Ray Pride

The wry, witty and pungent "Wah-Wah," Richard E. Grant's debut as a writer-director, should surprise no one who's seen his performances in movies like "Withnail & I" or his quippy, gossipy film diaries ("With Nails").

Patterned after events in Grant's own life growing up in Swaziland--including having his protagonist Ralph witness his mother's adultery in the opening scene--"Wah-Wah" is set at the end of the English empire, as well as the end of a tortured marriage. While his script is rife with keenly observed details and behavior about boredom, snobbery and the inevitable colonial provincialism, Grant also gets 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 `Poseidon' budget behind me." It took six years from first draft to an American release. "I'd always been thinking of writing a script 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 setup 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."

He had made notes for years, with a result like "a tax return having a nervous breakdown," as he puts it. "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 ten years into a three-year time scale, you've got to seriously edit, and take 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."

Referencing the 1950s British comedy studio, Grant refers to his African-set tale of bantering, bickering English expats as "Equatorial Ealing." "Yeah, suburban tropical," he says, "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 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."

Grant's been a lifelong diarist. "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."

What happens on a day when you can't write? "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."

Among his public quirks, Grant has always bragged on being quite the smeller. "Yep. Yeah, I think it's the great underrated sense." And what are three great smells he can share? "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."

(2006-06-13)

Also by Ray Pride

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The Opening Night Program of the 18th Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival, shown at the Siskel Film Center, produced by Chicago Filmmakers, has two distinct highlights
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"Sketches of Frank Gehry" by Sydney Pollack is a unique documentary, an ongoing appreciation-cum-bitch session between a pair of successful men in their seventies who must navigate the ego and caprice of other men who would give them the millions to practice their respective crafts of architecture and moviemaking
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Patriotic Gore
Two bits of testimony to the strength of "An Inconvenient Truth": in the first week of its release, on both Fox and in the Washington Post, the name of Vice President Al Gore has been linked to Adolf Hitler; and Variety's charts for the past weekend noted that a four-screen tally of $365,787 was the highest per-screen total ever for a documentary
(2006-05-30)

Tip of the Week
Aside from one of the greatest titles of all time, Frank Borzage's eclectic comedy-romance-melodrama, set in Paris and Manhattan, "History Is Made at Night" (1937) contains some of the most jaw-droppingly agile shifts of tone in classical Hollywood screenplay construction
(2006-05-30)

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