It is 35 years since a quartet of Atlanta city slickers set off into the Georgian wilderness for a spot of rural R&R. A couple of days paddling down the river, a couple of nights under the stars, then home “in time to see the pom-pom girls at half-time in the Sunday ball game”. Idyllic stuff.

Fat chance. By the time the cheer-leaders had bounced out, one of the group was dead, one had been raped by a hillbilly and the other two had each killed a man with a bow and arrow. Deliverance (which has been reissued on DVD) was one of the big screen’s most elemental tales, heightening the insecurities of urban wusses the world over, popularising the phrases “duelling banjos” and “squeal like a pig”, and informing films as diverse as City Slickers, Pulp Fiction and Crocodile Dundee.

Admittedly, some of it has dated. A tank-topped Burt Reynolds, as Lewis, the trip’s gung-ho leader, is now worryingly reminiscent of the infantile paintballers from The Fast Show.

But the moral compass of Deliverance was always Jon Voight, who played the more reflective Ed. Exploring the tension between metropolitan equivocation and the survival instincts that many Americans had rediscovered in Vietnam, he produced one of his most quietly effective performances.

Since then, the quality has been patchy: for every Ali, there has been an Anaconda. But Voight responds well to Brits, having reserved three of his best strong-but-sensitive turns for films by British directors: John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy, Ronald Neame’s The Odessa File and John Boorman’s Deliverance.

“It was a bit like a real camping trip,” the 68-year-old remembers of the Deliveranceshoot. “We were making a movie and all working very hard, but still having a lot of fun.” He and Reynolds, who had met only once before, hit it off splendidly. “We challenged each other and he teased me. I had always considered myself a natural athlete, but Burt was a world-class football player and a certified stuntman. He was doing his own stunts and so I wanted to do mine, too. It wasn’t healthy for me, but I did it anyway.”

“Insurance? I never been insured in my life,” sneers Lewis hubristically at the beginning of the trip. Word has it that the movie’s producers thought the same, meaning that Voight and his co-stars had to shoot some fairly hairy rapids with the minimum of financial security.

“There was a point when somebody got a little nervous. I won’t say who it was, and John [Boorman] said: ‘What are you talking about?’ Cigar in his mouth, he jumped in the canoe, went around a log, around a rock, got to the other side and walked back, growling: ‘Come on! Let’s do this!’”

More gruelling, however, was the “squeal like a pig” scene, in which Bobby (Ned Beatty) is raped by a hillbilly while Ed watches, strapped by his neck to a tree. It still packs a visceral wallop, even to viewers inured by similar subsequent scenes in Scum, Pulp Fiction and The Shawshank Redemption.

“When I first read the script, I stopped at the rape scene and couldn’t get past it for several weeks,” Voight admits. “It was pretty disturbing, and I started questioning whether I should do the film.”

But Boorman wanted Voight. He kept calling and Voight kept stalling. In the end it took a woman, Marcheline Bertrand, to convince Voight to sign up for this most masculine of tales. Bertrand would become Voight’s wife and bear him two children (including Angelina Jolie, from whom he confirms he is still estranged), but in 1971 they had only been seeing each other for a week.

Their second date was an unorthodox one, Voight recalls. “I said: ‘Marcheline, I’m reading this script tonight, you wanna come over and I’ll read it out loud?’ She said: ‘I’d love to.’ So I read through the rape scene and she didn’t blink. I kept reading to the end and she said: ‘Oh, it’s a fantastic story! You should do this.’ ” Boorman called the next day and Voight said yes. He has never regretted the decision. “When the film came out it was very popular. It came out in the same year as The Godfather. You would think that would have left us in the dust, but it didn’t. Deliveranceran for a long time in theatres and played on television all over the world. I think that was because of its visual aspect – there is not that much dialogue and it plays very well in every culture.”

Except, perhaps, the rural Deep South? Has Voight not been scolded by hillbillies, incensed at their portrayal as inbred halfwits and murderous rapists? “No, I’ve never had any problems,” he insists, going on to rhapsodise about Billy Redden, who played the strange albino who engages the fourth member of the group (Ronny Cox) in a banjo contest. “He was a boy who had a genetic imbalance – a product of his mother and his brother, I think. He was quite amazing, a very talkative fellow.”

The film continues to resonate, particularly environmentally – in the film, the region that the group visit is due to be submerged by water as part of a hydro-electric dam project. But Voight– fresh from playing a Donald Rumsfeld-style Secretary of Defence in Transformers – draws more political contemporary parallels. “ Deliverance is about what happens when a civilised man has to confront evil.That is what is going on today with the Islamic fanatics. This assault on our freedoms is something that we hardly know how to face.”

He’s not done yet: “Everybody has gone soft and no one wants to admit that there is a big war or that we can’t handle it.” Perhaps the softies need a trip down the Chattooga River to toughen them up...

The Deliverance Deluxe Edition is out to buy on DVD

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010