Don’t all groan at once but Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons, is the latest in a long line of celebrity Toyota Prius converts. The first full-length Simpsons film, which opens in the UK on Friday, has an environmental theme, but not necessarily in the way Al Gore would like. The film is a send-up of green issues and religion and Groening admits his motives for buying his petrol and battery-powered car are not purely eco-related.

“In a parking lot, when you’re backing up, you can drive silently and really scare the hell out of people!” he chuckles. “They jump because they don’t hear you coming.” Bart Simpson, eat your heart out.

When Groening first came up with the idea for The Simpsons, he named the characters after his own family, little expecting that 20 years later he’d still be explaining that his father Homer and mother Margaret are nothing like the cartoon’s beer-swigging patriarch and his ever-patient blue-haired wife. He almost included a Matt, changing the name at the last minute to Bart, an anagram of brat. But there is still something of the troublesome little brother in Groening. “Half the reason for being a cartoonist is to annoy people,” he admits.

Now 53, Groening has spent 400 episodes of The Simpsons doing just that, most notably George Bush Sr, who famously said Americans should be more like the Waltons, the wholesome television clan, than the yellow-skinned inhabitants of Groening’s fictional middle American town of Springfield.

In the debut movie, Lisa, the show’s eight-year-old intellectual, gets a “green conscious” Irish boyfriend, while Homer’s toxic pollution of Springfield’s river threatens the whole town with forced evacuation. But exact details of the plot remain under wraps. Test audiences were made to swear an oath they wouldn’t leak anything onto the internet.

Groening has described the film as a love story – “Homer falls in love with a pig” – and there will be a “super-special secret guest appearance”, following in the footsteps of previous guest stars including Tony Blair and Paul McCartney.

“We took a long time before taking the plunge with our first movie,” says Groening. “We started meeting and throwing around ideas in November 2003 – and that was two years before we got a script that we were happy enough with.”

Groening (pronounced “graining”) was born in Portland, Oregon, and not far from one of the 34 Springfields in the US. He attended Evergreen State in Olympia, Washington, described as a liberal arts college, where he was editor of the college paper in his final year. His first car was a 1972 Datsun Sedan, given to him by his parents when he decided to leave the northwest and head for Los Angeles. “I ran it into the ground,” he smiles. “I barely made it to LA before it collapsed.”

Intending to forge a career as a writer, Groening began work doing “a series of really demoralising jobs” – including working at a photocopying store run by a manager who later partly inspired Apu, the frugal storekeeper in The Simpsons. He eventually found work in journalism, “doing everything from answering the phones, to delivering the paper on Friday, to writing feature articles and compiling the entertainment listings”.

He even got to live out his rock fantasies, becoming a music critic. “I interviewed David Byrne of Talking Heads once, and the tape was going around – but it was broken and I had nothing!” he chuckles.

By this time he had upgraded to a 1962 Ford Fairlane. “It had push-button transmission,” he sighs wistfully, in the same way Homer Simpson might salivate over a doughnut.

One frequent employer, the Los Angeles Reader, picked up Groening’s first cartoon strip, Life in Hell, which he had started as a way for him to express his “miserable life” at the time. By this point Groening’s then girlfriend Deborah Caplan, whom he married in 1987, offered to publish a spin-off of the strip in book form.

Becoming an underground hit, Groening’s work swiftly came to the attention of James L Brooks, a director and producer, who asked him to pitch some ideas for an animated series and The Simpsons was born. Beginning as crudely drawn fillers on The Tracey Ullman Show in 1987, The Simpsons began its first series two years later, becoming an almost immediate sensation, first in the US and then around the world.

“There does seem to be something specifically American about The Simpsons – a kind of stubborn dopiness,” he says. “But I think what they do have in common with everyone else – and this is universal – is the idea that the people you love, your own family, also drive you crazy.”

Now heading for its 19th season, which opens with the 401st episode in the autumn, even Groening can’t believe the show’s staying power. “To me the idea of going beyond 365 . . . that’s just insane,” he says.

To some, the show is past its prime – in 2004 Harry Shearer, who provides the voice for Montgomery Burns and Ned Flanders, claimed its standards were falling. The producers rejected the criticism and Groening is forever optimistic. “I’m always a fan of the current season, and maybe that’s the secret of keeping up one’s energy,” he says. “The cornball answer to ‘What is the best episode of The Simpsons?’ is always ‘The next one – the one we’re working on now’.”

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