarian cancer in 1991. Indeed, it was these parallels that drew him to the role. "I was fully aware of the notes within the piece that chimed with my own life, having lost a wife to cancer," he says. That was part of the seduction of it, and the charm of it. My job as an actor is to show those emotions; to be connected to those parts of my life that have such meaning and poignancy. I don't know how Susanne hit upon me for this role... and yet I do. She said she would write it for me, and she did. Bier shares her writing credit with Anders Thomas Jensen, who also co-wrote her Oscar-winning 2010 film, In a Better World. The road I have travelled means I can understand just about as much as one can understand such tragedy in life. Love is All You Need premiered at the Venice Film Festival last year, and I remember watching Brosnan sauntering into the Palazzo del Cinema for his photo call, fresh off the water taxi, wearing a crisp beige blazer and a white shirt unbuttoned to a near-Hasselhoffian degree. The screening fell between a Japanese thriller in which a lot of angry gangsters shout at one another for two hours and a Korean drama about a loan shark who does a wide variety of unpleasant things to his mother, and it was received by weary critics like a cool breeze blowing in from the lagoon. Many of the reviews, including my own, praised the film for its delicate balance of escapist warmth and plausible heartache, and Brosnan's personal connection to the story folds in another layer of pathos for those looking for it. Nor is this the first film to which he has been drawn because of its resemblance to a real-life sadness: Sean, his son from his first marriage, was seriously hurt in a car crash aged 13. This inspired him to star in The Greatest (2009), a drama about a father who loses his eldest son in such an accident. It was the first film Brosnan produced, and he admits the project took both time and courage. "It was somewhere I didn't want to go, and I threw the script under the bed," he recalls. "But then I looked at it again and thought, "It's time to go there." But that's life. It's Deaths and Entrances; it's Dylan Thomas. Brosnan does this a lot: he flits off into unexpected mini-digressions, talking about art and thought with an ease bordering on mateyness. At one point he brings up Jungian synchronicity as if Jung himself had explained it to him over a pint of Guinness and a shared bag of Golden Wonder. "Well, that's old Carl for you," he chortles. Could this be a way for the man who played Remington Steele, Thomas Crown and the only 007 to drive an invisible car to gently reassert his artistic credentials? After all, Brosnan's first ambition was to be a painter - he studied at Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design in London in the early Seventies. At the moment, with good reason, he is intrigued by the Danish film-making philosophy known as Dogme 95: a set of rules drawn up by Bier's contemporaries Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg that were designed to "purify" low budget film-making. Love is All You Need has been made in line with the Dogme dogma: the cameras are hand-held, the lighting is natural, and all filming was carried out on location as opposed to studio sets. It couldn't be more distant from the precision-engineered cool of the Bond films - unless perhaps if Brosnan was also singing selected hits from Abba's back-catalogue, which we will come to shortly. "Dogme has beguiled and fascinated me for many years, so it was exhilarating to come to work each day," he enthuses. The camera was like an extension of yourself, another character - the cameraman, the sound man and the focus pull were always before me, in constant motion. Perhaps unexpectedly, this aesthetically rigorous, Scandinavian-crafted piece has much in common with another recent Brosnan success story: Mamma Mia! (2008), the £400million-grossing hen-night-on-celluloid that, it is fair to say, resuscitated his career following his departure from the Bond franchise in 2004. Not only do both films build towards a wedding, but squint at the right moments and Capri looks very much like Greece, and that flapping seagull on the rooftop in the background could almost be Meryl Streep. "They're like bookends really; they're on the same shelf," he says. Followed by this gag, delivered deadpan: "I did suggest to Susanne that I sing a few songs, but she promptly closed me down. I don't know why, really. The film was crying out for an SOS, I suggest. He roars. Oh, I'm going to sing again, I don't care what people say. Even though I could sense the similarities to Mamma Mia! while I was making this, when I saw it I was bedazzled by how much it was cut from the same swathe of cloth. But yes, Mamma Mia! was a real kick in the pants all around. Like James Bond, it's the gift that keeps giving, if you embrace it. Don't let it become a burden. Just enjoy it. Did he enjoy last year's 50th birthday festivities around the release of Skyfall? Of course, you have to celebrate it. One will always be a Bond; a James Bond" - old lines evidently die hard - "but now it's another man's life. Onward always, you carry the mantle of it. And what a gift. When we spoke Brosnan had not yet seen Skyfall, although he was planning to take his sons to see it on his return to New York. He is still to catch up with the earlier Daniel Craig Bond films, Casino Royale (2006) and Quantum of Solace (2008), due to both mixed feelings about his exit from the franchise and unreliable in-flight movie technology. "Back in the Casino Royale days I was on a plane and I started watching it: I thought 37,000 feet was a fair distance from the reality to observe it all; to see what Daniel had done," he says. But it broke down. And they fixed it. And it broke down again. On the third attempt it froze, and I thought, "Leave it at that." Let the man get on with it, and you get on with marching forward and cleaving out a career for oneself. Which, to give Brosnan credit, is exactly what he seems to be doing. He has already finished two more films: Love Punch, a comedy with Emma Thompson; and A Long Way Down, a drama based on a Nick Hornby novel, with Rosamund Pike. Next is Last Man Out, an IRA drama; November Man, a spy thriller with Dominic Cooper; and an as-yet-untitled television series with Jack Orman, a former writer and producer on ER. ""Action and recovery, action and recovery," as my drama teacher used to say," he says, wafting his hand to and fro. From my vantage point on the fainting couch, the two look very much like the same thing. Love is All You Need is out on Friday 19 April