Released on the 10 year anniversary of the cult hit movie, the screenplay to Withnail and I makes an hilarious book. Written by the film’s director Bruce Robinson, it’s a classic and a must for any REG fan, as it’s the film that launched his fabulous career.

Order it here

Below is the front and back cover of the 1998 edition, available in most bookshops still.

1997

In 1997, as you can read on the plaque, REG was asked to squish his paw prints into history. We all spotted these when we went to meet each other at the Withnail for Waterford thingy because you can find them in Leicester Square in London. Don’t know if the cigarette butt will still be there though!

Film Review Magazine (Special Edition) – 1997

Helena Bonham-Carter, faced with Richard E. Grant’s drunken groping in a dim and wet Westminster alley, slaps his face sharply and storms off. Showbiz scandal? Nothing so dramatic. Just a scene on location from Keep the Aspidistra Flying, the George Orwell adaptation that landed the Opening Night Gala at this year’s London Film Festival. Its stars, a pair of talented and highly recognizable British film actors, dominate proceedings.

“I’m effectively playing George Orwell from his autobiographical novel, which he wrote before the success of Animal Farm and 1984,” says Grant. “The character is ‘Gordon Comstock’, but it’s very clear who he is. So it’s a classic, bittersweet romantic comedy of England in the early 1930s, when Orwell left advertising and went ‘Down and Out in Lambeth’ to be a poet. It’s not hugely plot-driven, but after Withnail & I that doesn’t bother me.

So it’s another jaded outsider, 10 years after Withnail?

“That’s why I was cast. I’m not naïve. I don’t mind, because Alan Plater’s script uses every opportunity for narrative or dramatic development within the book.”

The stars have worked on film together before in Twelfth Night, “where I was pretty horrible to Richard,” admits Bonham-Carter.

As they prepare again fro the dramatic slap, Helena laughs. “I don’t quite know how to do it without hurting – you have to make contact. I started slapping him in rehearsal, and he said ‘Do you mind not slapping me yet, please?’.” Sure enough, the first take sees her collapsing into gentle giggles at the face-stinging moment, but by the third take everything works to order in the sequence.

So how do you approach playing one of the great writers of the 20th Century?

“Obviously I started with the biography, and found he had a long face and short hair – so I’ve got those……. next, parallels from your own life: I have the experience of being unemployed…… and of writing, although superficial film diaries are hardly proper art and literature!”

The ‘superficial film diaries’, better known as With Nails, has wowed critics and public alike with its honest, unglamorous, account of life as an actor. Was he surprised at its success? “Surprised, no. Staggered, yes. It was a huge relief, because I felt very responsible. A film can be a popular or critical hit because of all sorts of people’s contributions. But if the book failed I could hardly claim ‘well, it’s because Nicole Kidman wasn’t up to scratch’.

“Going on the book tour was about the most ego-massaging thing ever. You walk into a sold-out hall, read some extracts, answer some questions, and people have only come for you. Because writing is so solitary compared to the communal work of theatre and cinema, to have an audience responding was a real bonus.”

The diary offers a retrospective look at many of the key events in Grant’s professional and private life. With hindsight, wasn’t there the temptation to change any of the entries?

“I could have been wise after the event, but the point of a diary is day-to-day accounts. Take Hudson Hawk. Hollywood’s most successful producers offered me the lead role opposite Bruce Willis for more money than I’d ever had. Their Die Hard had transformed Alan Rickman’s career, the director had been behind Heathers….and then it all went wrong.

“You can be so thrilled at any project’s start, but like William Goldman says ‘Nobody knows anything’. Otherwise we’d be making classics with every movie. So, of course, here I am telling you how well-constructed this script is, but I don’t know how it will turn out. I have no control.”

He seems to have appeared with just about everybody in the business. Is there anyone left he’s dying to meet or work with?

“Oh God, yes, tons. My starstruck-ability hasn’t diminished in any way, shape or form. People say I must be cynical by now about the industry, but I still find talent hypnotic. If someone’s very successful there’s almost always much more to the person than the persona they’re known for.”

Grant, as ever, is working on Steven Poliakoff’s Food of Love, Serpent’s Kiss with Ewan McGregor, and after the Aspidistra shoot – as the foxy fivesome’s manager in Spice World: The Movie.

“I’ve never been ruthless or self-possessed enough to say ‘I will only play leading roles’. I wouldn’t have missed the chance of my supporting role for Jane Campion in Portrait of a Lady for anything. The best director I’ve ever worked with.”

High praise from an actor who has worked for directors he idolized in adolescence: Scorsese, Altman, Coppola.
In contrast to some of his big Hollywood productions, Aspidistra has a modest budget and some urgency in the schedule.

“I can be married in the morning, have a death scene at lunchtime, be drunk in the afternoon and hospitalized come evening. There’s no sitting around – we’re only here now waiting for darkness. Normally I have the huge luxury of being able to write and read in between scenes. Not on this one!”

So what about the famous Grant diaries. Are there any plans for more to be released?

“Yes, for my mental salvation. I’ve been asked to write another volume, and a novel, By Design, set in Hollywood. It’s an insider’s view. I can disguise the stuff I couldn’t put in the diaries. My reservation about doing more of those is losing the ‘Dick Whittington’ aspect of my arrival in London as an unknown. But it’s fantastic to get paid for writing something I do for my own entertainment.”

Anybody who has had any sort of working relationship with Grant faces the prospect of turning up in the upcoming diary, including Bonham-Carter.

“Well, I’m slightly worried about reading the sequel with a dawning sense of horror. But ultimately, Richard’s such an honest person – upfront and direct, completely un-English in many ways – that you start telling him things you wouldn’t tell your best friend. We shall see when the sequel’s published whether I really want to work with him again,” she reveals with tongue-firmly-in-cheek. Or at least it seems that way.

The Guardian – 7th November, 1997

On the scripts in his drawer and learning from the greats

Richard E. Grant was interviewed by Richard Williams at the National Film Theatre.

Ambitions to direct

RW: [repeating audience question] Do you have any ambitions to direct?

REG: God, scratch every actor. Um, do I have ambitions to direct? When I was midway through my university degree combined with a drama diploma at Cape Town University in the mid-70s, I co-founded a theatre company while still at drama school and then subsequently worked with that at the theatre co-founded and set up by Ethel Fugard and Yvonne Briceland called the Space Theatre in Cape Town, and directed at least half of the productions there, so that was –

And when I left university, my university professor said to me, in the kind of round-up, the outgoing sort of last interview, he said to me, “You are too weird-looking, plain-faced and lightweight to ever have a career as an actor, and I think that you” – well, you know, he was trying to be helpful. [Laughter] I laugh on his tombstone now. And he said, “You – I think that your talents lie in directing things,” so when I came to England, there seemed no opportunity or possibility of saying, “Well, I’m from Swaziland, I’m a director”. I just didn”t have the balls to do that.

But I do have a drawer full of things and I’m now, I have a script called Mud which is – I know, my wife thinks it’s a terrible title, as you obviously do too [Laughter] – which is set in Swaziland where I grew up. So inevitably, write what you know. Which I hope, one day, somebody will give me money, if I think it’s good enough to offer to people to consider financing, and I would like to direct it, but not to act in it, because it seems to me that it is – I mean having had the fantastic experience of writing a book, and having a sense of control – control freak; my wife says I am. In a film, you are completely at the mercy of what an editor does, a director does and finally the distributor does with a movie. Whereas, I think, in directing, for better or worse, you do, it seems to me, have the final say of how something can be done.

And having been – worked around the people that I have done, which I realise has been an incredible privilege, and have never ever felt, “Oh yeah, well, Scorcese this week, you know, fuck it,” [Laughter] always been, “Yes, oh Marty,” that I think something must rub off of how the best people work, which has generally been that they make things seem very easy and straightforward, and people that are not very good, both actors or directors, complicate things and the shit seems to hit the fan and you think, “This is just obvious and straightforward,” so, you know, you could be sitting here in five years’ time with somebody who’s been in my film who’s saying, “That is the worst fucker I have ever worked with”. [Laughter] So I don’t know, but thank you for your question.

Who Magazine (1997)

Helena Bonham Carter’s feet were on the ground but her head was in the clouds when she arrived on the Concorde and rushed to the Leicester Square premiere of her film Keep the Aspidistra Flying.

Frazzled, she froze onstage through her introductory speech. “Am I suppose to say something?” she stammered. “I don’t have anything to say.”

Co-star Richard E. Grant saved her when he took the microphone and offered his own off-the-cuff flight of fantasy about his (non-existent) naked scene in Aspidistra.