Bad to the bone

"I don't play bad guys; some of the guys I play are bad," he eventually responds in a suffer-no-fools tone. But the 78-year-old actor then pauses, flashes a cheeky grin and adds, "and some of the guys I play are badly played, too!"

In The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, Sutherland returns to what plenty of others would describe as the villainous role of President Snow, the man who has now put Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) in the Hunger Games not once, but twice in order to keep all the districts of Panem under his control and quash any talk of rebellion. The best-selling series of three books by Suzanne Collins is being adapted into four films, which all feature the legendary actor in a role that has earned him a new generation of fans.

"But he doesn't enjoy what he's putting her through; pragmatically, it's necessary in the process of his governing," Sutherland insists, looking smart in a dark suit with pale pink shirt and tie as he fidgets with his bushy silver beard and sips tea in a Beverly Hills hotel suite.

"He enjoys his relationship with Katniss and actually loves her and recognises her genius. He thinks if he can work things around to protect her and save her, maybe she will come over to his side. So Snow doesn't think he's bad," he says, circling back to his original argument. "He knows that some people are dead because of him, but so does Barack Obama and Lyndon Johnson, right?"

Sutherland has been famous longer than his 23-year-old co-star Jennifer Lawrence has been alive, but he's full of admiration for how she navigates that very different world today. "Fame is bewildering and I think she has dealt with it really well, but I don't think either of us are the kind of actors who sought it out," he adds. "People come up to me all the time and say, 'you are much better-looking than you are on the television' so I don't know much about fame at all!"

In his 46-year film career Sutherland has played some of the most unusual and memorable characters in cinema history. Growing up in Canada, he moved to England at 21 to study at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts and moved to the United States where he made his film debut in The Dirty Dozen (1967). Some of his best-known films include: Kelly's Heroes (1970), M*A*S*H (1970), Klute (1971), The Eagle Has Landed (1976), Animal House (1978), Ordinary People (1980), JFK (1991) and A Time to Kill (1996), in which he worked with his son, Kiefer Sutherland.

He laughs when asked if he has career regrets. "You should ask my wife, she will tell you what I should have done," muses Sutherland, referring to former actress Francine Racette, whom he met on the set of the 1974 flop Alien Thunder and married in 1990. "I am embarrassing sometimes, I really am, and I wasn't very objective in the early '70s so I made some silly choices and many errors," he elaborates. "I turned down Deliverance, even though John Boorman came and lived beside me for two weeks trying to persuade me to do it, but if I had done it, then I probably wouldn't have made the film that introduced me to my wife and I would actually rather have my wife!"

Sutherland has been an anti-war activist since 1971 when during his brief relationship with Klute co-star Jane Fonda they performed in the Free the Army anti-war revue that toured military bases. This was also a factor in why he signed on to The Hunger Games.

"I remember being in Capetown, South Africa, with my wife years ago and the hotel would always ask us to sign the book of visitors," he recalls.

"One day my wife told me she wanted to sign the book too, and I thought it was strange, because she's never wanted to sign the book in all the years of travelling. Then I saw on the opposite page, the signature of Nelson Mandela and I understood. That's why I wanted to be part of these movies because it kind of matches my heartbeat.

''It's not the Battle of Algiers and maybe not as succinct perhaps as Paths of Glory, but it's something that in this day and age can be a motivating force for young people, who have been dormant in terms of their political activity for years. I hope that by the time the four films are finished, it will have an extraordinarily clear resonance with people, young and old."

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire

Genre Action-drama.

Buzz Movie has huge expectations but built-in fan base is sure to deliver.

Stars Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, Liam Hemsworth, Donald Sutherland.

Director Francis Lawrence.

Release Out now, rated M.

Read all about it: why young adult fiction is box-office gold

They are some of the most anticipated films of the year and they all portray dystopian visions of worlds in crisis.

But The Hunger Games, How I Live Now, Ender's Game and Divergent have something else in common - their stories have all been plucked from popular young adult novels.

With budgets under pressure and hot competition from the ever-expanding Marvel universe, film studios are turning to this rich mine of new stories. Judith Ridge, an internationally recognised expert in young adult literature and project officer at WestWords, says the reason the young adult books (which are generally aimed at those aged between 13 and 18) are so appealing is because they offer ''really strong characters and stories''.

''Young adult books, in addition to having really strong plots and great characters, are also often dealing with really big, challenging ideas - morality, love, sex, death - because these are the big things that teenagers are starting to come to grips with, so that also gives them a substance that translates well to films,'' she says.

It also means the films come with a built-in audience (The Hunger Games book trilogy landed three spots on Australia's best-seller list last year) and strong social media buzz (think of the online frenzy surrounding anythingTwilight related).

They're also box-office gold: the first Hunger Games raked in $US690 million worldwide, while the five Twilight films averaged $US668.6 million each. Of the present crop, Ridge is most looking forward to The Hunger Games: Catching Fire as she thought the filmmakers did a brilliant job with the first instalment and dealt with the confronting concept of ''kids killing kids'' with integrity.

Also on Ridge's radar is John Green's The Fault in Our Stars (filming now), the 2012 novel about teenaged cancer patient who falls in love. ''I really hope they do it justice,'' she says.

And don't go thinking the young adult hype is a noughties craze. Ridge nominates 1967's The Outsiders, by S.E. Hinton, as the first-ever young adult novel, which was, of course, turned into the 1983 hit directed by Francis Ford Coppola and starring a young Tom Cruise, Matt Dillon and Patrick Swayze. Louise Rugendyke