Tim Ecott enjoys a stint in the director’s chair through Richard E Grant’s The Wah-Wah Diaries

Saturday May 6, 2006
The Guardian

The Wah-Wah Diaries: The Making of a Film
by Richard E Grant
320pp, Picador, £16.99

The completion of a feature film is always something of a minor miracle. Turning the initial story idea into a workable screenplay is just one hurdle on a journey in which writers, producers, the director and his players must collaborate with hundreds of supporting film crew to create something that then has to fight for screen-time in the pitiless world of commercial theatrical distribution. The Wah-Wah Diaries tells the story of that creative journey in all its agonising detail, beginning with Richard E Grant’s decision to write a script based on years of assembled notes “resembling a tax return in the middle of a nervous breakdown”.

Wah-Wah, the film, is an autobiographical tale that juxtaposes Grant’s parents’ divorce and his own adolescence in Swaziland with the tiny nation’s independence celebrations in 1968. To make his film, Grant required permission from the current ruler, King Mswati III, something his ongoing connections with the local community made possible.

Grant’s relationship with his producer is more problematic, and soon degenerates into barely concealed animosity. Such tensions are par for the course in film-making, but the relationship is one of the most gripping elements in Grant’s journey, during which he makes the first film ever completed in Swaziland. His name and reputation allowed him to get his script directly to fellow actors, ensuring that they would at least do him the courtesy of reading it and making some kind of response. But, famous or not, with no credentials as a director, Grant struggled to secure financing, and was forced into recruiting a French producer who promised to handle that side of the project.

Grant brings the tortuous directing process to life, interspersing the filmset action with fascinating snippets of memoir about his childhood in Swaziland. The plot of the film, and hence the “diary”, deals with his parents’ divorce and what Grant refers to as his father’s “schizoid alcoholism”, whereby “his charming and generous persona by day was in acute contrast to the morose and destructive demon he became at night”. Recreating scenes involving his parents after almost 40 years reveals to Grant that “pain has no sense of time”. The term “Wah-Wah” is a reference to his American stepmother’s description of the accents and speech of the Swazi colonials in whose company she found herself.

Few film-makers have itemised the horror of juggling the creative will with the financial and logistical imperatives of film-making as well as Grant. At times, the reader becomes exhausted and furious at the obstacles that the real world throws in the director’s path. Because he is an actor, Grant seems to have made a sympathetic and sensitive director. The desire to be positive sometimes weakens him as a diarist. Gabriel Byrne, Grant’s leading man, is described as “armed with Dublin charm… drawing women of all ages to him at all times”, while Miranda Richardson is “Bette Davis-like in her ferocity, and magnificent to watch”.

Emily Watson is “emotionally brave and astonishingly unostentatious”. Julie Walters is “genuinely funny, yet intensely private” and Celia Imrie is “one of life’s great enhancers”. The closest Grant comes to criticism is when he expresses frustration that Ralph Fiennes took more than a year to turn down the offer of a part in the film. But a few pages later we are told that Fiennes has sent an email apology for the delay, and Grant is “really grateful for this belated letter” from “a true and very busy gentleman, deluged with offers”.

Swaziland also comes out of The Wah-Wah Diaries well, with just a few passing references to Grant’s guilt at making a film in a country battling with poverty and in the grip of an Aids epidemic. He writes lovingly about the lush countryside around Pigg’s Peak, but understandably does not venture into any of the issues surrounding Mswati’s autocratic, and at times profligate, style of kingship. The King himself intercedes to prevent one of his government ministers fleecing the film crew for £100,000 to cover, among other things, “the use of Swaziland scenery”.

The Wah-Wah Diaries spans the period from October 1999, when he began writing, to November 2005, when Grant finally learns that a UK distributor will take on his film. Grant’s skill is in capturing the intense but ephemeral relationships that actors and crew forge during production. As many of the cast assemble for the world premiere in Edinburgh, he misses the camaraderie they had in Africa: “It feels like meeting up with someone you once had a passionate relationship with and now find yourself making small talk.”

Tim Ecott is the author of Vanilla: Travels in Search of the Luscious Substance (Penguin).

Thanks to Sue W.