Sean Penn is standing on the sidewalk at an outdoor mall in Malibu's Cross Creek. He's just had lunch — steak frites, rare — and he's smoking a cigarette and explaining why he's never written a memoir.

"I've been offered a lot of money to do one of those," says Penn, who has written two novels and multiple screenplays. "And I could see doing one someday, if I felt really old."

And then he stops. He sees something I haven't noticed.

"Oh, there you go," he says.

Penn points to a lonely lens about 100 feet away in the parking lot.

"See the photographer on the other side of the gray truck?" he asks.

In the old days, he responded to the paparazzi in ways that led to lawsuits and arrests. You can purchase a gelatin silver print of Penn, circa 1986, swinging at a photographer who had followed him and then-wife Madonna to their apartment in New York City. On this August afternoon in 2021, Penn doesn't snap. His expression flattens as he strides to his pickup truck. He's not being targeted, necessarily. He's just the most famous person spotted that afternoon by a photographer sweeping an area near the homes of Tom Hanks, Bob Dylan and Julia Roberts.

"They come to check, see if anybody famous is over here," says Penn. "They'll collect the picture of me. They're not going to make a lot of money on that now. They need, you know, Britney Spears, or whoever else they're paying attention to."

There is resignation and acknowledgment in his voice. Sean Penn is 61 now. He didn't mean to get famous, though he somehow ended up more famous than most. He won Oscars in 2004 and 2009, and that seemed to inspire him to have an equally outsized impact off-screen. He went to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and to Haiti after the 2010 earthquake.

One afternoon early last year, Penn was out in front of his house putting a decal on the door of his Toyota Tacoma. The sticker was for CORE, or Community Organized Relief Effort, the nonprofit organization he founded in 2010.

Julia Roberts and her husband, cinematographer Danny Moder, were driving by and stopped to talk. The coronavirus had started to spread, and the government seemed paralyzed.

"And we talked for a while about how terrifying things were, and then I noted his mood and said, 'You look good,'" says Roberts. "And he said, 'Emergency is my happy place.'"

Penn has a new film, "Flag Day," and he should be talking about that. Only that. But that's not Penn. He is strongly opinionated, with a caveat: He's not always positive he's right, and when he's not, he's often willing to admit it. What he lives for is the discussion.

This means topics that would make most Hollywood publicists shudder — Harvey Weinstein and #MeToo, race and gender, Susan Sarandon's Bernie Sanders fixation — are fair game in interviews. Penn will even bring them up. He did not appreciate Sen. Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, telling men to "just shut up and step up" during the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

"I have feelings about where men stand in the world," Penn says. "I have feelings about where women stand in the world. I have feelings about where Black men stand in the world, and without those feelings, I'm not human. And to be told you are only allowed to have feelings about your own experience, we all may as well just part ways. It shuts off learning."

Show business is another sore topic. On the eve of the first movie he's both directed and starred in, pessimism saturates the conversation. "I want to be optimistic," he says to an audience assembled for a preview of "Flag Day," "but I do think the sky is falling."

Penn doesn't care much for streaming, "the hybrid exhibition model" or whatever studio execs want to call it. He has an iPad, though he hasn't figured out how to use it, and you'll never catch him watching "The Revenant" or "Coming Home" on his phone. (He's no snob. He does watch TV, and raves about "Succession," Kate Winslet's performance in "Mare of Easttown" and Questlove's debut documentary, "Summer of Soul.") Over the past few weeks, Penn has been filming a series for Starz called "Gaslit," in which he plays former attorney general John Mitchell to Julia Roberts's Martha Mitchell.

But he has not changed the way he feels about movies. He misses the collective experience of sitting in the dark with an audience, knowing that thousands across the country are experiencing, say, "Taxi Driver" at the same time. He misses an era when the best movies were also some of the biggest movies.

"Entertaining is great, but that's not all a movie should do," Penn says. "I now find more actors interested in just entertaining than in digging in and revealing anything about human behavior in a serious way. It's less character-driven, more cool-driven, and an awful lot of mediocrity. And then a lot of things that I just get repulsed by. I mean, like these 'Fast and Furious' movies. I wanted to vomit watching a trailer."

These days, any time he acts, he calls it "suiting up." If he had his choice, he'd devote himself to writing novels, but his two Bob Honey books didn't move like Harry Potter. By continuing to act, he aims to basically make enough to keep what he has: a modest single-level home in Malibu and a second place in Hawaii. So many of his heroes — Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty, the late Marlon Brando — slowed their production schedules down after they turned 60. Penn can't.

"They'll all extremely wealthy and I'm not," he says.

"Flag Day" tells the real-life story of John Vogel, a fast-talking con man who spent much of his life plotting or in jail when a plot collapsed. Penn first read the script 15 years ago and immediately saw his daughter, Dylan, now 30, as the star. She resisted. She wasn't interested in acting; she would go on to work as a fashion model.

Eventually, after some urging from her mother (Penn's second wife, the actress Robin Wright), she agreed to play daughter Jennifer Vogel.

"Flag Day" almost collapsed. Casey Affleck, picked to play John Vogel, dropped out only a month before filming started. Penn has lost other projects, most notably an adaptation of a Gabriel García Márquez novel he had hoped would be Brando's final great performance. But this was different. "Flag Day" was starring his daughter.

The closest he got, on such short notice, to finding a suitable replacement was Matt Damon, who read the script and called back excited. But he had committed to "Stillwater" and didn't have time. He told Penn he was crazy not to act opposite his daughter.

"And I said, 'Well, you know, I am, whatever I was, 58 years old,'" said Penn, noting that in the film Vogel ages from his 20s to his 60s.

"There's a way to do that digitally," Damon said.

At the Cannes Film Festival in July, Moder, who served as director of photography on "Flag Day," sat with Sean and Dylan Penn and actress Katheryn Winnick on a "Flag Day" panel.

"It was amazing," says Moder. "Seventy percent of the questions were about his humanitarian efforts."

Many celebrities give money or take up causes. Penn's commitment is something different, melding philanthropy with a kind of fearless wanderlust. After the verdict in Rodney King's beating in 1992, with Los Angeles on fire, he found himself driving into the middle of the riots. After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, he traveled to Iran to write a story for the San Francisco Chronicle and to Iraq to tour a hospital and meet with public officials. He called it fact-finding. Others attacked him for being naive.

Even now, Penn can't explain exactly what drives his form of extreme volunteerism. Is it his late father, Leo, an actor and director, being blacklisted for supporting the Hollywood 10 after he returned from bombing missions in World War II? Guilt over his success? Boredom?

Former president Bill Clinton, who started working with Penn in Haiti in 2010, has his own theory.

"Instead of asking, I watched him," says Clinton. "And I think he does it, first of all, because he finds it interesting and he thinks it actually makes him a better actor, a better director, a better artist to know how other people actually live, not to visit and look at it, but to actually know."

Penn is standing in his front yard when he's told about Clinton's praise. He's honored but shrugs. He's purpose-driven, yes, but does not believe he's a humanitarian.

"If I were humanitarian, I wouldn't have 750 reasons for Greta Thunberg to hate me in my garage, which is my Dodge Hellcat," he says. (The car's V-8 engine produces 750 horsepower.)

He also resists analyzing his motivation, shifting the conversation to what he believes he's skilled at: staying calm during a crisis. He admits to finding satisfaction in clearing a neighborhood of rubble or tearing through the dark streets of Port-au-Prince to get an injured boy to the right hospital.

"I don't get too flustered when the house is on fire," says Penn. "I have the right temperament. And when you're doing what fulfills your temperament, it's very rewarding."