But everything you see happen did happen and my family are all pretty verbatim
But everything you see happen did happen, and my family are all pretty verbatim.”Grant’s first problem was assembling a cast. “At my father’s funeral the young Swazi priest, who had just come back from an evangelical course in America, jumped into the grave, undid the lid of the coffin and said: ‘I am going to raise your father from the dead.’ It was Monty Python meets Joe Orton.”I have to say the film is semi-autobiographical because it’s 10 years that have been concertinaed down into three years for the story. The bullet whistled past my head,” recalls Grant, who underwent 18 months of psychoanalysis when he was 42, partly to come to terms with the crippling abuse his father threw at him while drunk.But while attempted filicide seems barely credible, there were other events that Grant excised from the film because he felt audiences would find them too bizarre. There’s a scene in Wah-Wah where his father (called Harry Compton in the film) points a loaded revolver at the young Grant (played by Nicholas Hoult from About a Boy) after his son tips away a crate of whisky He fires and only narrowly misses “I thought I was going to die. In this “last outpost of the Union Jack on the African continent”, the British went around speaking in anachronistic “toodle-pip, old boy” voices that were satirised by Grant’s future stepmother, an American air hostess played in the film by Emily Watson, as “wah-wah”.In this “bizarre, claustrophobic, eccentric expat universe”, Grant’s cuckolded father descended into self-pitying and sometimes frightening alcoholism. While pretending to be asleep on the back seat of his mother’s Mercedes, he saw her make love to his father’s best friend.
“I started keeping a diary that very day and have done ever since,” he tells me now. “I tried God and never got a reply so I gave up on that after a couple of years. The diaries kept me sane.”
Wah-Wah is set in late 1960s Swaziland, in the dying day of British colonial rule, where Grant’s father (played by Gabriel Byrne) was minister of education. Not that his diary-keeping received any maternal encouragement. For, as Grant’s new movie – his semi-autobiographical directorial debut, Wah-Wah – makes plain, his mother was not that sort of a woman. Instead, it was the traumatic experience of witnessing her infidelity that first shocked an 11-year-old Grant into recording his thoughts and feelings on paper. Richard E Grant has his mother to thank for his assiduous diary-keeping – one of whose by-products has been the enjoyable With Nails journals about the making of everybody’s favourite Richard E Grant film, Withnail and I.
His films include Ladybird, Ladybird (1994), Land and Freedom (1995) and Ae Fond Kiss (2004).The Spanish director Pedro Almodovar missed out on the top prize, but he was presented with the award for best screenplay, and the six actresses in his latest film, Volver (Return), were jointly awarded with the prize for best actress, including his long-time collaborators Penelope Cruz and Carmen Maura.The best actor award was also an ensemble prize for the stars of the French director Rachid Bouchareb’s Days of Glory about Muslim men who fought the Nazis in the Second World War.. But it was his 1969 film Kes, based on the novel by Barry Hines, which ensured his reputation as one of Britain’s top directors. Despite a difficult period in the 1980s, when some of his work was never broadcast, Loach has relentlessly pursued his individual brand of social realism. The Wind That Shakes The Barley was filmed in Ireland and supported by the National Lottery through the UK Film Council.In a further triumph for UK film, Andrea Arnold, a new director, won the jury prize for Red Road, starring Kate Dickie as a CCTV operator on a Glasgow council estate who spots a man from her past in video footage.Loach, who studied law at St Peter’s College, Oxford, made his name in television in the 1960s, when he created docu-dramas with the producer Tony Garnett.