As shooting continued, the temperature heated up in what had become something of a personal war between Robinson and O’Brien. ‘Every day there was some battle going on,’ Ralph Brown remembers. ‘Denis was the sort of aggro guy at HandMade who was making it difficult for Bruce, in Bruce’s eyes anyway. There would always be a lunchtime discussion in the pub, it wouldn’t be on the set, so it never interrupted the shooting, but Bruce didn’t keep things to himself, he’d always share with us whatever problem he was having that particular day. During my scenes, I remember he was fighting with Denis over the title — HandMade thought Withnail and I was the worst title they’d ever heard. There were also problems over the famous “coal man” speech which they’d made him cut from the script. And Bruce came up to me on the day and gave me this bit of paper and said, “Learn that, they’ve cut it but I’m gonna fucking shoot it anyway.” And like every other aspect of the film, Bruce totally dug his heels in and said, “No, that’s what it is.”’
According to Brian Shingles, O’Brien performed a complete U-turn over the film once it was completed. ‘I remember going to a screening, one of the rough cuts, and everyone thought how wonderful Withnail was. We thought, We’ve got a really unique film. Denis did make changes and I don’t know what Bruce felt about them, but Denis had a very soft spot for Withnail as I recall. He felt, out of all of them, it was probably the jewel in the crown.’
David Wimbury, the producer, also found O’Brien accommodating. ‘I found Denis fine, actually. I know he upset some people and could be a little obstinate, but I had a really good relationship with him. Although he wouldn’t pay for a last day’s filming we wanted to do, so we had to pay for it ourselves.’
Another battle was over O’Brien’s interpretation of the way Uncle Monty should be played. Robinson wanted the part performed very straight, but O’Brien had in mind something approaching a cartoon figure. McGann comments, ‘He wanted the campest show on earth.’ Ironically, Richard Griffiths himself saw Monty as more camp than Robinson intended. ‘No, we’ll have to go again,’ Robinson would be heard to cry during a shot. ‘Richard, you mustn’t do any of that stuff with your wrist, don’t flap about and don’t pull faces. Just say the lines.’ At other times, though, he’d want Griffiths to pull a camp face or two. Griffiths says, ‘In one scene, we’re in the cottage eating this huge leg of lamb and McGann says something that Monty finds completely out of order and I pull a face at him. And Bruce said, “Cut. This is rubbish. Richard, you’ve got to give him such a shitty look. He’s said such a fatuous fucking thing so you’ve got to punish him with a look.” I said, “All right, I’ll give a punishing look.” He said, “No, no. I want a particular kind of look.” I said, “What kind of look do you want?” And he said, “I know... I want a look that’s something like a goat’s arse.” And I flippantly said, “Oh, you mean like this...” And he said, “Perfect.”’
Griffiths saw Monty as a wonderful creature, a character people could warm to, in spite of his amorous leanings towards Marwood. His botched ‘seduction’ of the young boy is a darkly tragic moment. Griffiths recalls, ‘I spent an hour-and-a-half in make-up being made up to look like Hermann Goering at an orgy. And I had the famous dressing gown on. And, of course, the bastards made me sit around the whole day waiting for this scene. I had lunch, sat around chatting, drinking, having fags and completely forgot how bizarre I looked, so when I went in to do the scene I was very natural and cool, because the dialogue was difficult enough to get through without cracking up.’
The script called for Griffiths to slip off his dressing gown and to spread his obese nakedness in front of McGann. When the time came, Griffiths approached Robinson. ‘I can’t cope with that. I mean I wouldn’t even do that in private. And I think I can suggest an alternative. Let me keep the fab dressing gown on ’til I back him into the corner and the camera’s behind me, then you can see him over my shoulder, and what I’ll do is I’ll flash him and it’ll be funny.’
Robinson liked the idea and the scene plays beautifully. ‘I remember at the première of the film,’ Griffiths says, ‘as Monty enters the room about four rows behind me this woman went “Uurrghhh! Beyond yucky.” But by the end of the scene, which must be all of two minutes, I could hear her weeping.’
Towards the end of August, filming moved from Penrith to London where a condemned house in Notting Hill was made to look even more decadent as the boy’s Camden Town squat. It was here, during the filming of the notorious dirty kitchen sequence, that George Harrison and Ringo Starr paid the film a quick visit, Starr commenting that the attendant squalor of the place reminded him of how The Cavern used to look. It was a big buzz for the team and a thrill for the actors. Richard E Grant comments, ‘Very low-key were they... very awestruck were we.’
For most of these scenes, drug guru Danny takes centre stage, spouting immortal lines like, ‘If I medicined you, you’d think a brain tumour was a fucking birthday present.’ The role is such a one-off stroke of genius that Ralph Brown simply can’t help but steal every minute he’s on screen, though that was never the actor’s intention. ‘I just played the character as it was written. If you look at the way the scenes are in the screenplay, Danny really dominates them, he drives them, the scenes are very much about them reacting to him. In the last scene, Paul’s getting stoned, Richard’s giggling and I’m being Bruce, actually. Those lines about hippie wigs in Woolworth’s and we have failed to paint it black, stuff like that, is really the voice of the writer there. And I’m the classic holy fool being given these words of wisdom to speak, because Danny is so clearly a pontificating idiot, therefore if he sort of speaks the truth it takes the curse off it a bit, it stops it being preachy.’
Brown only worked for three days on the picture. On his last day, they filmed the famous Camberwell carrot scene where he sits spaced out smoking an enormous joint. Brown was determined to behave exactly as he’d seen rastas smoking ganja in Jamaica, what he calls ‘professional ganja smokers’. That was to try and inhale through his mouth and breathe out through his nose at the same time, thus creating a cloud of reef smoke. That whole sequence had to be completed in one day, such was the tight schedule Robinson was under. ‘Bruce was great,’ Brown says. ‘He was an actor for years so understood the process very well. But at the same time, he didn’t let us run with it, he wanted it a very particular way. He could hear it all in his head and he could’ve played all the parts himself. In fact, quite often he’d give out line readings from the set. He’d let you try it and if you didn’t get it the first two or three times he’d come up and whisper in your ear, “No, it’s supposed to be like this...” He was conducting the film, really, like a mad, drunken conductor with his flask of vodka he’d had for breakfast. He never appeared drunk at all; one was aware that he must be drunk because of the amount of alcohol he was drinking, but he never appeared to be drunk, he was always very lucid.’
During that week, McGann’s Monocled Mutineer debuted on television to much press attention. Strangely, the final stages of Withnail curiously mirrored the relationship between Grant and McGann themselves. The scene in the cottage where Marwood receives a telegram offering him a job was played from the heart by Grant who dreaded a return to unemployment when shooting ended and envied McGann his success with the Monocled Mutineer. McGann says, ‘That scene is my favourite bit of Richard’s whole performance. I hand the telegram to him and he looks at it and just says, “Well done.” Next time you see the film, look at his face, everything is in this beautiful bit of acting, fantastically bittersweet. It’s the whole film. It’s over. Their relationship is over. It’s about to end. That’s wonderful acting, and it proved that his performance wasn’t just all those shenanigans and camp shit, he did a lot of really brilliant, clever stuff, too.’
Other memorable scenes included the boys’ nocturnal visit to Monty’s posh London abode where he strains to let them in while holding a cat. ‘The cat we used was hopeless,’ Griffiths complains, ‘a useless fucking cat
. It was this blue Persian kitten that was just shitting itself with fear. I said, “What am I supposed to do with this?” They said, “You open the door and you’ve got a glass teapot in one hand and this cat in the other.” I said, “And I open the door with the end of my willy?” And they said, “No, no, you’ve just got to struggle a bit and open the door.” Well, I opened the door and this fucking cat just hung there. It had died and gone to hell. It hung in my hand like a friggin’ wet dishcloth and so I was having to hold it up, it wasn’t clinging to any part of my arm. I had to hold this thing up like you’d hold up a squid because it was slipping. And, of course, being a Persian they’re very tiny, skinny creatures with all this mass of fur. Talk about fur coat and no knickers, there’s no substance to them at all.’
Monty ushers the boys inside to the lounge and, at some point in the dialogue, the cat was to suddenly materialise on top of the couch, startling Monty. ‘Well, you wouldn’t believe,’ Griffiths adds, ‘it couldn’t jump, and eventually they were lobbing it. They would throw it in the air and hope it would land near my head on the couch. They said, “Oh, don’t hurt it otherwise we’ll all get into trouble.” I said, “Fuck that. Why don’t we just pull it inside out and get another one?” But, no, they wouldn’t have that. The cat hardly figures at all in the film, but, God, it dominated the time we were in that room. Bastard thing.’
Then it was off to Kensal Rise to film Withnail and Marwood’s Jimi Hendrix-fuelled drive out of London. It was a drizzly, quiet Sunday morning, very early as the crew hadn’t really gained permission to shoot there. They’d secreted themselves in the doorway of a bleak tower block to capture this battered Jag roaring past. McGann was driving and had to take the Jag on a lap of the estate a few times until the perfect establishing shot was in the can. ‘On the fourth take, I’ve come to a stop at these lights and we’re looking like a pair of cunts at the wheel in costume. The Jag’s got like one headlamp and Grant’s got a bottle of scotch between his legs. And I saw a parked Panda car and thought, Jesus. And I said to Richard, “Look.” And he said, “Oh no.” I said, “Don’t worry, they haven’t even noticed us.” Then one of them looked up and saw me and nudged his mate, mouthing, “What the fuck?” And I thought, Well, this is it. And I don’t know what possessed me, the lights were still red, I just stood on the Jag and took off. And they didn’t waste any time, these guys were right behind us pretty quick. Richard was already a ball of fucking claws next to me, he was going like, “You’ve got to stop, I’m gonna get fucking arrested.” I think he imagined he was still an illegal alien or something. He’d only been in England a couple of years. I said, “All right, don’t worry.” And we get back round to where the crew are and I mount the pavement doing about 50 and, before I’ve even brought it to a stop, Richard had the door open and he did a stunt exit from this car and was off. He’d gone.’
The car was now stationary, and a policeman came tapping on the window. It was then that the first assistant came out of the high-rise to calm things down. McGann remembers, ‘But we couldn’t find Grant for five minutes. He’d completely disappeared. They found him hiding in someone’s garden down the fucking road. And Bruce was going to him, “Fucking hell. If this had been Los Angeles you’d have been dead, they’d have shot ya.” It was great. It was so exciting.’
Early in December, the cast saw the film for the first time in a small screening room in Wardour Street. Brown recalls, ‘Richard E Grant was there and he’s actually never seen any of his work since then because it freaked him out so much. I was appalled by how slowly I was speaking. I thought, Fuck me, this is terrible. And I was sitting next to Richard Griffiths and I said to him, “I’m talking too fucking slowly.” And he went, “Don’t worry, dear boy, it’s marvellous.”’
Then came the test previews. The first one was a disaster. Shown to a small, hand-picked audience in the West End, Robinson sat there mortified as his film raised not one titter or semblance of a laugh. Only later was it discovered that the audience was comprised of German tourists hijacked from a nearby hostel.
For a time, it looked like Withnail and I might be doomed to collect dust on a shelf somewhere as distributors shied away from releasing the film. David Wimbury recalls how he would be on the phone trying to flog it, saying stuff like, ‘No, it’s just two boys. Talking. No girls.’ Just how do you pitch something like Withnail and I? Grant believed the film would never see daylight. Palmer confirms, ‘Withnail was so difficult to sell. We couldn’t do anything with it. God knows, we tried. For me, that was probably my personal biggest disappointment that we couldn’t find it a proper distributor.’
One achievement was getting it a showing at the Edinburgh Film Festival, which Robinson attended. Checking into his hotel and not liking the room, he declared, ‘This room is so small I couldn’t even get an erection.’
Eventually, Recording Releasing took the film on but, being a relatively small outfit, they couldn’t give it the wide release it deserved. Stupidly, O’Brien, still smarting over his encounters with Stephen Woolley on Mona Lisa, refused to let Palace have the film when they put in an offer. ‘Denis wouldn’t let Woolley have it,’ Palmer says, ‘and Palace were the company to distribute it. If anybody could’ve made that a success, it was Palace.’
Woolley had already seen the film and loved it. ‘HandMade were looking for a distributor and, again, they had no idea what to do with it, they were lost, and I saw it and after ten minutes I had literally collapsed to my knees, I was just laughing so hard I could feel the tears coming down my cheeks. And I really wanted us to distribute it, and we did everything we could to try and get it released under Palace, but they wouldn’t let me have it. Denis was quite cruel, and I feel cruelly treated by him on a personal level.’
Withnail and I opened in London in February 1988 and was widely welcomed by critics. The Observer proclaimed, ‘A funny, curious and oddly affecting slice of anti-nostalgia.’ The Guardian said, ‘One of the most original and certainly the most personal film of the current British revival.’ The Face, however, found it ‘ineffably patronising, tedious, unconvincing and irretrievably self-indulgent’. It was the Daily Telegraph that perhaps said it best: ‘In many ways, Withnail and I is what the British film industry is all about. It is an eccentric, intimate and well-written independent production that would never have seen the light of day in Hollywood.’ Strange, then, that HandMade chose to open Withnail first in America, during the summer of 1987, cannily at a time when other off-beat British films like Personal Services and Prick Up Your Ears were finding appreciative, if small, audiences. McGann remembers, ‘I was in New York at the time meeting a prospective agent and she said to me, “I’m sure you’re in a film around the corner.” I’ve only done one film, I thought, it can’t be that. And it was. It was playing in the basement at the Carnegie Hall. I went down there. I had to go and see. And I spoke to the girl on the tickets and she said, “Oh my God, it’s you.” I remember standing outside and people coming out laughing. It was lovely. I said to Bruce, “It’s here!”’
It was also in America where the cult of Withnail really first started, long before it was embraced by the college kids of Britain. Brown says, ‘It was almost immediate in Hollywood because there was always a little coterie of people in Hollywood that would walk around quoting lines from it. And that’s how come we’ve all worked a lot since.’
Director David Fincher was a huge fan and wanted to reunite the Withnail cast in Alien 3. McGann and Brown appear, but Grant turned down an offer to play the doctor which, instead, went to Charles Dance. And Brown’s role as a drug-crazed roadie in Wayne’s World 2 was specifically written with him in mind and very much based on Danny. Richard Griffiths also remembers being out in Hollywood making Naked Gun 2 and cast members pointing him out as Uncle Monty. Indeed, so associated did Griffiths become with that role that the actor was assumed to be gay in real life. ‘For the next five or six years, I was getting begging letters from every AIDS charity in the world to become it
s president or spokesman and I kept writing back saying, “I’m sorry, you’re barking up the wrong tree.”’
In Britain, the Withnail cult was slow to take off. It wasn’t until the early 1990s that the film was ‘discovered’. ‘It was people who must have been too young when it was first released,’ Brown says, ‘so they’ve caught up with it on video and it was passed from hand to hand in student refectories and halls of residence. And I think that’s been the heart of the cult, really, it’s been students and people who smoke marijuana.’
McGann, living as he does in a university town, is a witness to the cult first-hand. ‘I know come September there’ll be a new intake of students and I get stopped by different 18- or 19-years-olds in the street. And they act out the scenes in front of you.’
One can argue that, back in 1987, if Withnail and I had received a mainstream release it might well have been a hit, thus precluding the huge cult status it enjoys today. With video and DVD sales, plus a deserved 1996 cinema re-release in the UK, one might guess that everyone concerned has done very nicely out of it, thank you. Certainly Richard E Grant’s quite exceptional performance turned him into an international film star. ‘I don’t think there is a single film that I have done that hasn’t been as a result of Withnail,’ he said in 1996. ‘That is the thing that has stuck in the head of whoever has employed me.’ Indeed, all the principal actors have pursued solid post-Withnail careers. But financially, aside from their basic fee, and they did the film for British Equity contracts — ‘the worst film contracts in the world, with the possible exception of India,’ according to Richard Griffiths — they’ve received no extra financial benefits. Largely due to the ownership of the film changing hands so many times, even Bruce Robinson hasn’t received a penny of the not inconsiderable profits Withnail has incurred since. Something of a scandal, but not that unusual for HandMade. Cooper says, ‘Bruce hasn’t had a reporting sheet on Withnail I think since he made the film. I don’t think Bruce has had a day’s cheque from it, from the point of view of profit, and I find that extraordinary.’
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