RICHARD E. GRANT’S DEBUT AS WRITER-DIRECTOR, the wry, witty and pungent coming-of-ill-age Wah-Wah, should surprise no one who’s seen his unforgettable, eccentric performances in movies like Withnail & I or read his quippy, gossipy film diaries (“With Nails”). Patterned from events in the veteran actor’s own life growing up in the African former English colony of Swaziland—including having Ralph, his young protagonist, witness his mother’s adultery in the opening scene—Wah-Wah is set at the end of English empire, as well as past the end of a torturous marriage. While Grant’s script is rich with keenly observed details and behavior about boredom, snobbery and the inevitable colonial provincialism, he also gets uniformly fine performances from a strong cast, including Miranda Richardson and Gabriel Byrne as Ralph’s parents, Harry and Lauren, and Emily Watson as Ruby, the bold American stewardess his father later marries. (Harry’s descent into Jekyll-and-Hyde alcoholism is touching and unsentimental: Byrne seeps melancholy.) Grant, 48, is in a good mood when we speak. “The sun is shining. I had a very good response to an AFI screening last night for my friends and some famous faces. Steve Martin did the Q&A with me afterwards. I couldn’t be in better shape if I tried. Of course, I’d like it to be on 4,000 screens but I don’t have the MI3 or Poseidon [advertising] budget behind me.”
PRIDE: Roadside Attractions have done well with unexpected films, like Ladies in Lavender, even if Wah-Wah is less… genteel. You may be in good hands.
GRANT: I hope for their sake that their faith is proved to be rewarded and reciprocated.
PRIDE: You’ve said this story is very personal. I’m wondering how you organized your thoughts. Personal history is sometimes the most difficult thing for a writer to organize and it can take a long time to get there.
GRANT: I’d been thinking of writing a script for some years, about the last gasp of Empire and the community of people who are past their historical sell-by date. That [was] a source of comedy and tragedy in my own personal life, and I thought that it would be a good set-up to have the story of my utterly dysfunctional family set against the last gasp of empire, the disintegration of the English empire, this private family life against the public show of a broad political canvas. That’s what I did. I then spent two months in 1999 writing the first draft. In the way of the world, a first-time writer-director’s movie getting off the ground has now taken six years to releasing in the U S of A… Yeah… Six.
PRIDE: There has been a gap in your acting CV the past few years.
GRANT: That’s because I’ve been taken up with the all the pre-production, shooting and post-production on my movie.
PRIDE: You’ve described writing this movie as being like “a tax return in the middle of a nervous breakdown.”

GRANT: Yeah, because… Yeah, I’m sure you know, as a writer, that if you try and organize a story that is taken from your own life, trying to condense and compress things that have happened over 10 years into a three-year time scale, you’ve got to seriously edit, and take, y’know, as objective an overview as possible to translate it into a cohesive narrative. I had been writing scenes or descriptions of what I thought would make up a movie over X number of years. Only they were all on scraps of paper in paper bags and drawers of stuff. When it came to collating all of them, I realized a great deal of the movie had already been written in some shape or form. So I wasn’t starting with a blank page, if you like.
PRIDE: From a project of my own that’s taken too long, what you’ve said about foreground and background, family and canvas, matches the solution I’ve finally found. The innocent in the foreground, and the world’s crazy around him.
GRANT: Mm-hm. It’s the perfect vehicle, or, if you like, route into a story. You take the audience on the same journey as that adolescent 14-year-old boy goes on. Where you experience the same confusion, and decisions taken by adults that you had no control over. I think you experience that as a moviegoer on the same journey he does.
PRIDE: Tell me what you mean by saying that the 1960s Swaziland setting of Wah-Wah is “Equatorial Ealing.”
GRANT: Yeah, suburban tropical. Where everybody knows everybody else’s business and it’s a kind of incestuous, hermetically sealed environment overlaid with all the social order and snobbish pretensions of that happen in any kind of provincial situation. But when you add a bit of colonial administrative power to it, it ups the ante: comedy, snobbery and inevitable drama.
PRIDE: Do you shoot stills?
GRANT: Photography? Oh no, no, no, nothing at all, just other than handicam with my family on holiday and Christmas and that kind of stuff. No, nothing at all.
PRIDE: I wondered because Wah-Wah has an impressively clean visual style. And widescreen is always an interesting choice, and in this film, you use it for a bounty of vistas but also for groupings of characters. Why did widescreen appeal to you?
GRANT: Because I wanted to have the landscape as much as possible without banging people over the heads with it. That you saw these characters, these people, in relation to this landscape. Snobberies and pretensions under a kind of cultural environment that was not naturally theirs. It belonged to the Swazis, the people of Swaziland, if anything. It would emphasize that difference, that the climate doesn’t suit them, that they’re uncomfortably hot. That they don’t really fit in against that landscape. I also was very keen that you… It also gives you an opportunity, because [there are] so many interior scenes, it gives you a chance to, I suppose, breathe, if you like, by then pulling out and seeing that all this high drama and comedy is really like ants and a molehill compared to the bigger landscape that they exist in. Of course, I think Swaziland is so visually beautiful that it was irresistible to do that. Also, with the letterbox format, because the main character is often so emotionally isolated through the story I could put him on the extreme right or left of the frame and then have a huge amount of air of landscape to the side that would emphasize that, as opposed to a normal format.
PRIDE: Sydney Pollack says his career-long use of widescreen is pragmatic; his stories are about men and women and relationships. He was essentially saying that it’s the best way to have them both in the frame at the same time, to focus on the man or the woman but not to neglect either.
GRANT. Absolutely true, yep. That’s more succinctly put than I. I’m going to use that from now onwards. You’re the first person who’s asked me about that framing format.
PRIDE: You also open with unusually clean and good-looking credits. Talk about how you arrived at the look of the film in general, especially with your cinematographer.
GRANT: Yes, absolutely. I had a French cinematographer whose English wasn’t great but it was certainly better than my bad French. I found that, so to avoid any misunderstandings, I did storyboards of the whole movie, so that the whole crew had my crude, cartoon storyboards of the whole movie on a daily basis, which I did the night before shooting. It wasn’t pre-planned, and I found I had to make very clear visual decision before I shot anything, before rehearsals and tossing everything out. That clean, sort of unfussy, I suppose, classical style that doesn’t involve wobbly-scope or a million jump-cuts is what I was absolutely determined to have. I thought if a story like this suffered from “NYPD Blue” [jiggering] it would drive me nuts. And I know that’s the fashion for almost any cinematography now, this reluctance to actually allow the camera to rest on somebody’s face for more than two nanoseconds without jiggling it around or moving it. The cinematographer thought it was a fairly radical departure because he expected that’s what I would be after.
PRIDE: Have you kept a diary like the one published as “With Nails” on a daily basis since childhood?
GRANT: Yeah, ever since witnessing my mum’s adultery, which is the first scene in the film. The idea of not having anybody to talk to, I couldn’t speak to my parents about it, or certainly not my friends, so a diary was a way of, I suppose, having a conversation about it, without everybody else, y’know, knowing.
PRIDE: What happens on a day when you can’t write?
GRANT: Oh. You can always write. You can always find something to write down. It’s such a lifelong habit that I don’t’ even think twice about doing it, I just do it.
PRIDE: Excellent philosophy for a writer, to have the muscles developed.
GRANT: Yeah, it is.
PRIDE: Many times I’ve read you say that you’re quite the smeller.
GRANT: Yep. Yeah, I think it’s the great underrated sense.
PRIDE: Here’s a silly way to walk around that: what are the last three great smells you’ve encountered?
GRANT: Gardenia flowers, which are my favorite. The smell of my daughter’s neck, which is like newly baked biscuits. And the smell of when you open your Apple laptop and you put your nose down to the computer keys. There’s a most fantastic smell there that never fails to get me going.
PRIDE: So you like being a director rather than an actor?
GRANT: Yeah, because you, y’know… [Grant laughs] You get to use much more, your full brain, as opposed to just the tunnel vision required in focusing in on one character. You have to multi-task, it’s the perfect job for a detail-obsessive masochist.
PRIDE: That sounds like a self-description.
GRANT: Ah… Yeah. If you think that you have to deal with rejection as an actor, as a director you can punch through all that because you’re told no on, if not a daily, an hourly basis, of what can’t be done or what shouldn’t be done or how this can’t be or no that can’t be, so you just get inured to that. Like dog-and-the-donkey, you’ve gotta keep the carrot of the thing that you want to do in front of your nose when everybody else is saying, This is not possible. And keep consistently trying.
PRIDE: You have to envy someone like Ang Lee whose producing partner James Schamus makes it his place to keep people like that out of Lee’s hair.
GRANT: Oh yes.
PRIDE: It sounds like you had a more arduous experience. [“I had a French producer whose name I can’t even speak because I’m so splenetic with rage about it, but the film got made in spite of what she didn’t do,” Grant told Australian ABC. “We got to Swaziland and we had 110 cast and crew three days before we were due to start shooting and I was red carpeted by the Swazi Minister in a Government department saying ‘you have no right to film in the country, you’re illegally here. You don’t have police certificates or medical clearances so you’ll all have to leave’. So I then begged an audience with the King, which you can do in Swaziland, and he then granted us clemency to allow us to start shooting whilst these things were processed. But I don’t know if you can imagine arriving with 120 foreign nationals at Sydney Airport and saying, ‘Well, we’re going to be shooting at Bondi Beach for seven weeks but have got no papers’. I don’t think you’d get two steps ahead of yourself.”]
GRANT: Yep. Well, I certainly won’t be working with that producer again and I hope she never gets to work with anybody again, that she doesn’t torment with her professional incompetence.
PRIDE: But this is the film, the finished film we’re seeing, that you intended to make, wanted to make?
GRANT: It is. Yeah. Absolutely.
PRIDE: Tell me about this project you’ve written that you want to write next, Zeitgeist.
GRANT: It’s about the making of a disaster movie, basically The Poseidon Adventure set in outer space. So it’s really about acting.
PRIDE: Small story against the big canvas. A good thing to remember.
GRANT: Indeed.

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