Film Review Magazine – February 1998

Richard E. Grant, currently busy managing the Spice Girls (in fiction, at least), reveals his five favourite films to Mark Wyman.

Since Withnail & I etched his versatile features and capacity for hysterical tirades on the public retina, Richard E. Grant has become one of Britain’s most recognizable screen actors. But for all his acidic roles and reminiscences, he remains a passionate film lover who successfully crossed from stalls to screen. Talking to Richard on the set of Keep the Aspidistra Flying revealed a Picture Paradise selection dominated by his formative years spent in Swaziland.

Without a moment’s hesitation, Richard gave his first two choices in one go.

“The Godfather and The Godfather Part II. They came out in 1972 and 1974 when I was in Swaziland. I’d never seen films with that concentration of acting talent, before or since – or any with the same potency. The cast was just astonishing – Brando, James Caan – and, I think, at their peak. Pacino was absolutely awesome.

“There’s a big family drama going on amidst the Mafioso stuff and, like the Kubrick films, you’re introduced to an unknown world where you feel the whole geography of people’s lives is dealt with from A-Z. I believed in it so completely. When I finally went to see The Godfather Part III 20 years later – alone, at a midnight showing in Los Angeles – I was a complete mess, grizzling away as the opening music and credits came up….

“Number three would be Cabaret (1972) – because I’d never seen a film edited like that. Bob Fosse was a really brilliant director for it. I don’t like musicals very much, but here the songs happened in a place where people would sing. The characters are going through big changes in their lives – trying to succeed at acting or singing – while Weimar Germany collapses into the Nazi regime. I saw it again almost 20 years later in Budapest while doing Hudson Hawk, of all things. It was the first-ever showing there, and the print was quite bad, but it stood up exceptionally well and the audience response was electric.”

Having mentioned Stanley Kubrick, Richard’s next choice was the semi-legendary director’s most notorious film. “A Clockwork Orange (1971); I was so shocked by it. Of course, the older you get the more you find out about how films are made. But the impact of this world just seemed so alien. If that was the future, it terrified me about coming to England – I thought, ‘My God, is this how people are there?’ But Malcolm MacDowell was astonishing……

Again, I saw it recently in LA, and the second half palled quite badly, but it’s still a great moment of film-going. It was screened in Swaziland for a year at an exorbitant price, to get tourists to come over from South Africa, where it was banned. I was under-age, but the local cinema manager’s wife looked like a white trash version of Elizabeth Taylor. So I always used to tell her how much she looked like Liz, and of course I was let in for free, and given posters and stills….”

Refreshingly, Richard retains an undimmed enthusiasm for the work of film-makers who have cast him in adult life: Coppola, maestro of The Godfather trilogy, hired him for Bram Stoker’s Dracula, then Robert Altman did the same for The Player and Pret-a-Porter.

“Although I should mention Citizen Kane – another one of my favourites – the fifth film has to be Altman’s Nashville. Just a masterpiece: soap opera on a grand scale, with everything you ever wanted to know about America, or movie acting. Everything you didn’t want to know about country and western music – its politics, its characters…..”

Richard refers in With Nails to having seen Nashville 27 times as a student. An exaggeration? “Oh no, I don’t lie! In fact, I’ve seen it another four times now. I bought the video in America too. It’s now become a fantastic period piece of the 1970s.”