JIM CARREY IS known for looning around in films such as Dumb and Dumber and The Mask. But underneath all the comic bluster, he's a spiritual guy, he says. 'I'd rather sit and expand my consciousness than go to a club and listen to music,' Carrey says during an interview in New York. 'I like to see if trees are spiritually connected to my feet, that kind of thing. I believe that everything is connected - sometimes I even think I'm the planet Saturn. I'm really just a spiritually imperfect guy who is working on improving himself.' Carrey's latest movie, Fun with Dick and Jane, is a lot more down to earth. A remake of a 1977 film starring George Segal and Jane Fonda, the story follows a middle-class couple who fall foul of corporate corruption and turn to crime to make ends meet. When the company that Dick (Carrey) works for is shut down by investigators, he and his wife Jane (Tea Leoni) embark on a crime spree to pay their suburban mortgage. Fun with Dick and Jane doesn't really stand up as a social satire, but fans of Carrey's sense of humour will probably find much to enjoy. 'It's part of my job to use comedy to help people laugh at really serious problems,' says Carrey. 'That way they can get relief from them.' This time around the problems are recognisable as the greedy executives of Enron, Tyco and the like. 'It doesn't get much nastier than corporate corruption - a lot of CEOs out there are going crazy with our money. I think everyone knows that this apple is rotten, but we all keep nibbling at it as long as we can to see what we can get from it. We just go on banking the cheques, even though we know that it's not quite right.' Part of Carrey's attraction to Fun with Dick and Jane was the chance to work with Tea Leoni. The tough-talking actress more than holds her own. 'I haven't ever done a film in which a woman stands shoulder to shoulder with me and gives as good as she gets,' says Carrey. 'We had a cool domestic thing going on in the story while we were committing robberies, and that was a really good idea. She's a really good actress, and that keeps the film believable during the more ridiculous parts.' Carrey's acting skills were highlighted in Peter Weir's The Truman Show, in which he played a man trapped inside a television show. He agrees that the unusual drama was one of his best. 'I feel blessed that I was able to do something like The Truman Show. I know a bunch of people who are really successful, so I get insecure about myself. But every once in a while I'll sit back and think, hey, I've done some good work, too.' Carrey also points to the surreal romance Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind as one of his more dramatically successful works. 'I liked the way it played with film language,' he says. 'It really was a different kind of film. All the special effects were done on camera - there were no digital ones. I was running around changing clothes behind the scenes so that I could be in three different places at the same time. That was the whole joy of it - it cost us no money to get those effects. You can spend US$100 million on effects, but that film shows you don't have to.' One of his next projects may well join those two as a favourite. Carrey plans to team up with director Tim Burton to make a film about Robert Ripley of Believe It or Not fame. 'It's never done until it's done, but we've talked about it,' Carrey says. 'Ripley's an extraordinary guy who gets caught between fantasy and reality, and likes to fool the world. He's an inventor who's surrounded by a band of misfits and freaks. Nobody does misfits and freaks better than Tim Burton.' Carrey is a genial fellow off-screen, and appears to be the opposite of his frantic movie persona. He talks in long rambles that seem to be more directed at himself than interviewers, and he's often funny without noticing it. Carrey is Canadian rather than American - his family name was adapted from the French Carre. He grew up poor after his father was made redundant, and had a tough early life working as a security guard and cleaner. 'I was the angry guy who carried a baseball bat around with him to lash out with,' he says. His father encouraged him to break into comedy, and Carrey began his career in Canada as a stand-up. He got his break in the US as a regular on the comedy show In Living Color - he was the only white performer in the black cast - before cracking the big time with Ace Ventura, Pet Detective. He still has fond memories of that movie. 'I'm very proud of it.' Carrey now reportedly earns US$20 million a picture. But he's not just in it for the money, he says. 'Money comes because you believe that it's abundant and start working for it. Money is a symptom of my work. I never wanted to be the highest paid anything. If I'm making money, I'm doing projects I want to do. The money is always a result of just trying really hard.' Still, he's rich enough to stop working if he wants to. But he enjoys movie life too much. 'I work hard and I guess that I must really get excited by the work or I wouldn't do it any more. After all, I don't need to do it. I'm OK with the finances. The thing that keeps me at it is trying to keep the people in the cinema seats happy.' He's also happy that, bar a few incidents, the paparazzi leave him alone. He's rarely on the covers of the celebrity rags, which nowadays are devoted to the likes of Jessica Simpson, Paris Hilton and Britney Spears. 'People focus on me as an actor, and I'm proud of that,' he says. 'I'm lucky that I've not become a target for the tabloids. 'I've had my picture taken and they follow me when there's a movie coming out. They piggy- back on that kind of energy. I don't like it. But fortunately I really haven't been dragged through the mud. For the most part people have been pretty respectful, and I'm happy about that. So my life isn't really insane.' It's common knowledge in Hollywood that the less interesting stars use their personal lives to keep them in the news: a lot of the time, they willingly go public with all that personal information to keep their profiles up. 'There are so many TV channels and so much other media, I think that people feel a desperate need to be noticed sometimes,' Carrey says. 'And I think it can lead you to give too much away. I'm just not going to do that. My love life will never be for sale. They can speculate all they want. But it will never be something that I use to promote myself.' Instead of garnering column inches, Carrey prefers - as he puts it - to experiment with his life. 'I experiment with everything,' he says with a grin. 'I look at a lot of different spiritual philosophies, and I'm always looking for answers. I experiment with food: What if I quit this? What if I quit that? I even gave up salad dressing for a day. That was sad, and I'll never do that again. But it was all part of the experiment that I feel is my life.' Fun with Dick and Jane opens on January 28