Sir Anthony Hopkins drove from L.A. to Seattle to receive a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Seattle International Film Festival and to show a new feature film that he wrote and directed. Yes, you read that right, he drove up. And not because he's afraid of flying, either, but because he enjoys driving across this great country of ours and likes meeting regular folks along the way.

Though the calendar says he's approaching 70 years old, he's still very young at heart and his taste for adventure continues to grow. Case in point: this crazy little fever dream of a film he wrote and directed called Slipstream, which played at SIFF.

In front of a packed house of nearly 400 people, before the movie started, Mr. Hopkins sauntered forward and took the microphone. He told us that this was a very strange movie. He said he wrote it as a creative exercise, and only decided to bring it in front of the cameras because of the prompting of his wife (Stella Arroyave, who helped produce and is also in the movie). He told us it was a very personal film, but wouldn't tell us what it meant and encouraged us to make our own interpretations of it. He seemed to relish unleashing this film on the audience, and it is the epitome of independent film: bold and adventurous, and not out to please the masses.

And then the movie started.

When the title of the film appears onscreen, there is a flash of the word "dream". This is your first clue that the movie won't follow traditional narrative logic. If I remember correctly, the first images are of L.A. traffic, desert sunsets, and faces of people we haven't yet met, and then it settles in on an older woman at home talking to her niece, Nina. Only the movie doesn't really settle down. Flash frames pop up almost randomly, and stutter edits cause people to repeat words and phrases, and on TV there is a horse race that Felix Bonhoeffer (Anthony Hopkins) is attending.

The film moves to Felix at the races. He's there with Tracy (Lisa Pepper), a young actress. Is he her mentor? Her boss? Her lover? It's hard to say, but their ambiguous relationship feels very L.A. somehow. The flash frames and stutter edits continue, such as a splash of blood hitting a window, or John Turturro as a line chef in a diner shouting, "Do a rewrite!" This is the kind of movie that always makes you aware that you are watching a movie, and jams a lot of stuff into it through its editorial manipulations.

Most of all, however, the film is playful, both in form and content.

When Felix and Tracy are stuck in stopped traffic after the race, a man gets out of his car and starts shooting people while shouting, "We lost the plot!" Even though the movie just started, he's right. A couple of small scenes float by that introduce Michael Clarke Duncan as a bar owner and Christian Slater as some sort of fedora-wearing fugitive from an old hit-man movie. Then the action moves to a diner in the desert and stays there for a chunk of time. Slater goes to the diner and is joined by fellow hit-man "Geek" (Jeffrey Tambor), and they start to terrorize the people who are just trying to work or eat.

Slater in particular is over the top in this role, and it seems like he's having a blast overacting. Then the frame of the "narrative" pulls back to reveal the diner is actually the set of a film within the film and Christian Slater is playing the actor Matt Dobbs, who ends up dying from a serious case of overacting. Now the producer (John Turturro) is calling Felix, who is the screenwriter, to drive to the set to do a rewrite to accommodate the absence of the late actor.

As you can probably tell, this is not your standard Hollywood vanity piece. But what is it? Slipstream is a lot like David Lynch's Inland Empire in that it's an impressionistic look into and beneath the pathology of Hollywood, although Slipstream is a little more playful and a little less rigorously structured.

In both the Q&A after the film and the sit-down interview I had with Mr. Hopkins, he talked about how he was trying to mimic the flow of thoughts and dreams, to capture the stuttering nature of how thoughts arise and the malleable logic of dreams. It almost feels as though Mr. Hopkins opened up his subconscious and didn't edit it down (at least until he needed to create a shooting script). What comes out is a mixture of nostalgia for old movies (as with the hit men, but also with a nice segment that brings 92-year-old Kevin McCarthy, the star of the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers, out of retirement), and a satiric look at the current movie industry.

Mr. Hopkins said that he made this film to goose the people who take things too seriously, to poke a little fun at actors and New Age practitioners and maybe to get under the skin of audiences too.

Slipstream is both an experimental film and a light comedy, and nothing you would ever expect to come out of Hollywood, and it gets by on its own playful enthusiasm. This movie is certainly not for everyone, but what I love about it is that it is a quintessential independent film, willing to take chances and risk failure. As an added bonus, Mr. Hopkins populated it with recognizable names both in front of the camera and behind, led by the great Italian cinematographer Dante Spinati.

As we were wrapping up our interview, I asked him if he would be more likely or less likely to work on somebody else's independent film after this experience, and he told me he absolutely would be more likely to work on one. He also said he may make a couple more movies like this . I hope he does. With the discipline that practice and experience gives any writer-director-composer (he also wrote the music for Slipstream), entertaining cinematic doodles like this one can develop into bona fide works of art.

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Andy Spletzer had a dream where he interviewed Anthony Hopkins after watching some crazy experimental film that he directed.

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