By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
We want the finest wines available to humanity: Withnail, once more
Time Out London returns to the well for more Bruce Robinson on one of the great singularities of UK cinema, Withnail and I as it ripens into its twentieth anniversary: “The night before we were due to start shooting, I’m sitting in the bar of this hotel in Penrith with a bottle of vodka. It’s three in the morning, and I’m smoking myself silly, drinking myself daft to try and get arseholed so I could get to sleep—anything to escape or somehow navigate this fear that was coursing through my veins. And I couldn’t get drunk. I couldn’t get anything out of it and [co-producer] David Wimbury… came in, sat down with me in this empty bar and had a couple of glasses and said something to me that is so true about the film industry. He said, ‘The thing is Bruce, it doesn’t matter how good your script is, how good your actors are, how good you may be as a director, if you haven’t got luck, you’re fucked.’ The thing about Withnail is that we had luck. That’s why the film worked. Can you imagine how obscenely horrible a film like Withnail would be, if it didn’t work? Goddamn… I have sometimes sat in pubs when I used to booze and hear these old bastards talking dialogue as good as anything by Pinter – and I love Pinter – or Beckett. It is absolutely phenomenal and so funny, but if you told them it was funny or copied it down and gave it back to them and said, ‘Do it again’, they couldn’t do it. The moment they knew it was funny they would fuck it up.” At a New York preview, he recalls, “We put the film up and they start laughing. Not immediately, but ten minutes in… There were two girls in front of me. By about 30 minutes in, they were standing up to laugh, hanging over the seats in front of them. I thought they were going to choke to death and it was the best noise I’ve ever heard. I’m staring at their arses as they’re rolling on these seats and the whole theatre was screeching, so that was one of the best experiences of my life, because that’s what we were all about. [More teling tales of fuck-ups at the link; Kevin Jackson wrote a BFI Modern Classic on the film; promoting the as-told-to “Smoking in Bed,” Robinson told Rachel Ong “What I think it does do is touch that moment that we’ve all had where we’re all broke, all starving, all aspiring and all knowing that it might not work in our lives. For one of them it does not definitely and for one of them it might. I really think audiences love good dialogue. Brilliant photography costs a lot more than crap photography, whereas good dialogue doesn’t cost any more than bad dialogue, so even a cheap film can have great dialogue in it.”]