Tuesday 9th May, 2006

Richard was interviewed on The Tavis Smiley Show on PBS for about 12 minutes or so. He talked to Tavis about the making of “Wah-Wah” as well as the AIDS epidemic that is sweeping modern day Swaziland, in which almost 60% of the population of one million have become infected.

To listen to a recording of the interview (4.4MB) – courtesy of the PBS.org website – just click below. I’ve included the transcript of the interview below as well.

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PBS.org: The Tavis Smiley Show – Transcript

Tavis: Richard E. Grant is a talented actor who’s appeared in more than 60 films during his successful career. A native of Swaziland, he went on to study drama in Cape Town, where he co-founded a groundbreaking multiracial theater group. His latest project is the new film “Wah-Wah,” which depicts the racism, class snobbery, and hypocrisy of the British who colonized Africa. The movie opens this weekend in select cities, written and directed by Richard E. Grant. Here now, a scene from “Wah-Wah.”

Tavis: (Laughs) Richard E. Grant, nice to meet you.

Richard E. Grant: Hi. (Laughs)

Tavis: Don’t know how well this will do in Britain, but it’s nice to have you on our set. (Laughs)

Grant: (Laughs) Thank you.

Tavis: If I’m British, how am I supposed to review this?

Grant: Well, the colonial stuff is way back in the past. Swaziland was the penultimate country in Africa to become independent of the empire. So there’s a historical distance now between it. So people can look back with affection and criticism.

Tavis: Yeah. Speaking of affection, it’s difficult to say “Wah-Wah” into the camera without a little affection and a little love, a little laughter, quite frankly. (Laughs) That goes along with that. “Wah-Wah.” I can’t say it with a straight face. So, the movie is titled “Wah-Wah” because?

Grant: Because it’s what the American character, played by Emily Watson, that you’ve just seen identifies the way upper class English people speak, in this kind of tribal code to exclude Swazis and Americans. And anybody who basically isn’t British, speaking sort of toodle-pip, la-di-dah, hootie-tootie-snooty talk.

Tavis: So her attitude is wah, wah, wah, wah, wah.

Grant: Exactly. Blah, blah, blah, blah.

Tavis: Yeah, exactly. So we got “Wah-Wah.” Got it. How did you decide to do, I mentioned earlier you’ve been in over 60 films in your career. This is your directorial debut, I should mention, as well. How and why did you choose this particular project, and an autobiographical project, quite frankly. Semi-autobiographical.

Grant: Yeah, well I was very inspired by the first film that I was in 20 years ago, “Withnail And I,” which was autobiographical to the writer-director. And I thought that as my story could begin with my mother’s adultery when I was 10 years old that I saw from the back seat of a car, and that I wasn’t supposed to see, and then my father’s subsequent fall into chronic alcoholism, and finally his death, it sort of covered the gamut of every possible thing that goes on behind closed doors of addiction, adultery, first love, lost love, true love, death of a loved one, all of these things are in there, as well as comedy.

Tavis: Yeah. Doesn’t mean, though, respectfully, that you have to put your story out there in that way. So why that choice?

Grant: Well, I think because I knew that where I grew up, it was the British expatriate community were, they knew that history was overtaking them, and they’d passed their sell-by date. The sort of steep colonial pecking order of how people lived their lives, and provincial attitudes are a source of great comedy and tragedy. So it was irresistible, really, to write that story. It was like a gift.

Tavis: I’m gonna steal that line. I love that formulation. They had passed their sell-by date.

Grant: Yeah.

Tavis: I like that. They passed their sell-by date. The first time I use it, I’ll give you credit for it.

Grant: Okay.

Tavis: Attribution. Second time I use it, I’ll just say I heard somebody once say.

Grant: Okay. (Laugh)

Tavis: The third time, as I always say. (Laughs)

Grant: Yeah.

Tavis: (Laughs) But I like that; they passed their sell-by date. What was happening in Swaziland at that particular time that put the British in that position of bumping up against that sell-by date?

Grant: Well, the rest of Africa, post-independence in India in 1947, the rest of Africa, of British colonies, had requested and gained their independence. Because Swaziland was unique on the continent in that it was an invited protectorate form of colonialism, where at the turn of the last century, the king of Swaziland then requested of Queen Victoria in England to form a protectorate colonial administration over the country, which was unique.

It was like invited colonialism, so that as a result, there were no coups or revolutions or any of the other things that had blighted so much of the continent. In order to regain their independence, they asked for it back, and it was a very peaceable hand-over. So it was known when I lived there, because of its geography and its politics, as the Switzerland of Africa.

Because it trod this very neutral line between Marxist Mozambique on the one side, and apartheid South Africa on the other side. So it was a fairly unique place to grow up in, in terms of being a White colonial in that setting. And that I went to school with Nelson Mandela’s daughters and Thabo Mbeki’s daughters, because they’d been sent as political dissidents to Swaziland, which was a multiracial country by the mid-seventies. So it was fairly unique in that way.

Tavis: I wanna go back to the story and the movie in just a second here. Before I do that, though, ’cause you keep saying so many interesting things, could one get away today with the comparison, the metaphor, if you will, that you just used, of Swaziland being the Switzerland of Africa, one couldn’t say that today, could one?

Grant: Well, they’ve had a lot of criticism, because they have an absolute monarch. And in terms of trying to make democracy succeed in Africa, that has brought a great deal of criticism in that way. But it’s also a very traditional one tribe, one language-based culture. The biggest problem that they face now is AIDS. They have 58 percent, the highest concentration of HIV-positive people for a single country on the planet.

And the problem with that is that it’s a polygamous culture. So to say to people that have always lived like that, you can’t have more than one wife, or you can’t have more than one partner, is against the culture of the country. And because people don’t die or it’s not like leprosy where your hand falls off in six months, because it takes five to seven years for it to manifest itself, it’s very hard to get people, especially in rural areas, without television or radio, any kind of media, to understand that there’s a time bomb. And out of a million people, in 10 years’ time, the population, theoretically, will be halved.

Tavis: So, that’s daunting, to say the least. What does one do in a situation where, again, in this country, unique to other sub-Saharan African countries, it is the custom of the country that they’re bumping up against, to the point you made a moment ago. So what’s the solution? It can’t be that we sit here and wait for Swaziland to just die off.

Grant: Well, I think that because, unless you get medical aid out there, and the drugs that we have in the west to people, I don’t know any alternative other than trying to educate people as much as possible. I know the theater groups now are trying to do that. But we’re certainly going to, all the money that’s raised from the premiere of this movie in England next month, and the premiere that’ll happen in neighboring South Africa and then in Swaziland, all of that money will go to AIDS hospices that two friends of mine are running out there. So that’s, in my small contribution, is the way that I’m trying to do something.

Tavis: You live where now?

Grant: I live in London.

Tavis: You live in London. One other question, before I get back to the particulars of the film in just a second. How do folk inside of Great Britain, folk in London, where you live, for example, how do they contextualize now the colonization that the country was so engaged in then? We joked somewhat earlier about this, about how you think people can look back on it now. But how do people in that part of the world put into context their colonization efforts so many years ago?

Grant: I think that at its most positive, you can look at it as a feudal system whereby basically the White people patronized, with the best intentions, the African population. But they didn’t, at that time, have any votes or any rights. So, while you may have been looking after people who were on your payroll in a way that they were fed and watered, and that was deemed a sufficient way of dealing with people.

It’s clearly, in retrospect now, it’s absolutely preposterous. And I think that there’s a great deal of revisionism now in England about the empire, because with all the civil rights movements and the things that have happened, that to blanket sweep and say that all colonialism was a total horrific disaster, there’s now, people are coming, I think, in revisionist thinking that there were some good things about it.

That it did establish some kind of infrastructure or religious beliefs or economic possibilities. But what astonishes me is that anybody, and I lived in South Africa just on the cusp of when the revolution was about to happen, when I was at college, and the sense of history all happening around you, how Black South Africans have forgiven what White people imposed on them is an astonishment to me.

And the fact that I think Nelson Mandela led the way by saying that abuntu of making people account for what they had done, and then begging forgiveness was a really profound thing. So that it didn’t lead to the anticipated bloodbath that everybody thought would happen.

Tavis: I’m with you. In the tradition of the Black church, I could just say amen on that last point, because I feel the same way. I’ve talked, at times, to Archbishop Tutu about this. The courage and conviction and commitment and character, quite frankly, that it takes to even engage something like the TRC, that Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

It’s what I call Black love. It is the power of learning how to love people in spite of, and not because of. And it’s a powerful thing. A powerful lesson to learn from these Black South Africans. That said, let me circle back around right quick to “Wah-Wah,” the film. What is it like for a 10 year old to be in the back of the car watching his mother, comes out in the movie, of course, engage in a love affair? With someone who’s not your father, obviously.

Grant: Well, it was pretty shocking, because she didn’t know that I was awake, or had woken up midway through this happening, which is the first scene in the film. And as a result, I then developed a terrible facial twitch for a couple of years, which you see in the movie, which my stepmother then cured me of. But it was also the beginning of keeping a diary, which I’ve done ever since.

So it was a way of making it concrete, that this thing actually happened. And having somebody to listen to, although it’s only yourself writing to yourself, as it were. So that’s been a lifelong habit.

Tavis: And your father is an alcoholic. In the movie, of course.

Grant: He became an alcoholic when my mother left, yeah.

Tavis: So, the most amazing thing for me is you were talking earlier about the power of these Black South Africans to love. What’s amazing for me is that you have turned out to be so well adjusted. (Laughs) After, on a serious note, enduring all of that, how does one survive that and come through that so well adjusted?

Grant: Well, I think that you only know what goes on in your own family life, and I lived for so many years with the shame of having an alcoholic father, and not being able to admit that, and he couldn’t admit that. Because by day, he was Mr. Charming Nice Guy, and then by night, this incredibly violent…

Tavis: A government official, no less.

Grant: …alter-ego, absolutely, yeah. He was Minister of Education for the country. So, the love that you have for your parent is so overwhelming, and I knew that the man that he was by day was not the monster that he became by night. So that made me able to forgive the fact that he tried to shoot me, and I survived all of that.

Tavis: It’s a powerful scene in the movie.

Grant: Love is the thing that gets you through everything, and my mother did say to me, about eight years ago, after 35 years of pretty extreme estrangement and Ice Station Zebra between us, she said three words to me, which (unintelligible) to what you were saying about Desmond Tutu, is that she said these three magic words, please forgive me. And for a parent to say that to a child is an extraordinarily powerful thing to do. And so of course, the milk of compassion and human kindness flooded through me and has enabled me to really write this story. In all its pain and humor, by turn.

Tavis: No better way to end this conversation. The movie is starring, directed by, his directorial debut, Richard E. Grant. Nice to have you on the program.

Grant: Thank you.

Tavis: Check out “Wah-Wah.” I just love saying that. “Wah-Wah.” That’s our show for tonight. Catch me on the weekends on PRI, Public Radio International. Check your local listings. See you back here next time on PBS. Until then, good night from Los Angeles. Thanks for watching, and as always, keep the faith.