BBC2 – 19th August 2005

NOTE: Thanks to Denise for the write-up

Interview is undercut with clips from Wah! Wah! I’ve tried to give a flavour of contents. In some clips I refer to characters by their actor’s name hopefully this will aid your visualisation.

Please note that speech is, as far as possible, as spoken. Interviewer’s opening, closing and voiceover of clips is obviously prepared but speech between him and Richard is conversational.

Introduction, interviewer is talking to camera.

“At this year’s International Film Festival the honour of opening and closing events went to British films. Richard E Grant’s Wah! Wah! premiered here on Wednesday and it’s one of thirty home-grown movies being shown. So does this point to yet another renaissance for British cinema or is the industry still dogged by under-funding and localism.”

Cut to film clip of smartly dressed mixed-race crowd on a grandstand, foreground has white people; ladies in hats and gentleman wearing white uniform, pans down to Ralph and his father. Ralph (Nicholas Hoult) filming, scene father watching through binoculars.

Interviewer talks over clip – “Wah! Wah! is based on the story of Grant’s early life told from the perspective of Ralph, a boy growing up in Swaziland as the country wins its independence from Britain.”

Film cuts to scene in marquee where Ralph’s father (Gabriel Bryant) is giving his wife (Miranda Richardson) a social/polite kiss that he suddenly converts into an overtly possessive gesture that she is obviously not comfortable with.

Interviewer continues – “Ralph’s mother, Lauren, leaves him and his father, Henry, for another married man causing a scandal in the high-bound, ex-pat community.”

Film changes scene to show Emily Watson walking to join Julie Waters amidst a group of ladies watching a field game (cricket? polo?) Women hatted and wearing tea-dresses.

Interviewer – “Ralph’s father remarries but his new wife, the American Ruby, gets a frosty reception from the rigidly hierarchical Brits.”

Ruby looking across at Celia Imrie – Hey Hi!
Celia – “I beg your pardon.”
Ruby – “Granted.”
Julie Waters – “Lady Hardwick is the wife of our residential High Commissioner, Sir Gifford.”
Ruby – “Good for you girl!”
Celia – “Lady Hardwick to you!”

Cut to Richard’s face listening to interviewer’s opening question. “It is deeply autobiographical but was it important to you that it didn’t become too private or inaccessible, that other people could find a way in?

REG – “Everybody has a family, or wants to be in a family, or has left a family so that common denominator is the world over, and I think that mine just happens to be set in the last gasps of the Empire at the end of the 60’s in Swaziland is the kind of window dressing of it. But it is essentially about what happens, which I think happens in all families in my experience, is that what happens outside, what people perceive your family to be and what actually goes on behind closed doors, that’s where the drama lies, between those two things.”

By end of dialogue we are watching a scene where the young Ralph is overhearing a confrontation between his father and mother.
Father – “Where were you last night?”
Without speaking mother moves away from him, but he intersects her path.
Father – “We all left the club at the same time?”
She moves to leave room, he bars her way.
Father – “Another flat tyre!”

Return to studio. Interviewer – “Were you tempted to be in it?”

REG – “Ah no, because I find, like most actors I know with very few exceptions, watching yourself is like listening to yourself on a tape recorder, you think, Oh god no that’s so, I knew that if I was in it and I edited it that I would not be in the film at all.”

Film clip of Richard demonstrating the choreography of the father’s movements in the last scene to Gabriel Bryant.

Voiceover by interviewer. “It has taken Grant six years to bring the project to the screen. He endured a torturous series of stops and starts all too familiar to British film makers, but eventually found sufficient funding from sources in France, South Africa and the UK.”

Back to studio, camera on Richard’s face. Interviewer – “Was there anything uniquely British in the problems you had? Was it because it was the kind of film it was?”

REG – “I kept being told the story was too personal. That, it doesn’t fit any genre. It’s not about council estate people between the ages of eighteen to twenty-four.”

During end of dialogue film scene is shown. A gathering of ex-pats at daytime event with food, drink and bunting.

Ex-pat gentleman addressing crowd – “…we might gift the Swazi nation with a diddle-dos swan-song of our own.”

Julie Waters – “Ooooooo!”

Richard – “So that something, that is the nature of this film, people thought of as high risk factor to finance.”

Interviewer – “None of the action in this film takes place in Britain but would you class it as a very British film?”

Richard – “Completely, because it’s about English people aboard. And I think that the number of people in Britain who have some kind of colonial connection, or family who live there or who live there or have lived there is rife through many people’s experience. And I think that the thing that happens with British people aboard, especially in a hotter country, there’s this sort of hot-house flower effect. Their peculiarities are somehow emphasised away from being on the mainland.”

During the last sentence a film clip runs here a group of people, who are dressed in costume for the play (Camelot), are trying to revive Julie Waters. For some reason Lady Hardwick and another lady (Fenella Woolgar) are moving her legs up and down.

Julie burps and then ((squiffy-eyed) addresses Lady Hardwick – “I may be common but you can’t act, you can’t cook, you can’t even keep his lordship’s cock out of everyone else’s klumps*.” Her audience looks unease. Then Julie turns her head away and vomits.

Richard – “I wanted to make a film that didn’t even have explosions which immediately means that most multiplexes won’t have it and I realise that’s a big problem. But, by the same token I didn’t want it to be an Art House film with Udo subtitles and a cast of Bosnian refuges who spoke no English, no disrespect, but I wanted a film that was personal but accessible to as many people as possible at the same time.”

Clip shows the last scene of the play with Ralph standing next to King Arthur singing (with background chorus) “…That once there was a spot for one brief shining moment…” In audience Ralph’s father is sitting smiling with Ruby, in another part of theatre Ralph’s mother and her partner sit rigidly unsmiling.

Interviewer voices over clip. “Despite Grant’s admirable intentions, and the stellar cast he’s assembled, Grant still doesn’t have a disturber in the UK. Maybe the British aren’t coming just yet.”

Clapping from film clip.

*played and replayed this is what word sounded like.

Footnote – according to Richard there are three potential distributers in UK, but he was waiting to see response to screening at Toronto Festival for US interest. At present there is no UK release date.