| Penny Folger |
Withnail and I plays at the Trylon Cinema from Friday, December 5th, through Sunday, December 7th. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org.
“Fork it!” screamed actor Richard E. Grant, in the audition for what was to become his first role in a feature film: 1987’s Withnail and I. For Bruce Robinson, who was directing his first feature film, it was the way Grant delivered this line that sealed the deal.
Grant got the job, but by day two of shooting it seemed the film would be shut down by HandMade Films, George Harrison’s production company. HandMade thought the rushes were too dark (early scenes were shot in a cottage lit by oil lamp) and that the film was “as funny as an orphanage on fire.” According to Grant, HandMade’s cofounder Denis O’Brien thought that all comedy should be very brightly lit.
The film is indeed funny, but the humor is more situational and character driven—not a string of overt jokes à la Monty Python, whose Life of Brian HandMade produced. Said Robinson at the time, “It’s what I tried to explain to those f**kers. The script has no jokes. It’s cumulative and has to be real. Otherwise it’s just a load of old wobbly bollocks.”1
Robinson, who co-lead Paul McGann later described as “neurotic,” would yell “cut!” anytime anyone in the crew laughed at anything the actors were doing. This might sound counter intuitive, but he was worried that any glimmer of self consciousness in the comedy, or a play to the assembled “audience” would render the film immediately unfunny.
Robinson, for whom a lot of the film was autobiographical, said of this period of his life he was trying to capture, “This was a kind of general madness that we lived in and it looked like that and sounded like that except it was not remotely amusing to us… Though there were some very funny things going on.”2
Robinson began chronicling his life back in the late 1960s in Camden Town, while living in squalor with a band of other out of work actors he’d met in drama school. Said a friend of the Victorian they shared, “There were like 15 people living in it. There were three bedrooms.”3 Robinson used to carry a lightbulb from room to room because it was his only working lightbulb, and he slept on a mattress next to the bathtub. “Every time, once a week, someone would have a bath, it would all slosh over on the bloody mattress. Consequently my mattress was like a sort of suburb of the Nile.”4
In the film there are only two people living in these ridiculous conditions, but while funny, this is also one thing that makes the film so endearing and identifiable. The lives of the characters are not in fact perfect. They are struggling, to put it mildly. They’re desperate. They’re drinking coffee out of soup bowls and putting plastic bags over their shoes in the absence of rain boots. In a popular entertainment landscape where sitcom characters have been known to work in coffee shops while living in the equivalent of multi-million dollar apartments, this is refreshing and relatable. Perhaps it even makes us feel better about our own lives. (I didn’t watch Friends, but do its characters approach their sink filled with weeks worth of dirty dishes like they’re trying to diffuse a bomb? In real life there was a frog living in Robinson’s own sink named Jeremy who eventually died.)
Relatable horrors: do the characters on Friends live in a flat that looks like this?
Another lovable quality in the film is Grant’s tour de force performance. His Withnail is living in complete squalor, but he walks around with an entitled fury, like he knows he belongs to the upper classes yet does not currently find himself there. It might be unbearable to know someone like this in real life, but in the hands of Grant, it’s wildly entertaining from the safe distance of the big screen.
“It’s a strange process because, knowing the script so well and finding the lines and scene descriptions very funny, you have to put all that aside and inhabit the mental furnishings of failed rage,” said Grant. “‘How dare you?!’ seeps into my head like a mantra for this character. It silently goes through my mind before every new scene and keys me in.”5
For all the greatness of Grant’s performance, in real life he was a teetotaler who was in fact, allergic to alcohol. Robinson once forced Grant to stay up all night drinking before rehearsal to capture the “chemical memory” of being drunk.
Though they appear to have remained friends, reminisced Grant 31 years later, “Sadism. Doctors told me afterwards I could have died, because you can’t drink that amount if you’re allergic to alcohol.”6
“I” on the other hand, played by McGann, was a stand-in for Robinson himself. “I used to suffer from quite severe anxiety attacks when I was young. Particularly if I’d smoked some grass, I tended to freak out. And the only thing that would calm it down was booze.”7
Naturally, this went directly into the screenplay. Observed McGann, “What other film in the world starts with a panic attack and gets worse?”8
Another autobiographical element included was Robinson’s experiences as a young actor starting out in the film industry: more specifically that time he was sexually harassed by a then 44 year old Franco Zeffirelli when he was just 21.
“My character was called Benvoilio in Romeo and Juliet, and I renamed it ‘Bend Overio’ because of my relationship with the director,”9 quipped Robinson years later.
I was introduced to Withnail in England by a local in the 1990s, oddly around the same time Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill was sweeping the country. Alanis aside, this introduction seemed fitting, as its country of origin has embraced it to an almost fanatical degree. It’s regarded as one of England’s biggest cult films and was even put on the list of the British Film Institute’s greatest British films ever made. Fans even make pilgrimages to the phone booth featured in one scene and write messages, in a guest book, to the film’s characters.
Fans actually travel to this phone booth to pay their respects.
Perhaps part of the allure of Withnail is also getting to see characters behave how we wish we could in the face of adversity. The average person isn’t going to cackle and misbehave in a tea room full of proper English ladies until they threaten to call the police, but perhaps we’d be healthier as a society if we could do such things from time to time without getting arrested. It’s possible we’d at least be less likely to develop cancer from living in a constant state of stress and poverty fueled desperation, with no relief.
Withnail is also so beloved because its dialogue is extremely quotable. Even the exquisite Ralph Brown said decades later that he still quotes lines from this movie in his daily life, though never his own character’s. He plays Danny, who is a bit of a drugged out lunatic philosopher, and seems to steal every scene he’s in. Brown worried aloud when the film premiered, “I’m talking so slowly” because his character has his own unique, very memorable cadence. Veteran actor, Richard Griffin who played the stand in for Zeferelli, assured him, “It’s marvelous dear boy, marvelous!” Thirty eight years later, the same could still be said for the film as a whole.
Footnotes
1 Grant, Richard E., With Nails: The film diaries of Richard E. Grant. Woodstock, New York: The Overlook Press, 1999
2 Withnail and I, commentary by director Bruce Robinson, 2006
3 Gordon, Yvonne, director. Withnail and Us. 1999
4 Gordon, Yvonne, director. Withnail and Us. 1999
5 Grant, Richard E., With Nails: The film diaries of Richard E. Grant. Woodstock, New York: The Overlook Press, 1999
6 Withnail & I 30 years on: star Richard E. Grant and director Bruce Robinson discuss the film, BFI, 2017
7 Withnail and I, commentary by director Bruce Robinson, 2006
8 Withnail and I, commentary by Paul McGann and Ralph Brown, 2001
9 Withnail and I, commentary by director Bruce Robinson, 2006
Edited by Olga Tchepikova-Treon