With Nails: Empire Magazine Review
Empire, June 1996
By David Cavanagh - Book Reviews (pg 128):
Once, he was Withnail. In 1985, desperate for acting work, Richard E Grant physically attacked a director at the BBC’s Religious Department. A subsequent audition for panto saw him attempt the Swaziland national anthem, without success. His days were instead spent in W.H. Smith in Richmond, scanning the same film mags that would one day call him„ tombstone-featured.
By page 308 of With Nails (ten years later), he had completed his "hat trick" - working with Coppola, Altman and Scorsese - and had been granted entrée to any party, restaurant or house (Steve Martin‚s, for one) in LA. All this because of a sensational performance in Withnail and I, the film he was born to make, and, he finds to his amazement, a film that is adored by everyone from Jodie Foster to Bruce Willis. “Never before or since, writes Grant of Bruce Robinson’s screenplay, have I read something that conveys what goes on in my head so accurately.”
With Nails is a story of personal triumph told by a shockingly insecure actor. A good 50 per sent of the book is about Grant‚s own paranoia. The nine film diaries he has selected, from Withnail to Pret-a-Porter, reveal a man who is regularly paralysed by audition-fear (there is a hilarious disaster with Ron Howard) and who worries about alfresco nudity (”the penile frosties”), about what film he’ll make next (if any), and whether he‚ll even appear in the one he’s currently making (”My tongue is concussed with fear like so many jam doughnuts in a tight bag”).
As he rises to fame, he is swept into the world of A-list celebrities and Hollywood surrealism, the subject of the book‚s other 50 per cent. Fully aware of Hollywood’s capacity for bullshit, but somehow loving it for all that, he writes of these brief encounters in one of two ways: either as a laconic wallflower (shopping with creepy Sharon Stone; a ghastly evening at Madonna‚s place), or as Swazi Boy, his starstuck alter-ego who always says the wrong thing (to Barbara Streisand, Julia Roberts etc.)
Although the Bram Stoker’s Dracula account is marvellously informative (on Coppola, Gary Oldman and Anthony Hopkins, in particular), the knockout chapter’s unquestionably his superlative, 50 page eye-witness account of the making of Hudson Hawk. It‚s best read slowly and savoured, as Grant takes us from one end of Bruce Willis‚ exorbitant folly to the other (”Oh, my sweet darlings, where, oh where, do I dare begin? What follows is something that I suspected might unhinge my brain. And it did”) by means of sublime dialogue recall and the humour of the gallows. It‚s a star-packed, savagely observed delight ˆ and the film’s location, Budapest, will lose its tourist trade overnight.
A sentimental man, Grant admits to homesickness and frequent tears. He also alludes to one or two domestic disputes. Of his premature daughter (who died during pre-production of Withnail), he writes so movingly you can’t help feeling the event was too private to warrant inclusion in such a ritzy book. But the honesty and likeability of the man become addictive. It’s not hard to read 200 pages in a single sitting.
By preferring wit and openness to malice and indiscretion, With Nails will probably lose Grant few friends. If Lori Singer or Danny Aiello feel they’ve been harshly treated, to hell with them. While not always wonderfully written (Grant has a penchant for gonzo‚ Americanisms), this is a fast, scenic and often bizarre tale related by a credible witness. And as a vivid psychological insight into one actor’s complete experience of a film - from grateful signing of the contract to nervous attendance at the premiere, it really does stand alone.
