IT seemed as though someone was playing a cruel trick on Richard Attenborough in the week that the British film industry veteran made headlines over remarks about the "pornography of violence" in modern movies.

The screening of his new film Grey Owl was preceded by a trailer for The Way Of The Gun. Hardly the sort of blood-and-guts thriller you'd expect to see before Attenborough's gentle biopic about the first eco-warrior.

It emerged I'd been directed to the wrong cinema - Blair Witch 2 was the main attraction not Grey Owl - but not before it had crossed my mind that perhaps Guy Ritchie, the Lock Stock director whose follow-up gangster thriller Snatch was singled out for criticism, had sneaked into the projection box and tampered with his Lordship's celluloid opus to teach him to keep his mouth shut.

Silence is unlikely as the distinguished British film-maker is known as man who fights causes and chairs committees as easily as he makes movies. This is the man whose career spans more than half a century of acting, producing and directing. He's never lost for words although the mention of his alleged attack on Ritchie gives him cause to pause before replying.

It all hinges, he explains, on just three lines in a four-page article in which Attenborough expressed the view that if audiences are over-exposed to gratuitous violence they'll become inured to them.

"My grandchildren, from the age of ten up to 17, are going to believe that violence as such is an acceptable form of behaviour which is a human characteristic that doesn't disturb people beyond the actual moment," he says.

"I said I thought that for audiences to accept violence to that extent was a huge responsibility as far as the media were concerned."

He emphasises that he doesn't favour censorship. And he can't plead non-involvement, saying that the 1947 film Brighton Rock in which he played a knife-slashing juvenile delinquent was a "terrifying piece of violence but was attacking race gangs, condemning it not condoning it".

He recalls seeing a scene in the Russian classic Battleship Potemkin in which a woman is shot through the eye. "All you saw was a smashed lens and I can remember the gasp in the auditorium. The thought was so dreadful and the degree of violence was so unexpected in a movie that it had impact. You can blow a woman or man's head off now and you don't get a gasp.

"I am perturbed. Not that I think people would rush out into the streets and literally enact something they've seen. I'm simply saying that if you portray a society where the confrontation of violence, the awfulness and extent to which it now goes, with a reality which is available by virtue of technique, that degree of promiscuity seems to me just awful. I really do feel we are raising a new generation who will no longer abhor the use of violence to the extent that they should."

Grey Owl is a far cry from the Lock Stock genre. Pierce Brosnan stars as a Canadian native American Indian whose books and lectures on conservation and environmental issues brought him worldwide fame in the 1930s, earning him the title of the world's first eco-warrior. Only after his death was it revealed he was a fake - and really an Englishman from Hastings.

It's a fascinating story and one with a message that enables Attenborough to continue themes from previous directorial credits such as Gandhi, Cry Freedom and Oh What A Lovely War.

As children he and his brother, natural world expert David Attenborough, actually attended one of Grey Owl's lectures in their home town of Leicester. "Dave was interested in the natural world and I, being the ham, liked the theatricality of the performance. Afterwards we lined up and got him to sign his book Pilgrims Of The Wild," he recalls. He'd forgotten this until long-time associate and co-producer Diana Hawkins told him about an incredible story she'd read in a copy of Country Life in the doctor's waiting room. Attenborough realised that this was the fake Indian he'd seen all those years ago. He couldn't believe that it hadn't occurred to him, or anyone else for that matter, to make a film about Grey Owl before.

Pierce Brosnan swapped his immaculately-groomed James Bond look for skins and hair extensions to play Archie Grey Owl. "Pierce is, if I may be allowed to say, very good. You never think of 007," he says. "I have some sympathy for him wanting to play different parts. I was hopelessly typecast when I was younger and had a miserable time doing spivs and quivering psychopaths. I got very bored with it. The self-evident example is Sean (Connery) who took God knows how long but now sails through to this exalted position. But he had a hell of a time breaking out of Bond. What Pierce wanted to do apart from the fact that he is a passionate environmentalist is say, 'hey, don't leave me sinking in Bond, I really can do other things'."

Attenborough was able to go to experts, his brother David and his BBC wildlife film crews for advice. "Dave said, 'Dick, don't try and set it up. Have a camera available and photograph everything they do. Don't be tempted to use animatronics'. So we never stunted anything."

Making Grey Owl was one thing, getting an American cinema distribution deal has been impossible. "It's distressing really," he says. "I am not wanting to put words into your mouth but the picture's not crap. It's well-made, beautifully acted, exquisite to look at. When one thinks of the sort of things that do get released in America, it's puzzling."

He tells of one studio executive who left a screening in tears, said how much he enjoyed it and asked to keep the print to show to friends over the weekend but added there was no way they could market it. Perhaps, Attenborough reflects, his attitude would have been more helpful if there had been sex and violence.

"Isn't that terrible? If they say the picture is rubbish. If they say it's half an hour too long. If they say almost anything, I understand. But to say it's a beautiful film but we don't know how to market it. It's never happened to me before because I hardly ever make pictures for the studios. It's very odd, very strange and I don't full comprehend it. But I'm not going to compromise."

That extends to his acting roles. He was persuaded by director Steven Spielberg to appear in Jurassic Park and played Santa Claus in a remake of Miracle On 34th Street but recently turned down the leading role in a big movie "on the grounds it was obscene".

He's 77 and "will have to give up in the not too distant future" but has three film projects in the planning stages as a director. And of course there's his long-delayed wish to make a film about 18th Century radical writer Thomas Paine. "I feel content with the screenplay now but it will take a few years to raise the money. But while I am still breathing I will do it. I am determined. It's such a great story."

l Grey Owl (PG) is released on November 3.