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» Features » Maguffin » Reviews
| FEATURES Back to Africa Kathy Hofmeyr As a lifelong fan of Richard E Grant, I am looking forward to meeting him. In person he is quite alarmingly handsome (those demented Withnail eyes now a piercing and appealing blue), and so charming that I feel almost treacherous for not having liked his film, “Wah-Wah”. Having grown up in Swaziland and studied in Cape Town, in the early eighties Grant felt the pinch felt by many Southern African performers. Driven by ambition and a real feeling that as a white actor his opportunities for a future in the profession were very limited locally, he left South Africa to pursue an acting career in England. “I think because I was born and brought up here I literally had an insider-outsider status. I wanted to see if by the age of thirty I could crack making a living in England.” Richard E Grant has now made public a great deal of his life’s story: in “With Nails”, his early film diaries, he chronicles his rise from struggling actor getting his first leading role to working with some of the biggest names in the business (Joel Silver, Steve Martin, Bruce Willis, Martin Scorsese, Daniel Day-Lewis, Anthony Hopkins and Robert Altman are just a few that leap to mind). In his recently published “The Wah-Wah Diaries” he gives us the last six years, interspersing the record of his struggle to get the film made with engaging tales of the acting work he has done since the publication of his first book. Now he has returned to the beginning to present us with his fraught and difficult childhood, filling in the gap before his rise to relative fame. “Wah-Wah” is Richard E Grant’s labour of love. It has taken him six years to get it made, from first pitch to eventual release, and he has fought tooth and nail to tell his story from day one. For all that this is based on true events in Grant’s own life, it is a familiar, rather standard story of a young boy’s coming of age after growing up in a broken family. What sets it apart from the usual child-of-divorce tale is that Ralph Compton’s adolescence coincides with Swaziland’s independence from Britain. As a nation gains its independence, so does a young man begin to assert his own. Intrigued by this desire on his part to lay bare all things private, I ask him why he chose to focus on this period of his life. “It was coming of age at the end of an age,” he explains, “the last gasp of empire, which was inherently funny, tragic, poignant for those of us who were around at that time. It’s also 35 years ago, so hopefully from a perspective of middle-age I can look back with compassion and understand why and how things happened, especially in my family.” He tells me that he was also inspired by Bruce Robinson’s autobiographical cult classic “Withnail and I”, the hysterically funny story of a drug-addled, egomaniacal out-of-work actor who cannot fathom the world’s criminal blindness to his own greatness and extraordinary talent. It was Grant’s role in this that launched his career. The film is reminiscent in parts of “White Mischief”, detailing the addictions and indiscretions of the colonial population whose only allocated pastime is keeping half an eye on the natives. These are the characters with whom Grant grew up and, he believes, “boredom, boozing and bonking – those three tenets of colonial life would seem pretty standard for wherever people have colonised bits of the world. If people are bored and outside of their home environment, abroad, then adultery and booze seem so endemic to the way people live their lives.” The film’s non-mainstream subject matter and setting made finding a producer an epic struggle. As a first-time writer-director shooting in a country where no film has ever been made before, Grant found the odds stacked against him. “It’s not a Tom Cruise franchise remake or action CGI explosions,” he jokes. This may have been his first foray into directing film, but Grant feels confident that it the right move. He directed plays while studying Drama at UCT and afterwards at the Cliffhanger theatre company before moving to London. “I was terrified, but ambition and determination take over. I thought, I have a story to tell and I am determined that I’ll be the storyteller. I expressly wanted to direct and write it myself. I’d been taking notes for the last twenty years from everybody – [Francis Ford] Coppola, [Martin] Scorsese, Jane Campion, Robert Altman – all the directors I’ve worked with as an actor, so I’ve unofficially been at film school for a long time and I’ve learnt from the very best people.” While getting funding and a producer willing to take the risk were difficult, Grant was extremely lucky in terms of his cast. From the familiar faces of great British talent – Gabriel Byrne (“The Usual Suspects”), Miranda Richardson (“The Hours”, “Damage”), Julie Walters (“Calendar Girls”, “Billy Elliott”, the Harry Potter films) and Emily Watson (“Red Dragon”, “Gosford Park”) – to relative newcomers and character actors like Fenella Woolgar (“Bright Young Things”), Celia Imrie (“Bridget Jones’s Diary”) and Nicholas Hoult (“About a Boy”), he certainly has had the pick of the bunch. But finding an actor willing to take on the role of his father was a challenge. Having initially tried to cast one of “the big five” – Daniel Day-Lewis, Hugh Grant, Colin Firth, Rupert Everett or Ralph Fiennes – Grant turned in frustration to an older bracket of actors. Jeremy Irons turned the role down as “too unsympathetic”. “Then I went to Gabriel Byrne who absolutely jumped at it and identified with it and had a real, profound understanding of who this man was and has done a brilliant job, in my view.” Casting Ruby was also tricky: turned down in turn by Toni Colette, Rachel Griffiths, Charlize Theron, Sarah Jessica Parker, Renee Zellweger, Meg Ryan, Geena Davis and Catherine O’Hara, Grant asked his accent-coach wife, Joan, whether she thought his British co-star from Gosford Park, Emily Watson, could pull off the American accent necessary for the role. The answer was an emphatic “yes”. Julie Walters and Miranda Richardson both accepted their offered roles immediately, giving Grant the credibility and faith “that I had written a script that Oscar-nominated actors would be willing to take a risk on.” Grant’s pre-existing social and/or working relationships with his cast stood him in good stead, removing much of the pressure of working with such a talented group for the first time. “They were all first-timers in Africa, or certainly had never been to Swaziland. I knew the story from the inside out and I was in the country that I’d grown up in. That for me was an incredible advantage in that there wasn’t a question that they asked me that I didn’t have the answer to.” Grant is pleased that his risk in putting such a personal story out there has paid off. It has received good reviews in Canada, Australia, America and England, and South Africa is the end of the line. Is he confident that an African audience will respond as positively? “If it gets badly reviewed,” he says, “then I would have nowhere to hide, nobody to blame; the buck lands fairly and squarely at my door because I’ve written and directed and practically co-produced the thing. So the fact that it has been as critically well-received as it has is great approbational bonus. A cherry on the cake, as it were.” He also hopes his cast’s faith in him will be richly rewarded, that their work will be positively received. Having established himself as a capable and impressive actor, Grant has also published an autobiography, a novel and his production diaries from this latest venture. Now that he has added director and screenwriter to his impressive credentials, I want to know whether he any other creative outlets. He answers in the negative, but in the next breath admits that he has been composing film scores in his spare time, but didn’t have the confidence to put his own music into “Wah-Wah”. The scored themes, however, may yet be heard: he is busy working on a new screenplay, based on an idea from his novel “By Design”. The film, about the making of a disaster movie, is called “Zeitgeist”, and he describes it as “basically ‘The Poseidon Adventure’ in outer space”. He hopes to direct this one, too. Finally, I want to know whether his insider-outsider status has been a problem for him. Ever since Withnail, Grant has been cast as the quintessential Englishman, from Victoria Tennant’s cuckolded ex-husband in “LA Story” t0 the underbutler in “Gosford Park” by way of Dr Seward in Coppola’s “Dracula”. Doesn’t he ever just yearn to play a Texan or a Martian or something? His response is workmanlike and pragmatic: he’s just glad to have the work. Given the choice, “I think a seedy Las Vegas nightclub singer of the 1950s is what I’d quite like to do, or a southern hick, gas station attendant in some murder mystery. I’d have liked to have play Hamlet, but I am now too old to play him in the theatre and nobody ever asked me, so that will remain a hope or a dream.” It is the curse of many actors that they “shall never play the Dane”, to quote Uncle Monty in “Withnail and I”, but Grant’s rendition of the Prince’s speech at the end of that film is one no fan is ever likely to forget. | | |
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