The Guardian Online – Thursday 11th August, 2005

Richard E. Grant has made a film about his boyhood in colonial Swaziland

By Sally Vincent

Richard E. Grant is a maverick with a plan and a new film.

“I have kept a diary,” he said, “since I witnessed my mother’s adultery at the age of nine.” As he spoke, an elderly woman was slowly trundling her luggage trolley so close to our knees we had to draw our legs out of her path. Richard E. Grant was unfazed, as though his narrative focus was so fine he had not noticed her at all.

He is a disconcerting fellow. This morning, at the crack of dawn, he came off the red-eye from Newfoundland and, if he was a normal human being, he’d be crashed out in his pit, sleeping off his jet lag, not spring-heeling around this rowdy hotel. I can never trust manic energy, let alone a man with eyes the color of turquoise. It’s not natural.

He is not, he said (not for the first or last time), a shrink. He can only tell me he began his habit of diarising at a time when he was beset by guilt and loss. He knew something terrible and he couldn’t tell anyone about it, so he wrote down his understanding of the aforementioned debacle as a way of off-loading the pressure of what he knew. And went on doing it because it became his way of dealing with the world.

“It means you are simultaneously inside and outside your own life all the time,” he said, “watching yourself experiencing what is happening to you, then having a written conversation with yourself about it. It’s a kind of control mechanism; an exploration and a way of keeping a record.”

So excruciating is his self-consciousness, he has only once watched himself on the screen and that was nearly 20 years ago when he sat through the entirety of Bruce Robinson’s glorious Withnail And I in such an agony of disillusion that by the end he was practically welded to his seat and had drawn blood from his wife’s comforting hand. There-after, he was lionized up hill and down dale, but deep down he has always known he buggered up, let everybody down, missed the boat, exposed himself as a total no-hoper who would never work again.

He also knows, and will say with perfect equanimity, that Withnail was his first big break, without which he would never have worked with Altman, Coppola and Scorsese, never been the movie star who, in the mid-1990s published a memoir of his years in Hollywood that, yes, does credit to his addiction to diary-writing despite its catchpenny title With Nails, which doesn’t mean anything except a lack of confidence in the undoubted charm and cleverness of its content. He shrugs that one off. What could he do? The publisher had to know best, after all – they thought he was worth publishing.

After 60 films, things haven’t got any better.

“You finish a movie and you think, there, you’ve done it, really well, or best you can. But if you watch it, you see it was just bollocks. You have to look at the discrepancy between what you hoped and imagined and the reality of yourself and all your shortcomings. You only see your own failure. I’d rather,” he said, “stick with the first idea – just have the experience of working – and leave it at that. You’ve got to protect the old bravado.”

It has been 10 years since Grant first thought of writing and directing his own story, and nine since he cocked the snook at Hollywood with With Nails, an acerbic account of his days in LA, for which he knew he would surely be punished. He does not expect to be invited back. “What is there now?” he said.

“Famous people running away from explosions. That’s it. They call it production values. Audiences will queue round the block to see an unimaginably highly-paid film star running away from a fantastically expensive explosion. They think it’s their money’s worth. I despair that’s what people have to do.”

It does, however, explain why so many “thesps,” as Grant insists on calling his fellow actors, move away from the obscenely big-bucks industry and into television and small production companies – “to enact being human beings instead of cartoon characters leaping from implo-ding buildings.”

Somewhere back in Grant’s paternal ancestry, there were men who were Dutch or Hungarian and certainly Afrikaner. Yet he feels his father was an Englishman, working for the British government, and he, himself, is a Swazi who happens also to be English. Now living in Surrey, south of London, a brisk walk from where we sit, he will always classify himself as an immigrant.

He used to wear two watches, one telling Greenwich Mean Time, the other the time of day in Swaziland. Swaziland was his home. Where he was born. Where he grew up and where his heart is. When called upon to sing at auditions, he would stand solemnly and belt out the Swazi national anthem. He didn’t mean to be funny.

He patently enjoys talking about his homeland. The singular beauty of its landscape, what he refers to as the serenity of the indigenous population, the nefarious eccentricities of the European ruling class.

“Swaziland is a small part of south-east Africa, the last country in the continent to gain its independence,” he said, sounding rather as one of his father’s kindly schoolmasters must have sounded as he stood by a British government-issue blackboard in front of a crowd of happy Swazi schoolkids.

Grant got permission to film in his country, granted by the King of Swaziland, and got together a star cast (Gabriel Byrne, Julie Walters, Miranda Richardson, Emily Watson, Celia Imrie) last June. It took him seven weeks to make his movie.

If Wah-Wah was a self-indulgence in its making, the finished product is a prime example of a genre rarely, if ever, attempted by British or American film-makers: a child’s experience, impeccably observed through the narrow lens of the child’s perspective.

We chatted on about the film for a while: how he called it Wah-Wah because that was how his dad’s second wife described the conversational tone of colonialists at their leisure; the country club’s choice of Camelot for the am-dram treat for Princess Margaret’s official visit to mark Independence Day; and how, driven by lack of white talent to include a black man in their production, they scrupulously whited-up his face with plimsoll cleaner so Margaret wouldn’t notice. Even so, she made her excuses and left in the interval. Said she wasn’t feeling well, apparently. It gradually emerged, to my astonishment, that give or take the odd tinkering with the timescale, Wah-Wah is not just true, but literally true, frame by frame.

‘Wah-Wah’ opens the Edinburgh

International Film Festival on Aug. 17.

ContactMusic.com – Thursday 11th August, 2005

Actor Richard E Grant is dismissive of age gap taboos when it comes to romance – because he barely notices he is eight years younger than his wife Joan.

The Withnail And I actor, 48, insists his dialect coach spouse has no reason to feel insecure, however he has to compete with Orlando Bloom for her attentions.

He says, “I don’t think about the age difference.

“I have to listen to her telling me how gorgeous Orlando Bloom is after she’s voice-coached him.”

The Times Online – Thursday 11th August, 2005

By Richard E Grant

Budget nightmares, casting catastrophes, defecting producers…..despite all this the actor Richard E. Grant got his directorial debut ready for the Edinburgh Festival next week.

When I first started to pitch Wah-Wah I was an unknown quantity: I had no track record to prove myself as a director to any actor or financier. My work outside acting had consisted solely of my film diaries and my novel, By Design. People thought I could write, but writing a screenplay was another risk factor. It was difficult trying to get people to take me seriously.

Wah-Wah is about my upbringing in Swaziland and the trauma of my parents’ separation. Being an actor helped to get it made – it allowed me to get my foot through the door and approach people who knew who I was. But they said I had no track record: “Why should we give you money?” Then, of course, people wanted to know who was going to star in the film. To secure interest you have to get actors – you have to bull**** them. That happens only one way: you send out the script and hope that somebody bites.

Gabriel Byrne and Julie Walters wanted to do the film almost straight away, and once they had committed it made things a little easier. Byrne, though, was very worried that his character, based on my abusive father, was so hateful that anybody watching the film would find it difficult to relate to him. After a while, though, he saw the role for what it was: a challenging one.

The filming was beset by problems from the outset. The first producer, whom I had relied on hugely, withdrew to become a drugs counsellor in the West Indies. Another year and a half went by with nothing much happening, and Wah-Wah was placed with an executive producer who was basically babysitting the project. We weren’t able to secure any finance but I felt comforted in the fact that at least it was a production company that had a reputation for making feature films. Then finally a French producer came on board with whom I had worked before. It became a co-production between France, the UK and a bank in Johannesburg.

The financing of Wah-Wah was a quagmire. Trying to make people believe that we were indeed going to start shooting in June 2004 was difficult. Then, just as we were getting off the ground, there were changes in tax loopholes for people filming in Britain. It was like having the film pulled out from underneath you. I remember I took two dozen phone calls that morning with people saying how sorry they were to hear that my film had failed. I phoned the co-producers and they said that while they were worried, they would stick with the film.

There were times that seemed utterly surreal. The actor Nicholas Hoult, who plays my character as a teenager, effectively withdrew from filming because he was starting to look older than his part. I then had to recast the younger version of him. Hoult then became available again. The tiniest change can throw the whole schedule off. You feel like you are juggling marshmallow and jelly at the same time. It sounds funny now, but at the time there was a sense of complete despair.

I found that my obsessive nature helped get me through the experience. I prepared as much as I possibly could. We went to Swaziland and every door that was previously closed to us was opened. All the groundwork research had been done.

Time and time again I was told that I would never make the film on time and never make it on budget. That kind of criticism tends to turn me into a great big motor of efficiency. The actors also got equally committed and it helped that they fell in love with the country and were committed to the story. There was a real cohesion and we thought we would pull it off against the odds.

Filming isn’t the end of the process, though. I was told by industry people that the title was too weird and that it didn’t address the 18 to 24-year-old testosterised group of people who go to the cinema these days. How are you going to sell it, people asked me. Who will it appeal to?

Once, during one of the many collapses of this film, I was working with Robert Altman on Gosford Park. Jude Law pulled out weeks before filming was due to begin. The film was pulled since the financiers thought they couldn’t sell it in the US without a major star. “We’re floating on gas at the moment,” said Altman. In the end they got Ryan Phillippe to replace Law. I thought if this can happen to a person with as great a reputation as Altman the stuff I was going through was small beer.

If you believe in something enough you hope it will reach people. We had a film screening in London to which we invited members of the public. To make them laugh and move them was a thrilling experience – I levitated. I realised that even if my film worked for just 40 people in a tiny movie theatre, then it would find a home. It was an incredible relief.

Wah-Wah will be screened on Wednesday at Cineworld, Edinburgh (0131-623 8030)

Lessons with Richard E. Grant

“No” is the word you will hear more than any other. Tattoo “Yes” onto your psyche and never give up.

Always have an answer – even if you change your mind five minutes later. Best compliment your crew can give you is “He knows what he wants”.

Get the best catering your budget can afford – a well-fed cast and crew are all the happier for it.

Start shooting as early as possible. It establishes a rhythm and galvanises everyone into action.

Ensure that your script is watertight. If it’s not on the page, it will never magically appear on the screen.

I’ve just received this email from Stargazer. Sounds like it’s well worth doing:

“The Times” are running a promotion where you can download a free audiobook each week, and this week it’s “Enduring Love” by Ian McEwan, read by REG.

You need to go to: www.audible.co.uk/ timesoffer and register for free. I’ve just done this, and all you need to give is your name and email address. After choosing a username and password, it’s a case of downloading their software – which is really quick to do on a broadband connection. Then you download the book by going to “My Library” on your Audible page.

Best wishes,
stargazer

More info on the audiobook below:

“This week’s free download, brought to you by The Times, Times Online and Audible.co.uk, is Enduring Love by Ian McEwan, read by Kati Nicholl and Richard E. Grant.

One windy spring day in the Chilterns, Joe Rose’s calm, organized life is shattered by a ballooning accident. The afternoon, Rose reflects, could have ended in mere tragedy, but for his brief meeting with Jed Parry. Unknown to Rose, something passes between them, something that gives birth in Parry to an obsession so powerful that it will test to the limits Rose’s beloved scientific rationalism, threaten the love of his wife Clarissa, and drive him to the brink of murder and madness.

To download this audio book for free follow the instructions below and the link to www.audible.co.uk/timesoffer.

Also, find out how to download free tracks with iTunes. Buy The Times this Saturday and see The Knowledge for full details.”

More info (and how to listen to your book) is at:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/section/0,,23469,00.html.

Act fast! There’s only a few days left.

Richard E Grant’s autobiographical directorial debut Wah-Wah is the EIFF’s opening film. He talks to Paul Drake about making movies from memories.

They were the days of miracle and wonder. The long distance call. They were the days of medals and shoeshine, and of men called ‘uncle’ even though they clearly had no relation to you, of cricket, warm beer and faltering colonialism. They were the days of Richard E Grant’s childhood in Swaziland – the landlocked kingdom, bounded on all sides by South Africa except for a 110km of border with Mozambique to the east. They were the days of clipped speech and the long, hot, slow wait for Zulu King Sobhuza II to reclaim the country back from London. They were days of ‘toodle pip’, ‘good show’, ‘hush hush’ and ‘trot trot’ and, for young Grant at least, they were the days of ‘Wah-Wah.’

“The film is entirely autobiographical, albeit concertinaed in time with characters and events often amalgamated, but everything happened.” Standing in his west London home, Grant is bubbling with passion, perhaps a little relieved that I do not wish him to perform my favorite bits from Withnail and I. Open and personable, he seems as at ease discussing the factual as the deeply personal.

“You know I developed the facial tic when my mother left overnight; it was very real and a source of acute embarrassment for an adolescent boy. My stepmother essentially ‘cured’ me of it by talking to me about and making me feel secure. But the problem with this kind of nervous habit is that it’s always lurking there somewhere and even now, at 48, if I get particularly stressed, I can feel the ghost of it hovering.”

Since 1985 when Grant made his screen debut in Les Blairs’ advertising satire Honest, Decent and True he has acted in over 60 films. He played a dysfunctional hedonistic actor in Withnail and I, an advertising executive in How to get Ahead in Advertising, an explorer in Mountains of the Moon, a fashion designer in Pret-a-Porter, British royalty in A Royal Scandal, the Scarlet Pimpernel and a priest in Bright Young Things. So it comes as something of a surprise that the man cannot stand to ever watch his own performances back.

“Time and again, people say, ‘But it’s your job, way don’t you like to watch yourself?’ The only way I can explain it is that if you ask people if they like listening to themselves on a tape recorder, they say, ‘Oh God, no’ because that’s not how they perceive themselves. That’s exactly what it’s like to watch yourself and see the faults rather than what other people see…hopefully. It’s the experience of doing it and thinking yourself and feeling yourself into another character’s life.”

It is not difficult to see that for Grant, Wah-Wah, in which he takes no acting role, has been cathartic for a childhood marked by an absentee mother, an alcoholic father and a joyfully unorthodox stepmother. Hoping that by being honest, audiences might both and laugh and be moved by identifying with aspects in their own lives. Grant elucidates in a familiar but slightly too serious tone, Guiding him away from self-aggrandisement, I ask him whether there was any point in the writing of the film when autobiography crossed over into artistic license.

“All the family scenes, including the attempted shooting, happened pretty much as written. The historical liberties taken were necessitated by the three year time scale between 1969 and 1971 of the screenplay. Swaziland’s independence was in fact granted in 1968, Camelot, the play we perform in the film, was in fact staged in 1975, Princess Margaret attended a theatre show and left half way through in 1980. Swazi amateur actors were ‘white’ faced in Gilbert and Sullivan operettas in the mid 060’s, and my father died in 1981 when I was 24. What he said to me on his deathbed is the final line Gabriel Byrne delivers in the film. So I have taken historical license, but the essence of the experience of living there during that era is what I attempted to recreate as authentically as possible. The real challenge of writing about real events is having to edit and truncate them into relatively short scenes. Especially when writing the arc of my father’s alcoholism – having to choose key moments to convey what his schizoid personality was like to live with, when in fact it went on for years with a myriad of variations.”

Grant is no stranger to handling his own backstory with a deft touch. His career memoir, With Nails: The Film Diaries of Richard E. Grant, was one of the more satisfying reads of 1997. He seems to be that curious anomaly amongst thespians: one who respect for the crews he works with goes beyond that he has for his fellow actors. And why not? He has worked with the very best, after all. “Well, I think that growing up and being a teenager in the 70’s, I was influenced by Kurbrick, Coppola and Altman in particular and then having worked as an actor on three Altman films, I was deeply influenced by his regime of being as democratic and collaborative in the way you work.”

Uninterested in pursuing anything but the most personal of cinema behind the camera, Grant is not above that particular luvvie of quoting from the campest of icons.

“I can remember Barbara Streisand talking about when she made her first film as a director,” he gushes. “She said that if it comes from your heart, it goes to the heart. Certainly when I was writing Wah-Wah what I tried to impress upon the actors is that the thing that is most personal to you should reach out in the same way to many more people. I mean essentially Wah-Wah is above love lost, love found, love unrequited, love unresolved, love discovered. And the public face and the private shoe of what family is like, and the disintegration and the survival of my family set against the last disintegrating days of the British Empire.”

Enthused by the success of producing a low-budget film in a seven week schedule (“I was told by every producer I met that we would never make it in time,” he gleefully confides.) Grant was clearly born for this.

“Oh, directing is the most fantastic job in the whole world. If you are as detail obsessive as I am – being asked 200 questions a day was nirvana! I love that. You know: What do I do? How do I do this? Where do I go here? What colour of glass? Where do you what this light? You know, all that stuff. A friend told me a Ridley Scott quote: ‘No matter what you’re asked, always have an answer. Even if you change your mind five minutes later’. I know from my experience of being in films that the greatest compliment that a crew usually pays a director is they that he or she knows exactly what they want. And on day two, I was standing behind a lighting screen and I heard people talking and they said,’What do you think of the guy that’s directing this?’ and the other person said, ‘He knows exactly what he wants!’ and I thought…. well that’s right.”

After talking at some length about the pre-production, editing and funding the film, Grant finally returns to the reason for this beautiful, remarkable little film coming into being. Whatever way you cut it, Wah-Wah is clearly something of a homage, a farwell, a simplification of memory. As he talks, his voice becomes softer, slightly sadder, bur inclusive in it’s willingness to try and understand the sins and subsequent wounds that parents all too often inflict on their children.

As Emily Watson’s character surmises, “It’s called family – you never really get away you know.”

“As a child you totally accept that what goes on behind closed doors is ‘normal’. You love your parents unconditionally, even if one of them runs away and the other practically drinks himself to death. Wah-Wah charts the emergence , I suppose, of adolescent consciousness when you begin to recognize the schism between what is the norm and the abnormal in your own family life and to make choices on your own terms as far as you can. Like a homing pigeon, though, I still feel that Swaziland is my true ‘home’ but know that it is as much a combination of memory, nostalgia and a profound love of the landscape and the incredibly benign and easy going nature of the Swazi people that draws me back there, as much as anything else.”

Grant sighs as the burden of memory seems to overtake him. “I hugely miss the ceaseless flow of characters that fetched up in the colonial era, en route either form India, Kenya, or other outposts of Empire, who had eccentrified by being away from England for too long. Rather like a hothouse, something happens to the English character abroad that prompts all sorts of social and behavioral oddities to erupt. A spirit of gung-ho and make-do that is hugely attractive.”

“The petty snobbery and acute sense of colonial hierarchy and pecking order are mercifully gone, yet they provided an absolute gift for comedy and social gaffes. As my father endlessly pointed out we were only ‘guests’ in the country and with a tiny Europe population amongst a million Swazi, I was never in any doubt that, although born there, I had a ‘sell-by’ date. The AIDS pandemic is catastrophic and the fallout of this time bomb had yet to impact fully. So my feelings about the country are very complicated and contradictory. Exactly like being in love, really.”