Charles Bukowski: boozing, brawling, and larger-than-life, he was the rebels' poet, on the occasion of a much anticipated documentary about his legacy, a spiritual bedfellow looks back

Ten years since his death and now the subject of a riveting documentary, Bukowski: Born Into This, writer Charles Bukowski continues to fascinate and inspire. Here, Mickey Rourke, who portrayed Bukowski alter ego Henry Chinaski in 1987's Barfly, remembers the man and the myth. RICHARD DORMENT

"While we were shooting Barfly, Charles would come into my trailer at seven in the morning, go to the refrigerator, open up a beer, and say, 'Have a beer.' I'd say, 'No, I don't drink in the morning,' and he'd go, 'You pussy.' But then my brother, Joey, would say, 'I'll take one,' and the two of them would drink and ramble all morning. Joey would ask me, 'How come they're making a movie about this guy? He's just a fucking drunk!' And I'd go, 'Well, Joey, he's a really good writer.'

"I was surprised when I visited Charles in his big nice house in San Pedro. You read his shit and you'd figure he'd be living in some dump under the railway station. But what blew my fucking mind was that when I went upstairs to where he wrote, he'd actually torn the room apart: The floorboards were sticking up, the walls were destroyed. So you've got this pristine house and then you see this tiny little room, which we've all lived in at some point, and it was truly like a shanty. Some people see Charles as a mad genius, but there was also a regimented discipline to him because in doing that to his room, he constructed a place where he could be creative."

Mickey Rourke will appear next in Robert Rodriguez's Sin City.

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