WITHNAIL AND I
The story of two boozy out-of-work ’60s actors rejuvenating in rural England, Bruce Robinson’s hedonistic Withnail And I is turning 30. Ignoring a bastard behind the eyes, Total Film meets director and cast to talk the finest comedy known to humanity.
Toasting the gents.
’m 30 in a month and I’ve got a sole flapping off my shoe.” Withnail is 30. So is ‘I’ – or Marwood, as he’s called in the script. And Danny, Uncle Monty, Jake the poacher and even Miss Blenehassitt – all characters from Bruce Robinson’s cult comedy about two ‘resting’ actors who escape the grime of 1969 Camden Town for a delightful weekend in the country. After three decades, its popularity remains undiminished. Like The Big Lebowski and The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Withnail And I screenings are gatherings for hardcore devotees, repeating lines verbatim.
Robinson, along with his ‘Withnail’, Richard E. Grant, recently attended one such showing in Birmingham. “Here’s the audience,” he recalls, “all sitting there with these fucking Tesco carrier bags on their feet, and five or six Uncle Montys in the audience, and there were three huge thug-like men dressed as the Scrubbers [schoolgirls insulted by Withnail, in a rare female encounter], with little girls’ dresses on! And throughout the whole picture, the audience were just shouting the dialogue at the screen, and then laughing and then shouting it again.”
Already this year, long-time fan Johnny Depp (“Who knows the script literally back-to-front,” says Grant) introduced a screening at Glastonbury. Grant also returned to the Edinburgh International Film Festival this year for an anniversary screening (he first appeared here with the movie in 1987). Sitting in the bar of the Caledonian hotel the next morning, he’s still at a loss to explain its longevity. “Seeing it last night… the plot is almost non-existent. You spend time in the company of somebody [Withnail] who is so selfish, cowardly and entitled and think, ‘Why do you put up with that?’”
True, the plot is threadbare, as this booze-fuelled duo head to the rundown Penrith cottage owned by Withnail’s Uncle Monty, who soon follows, hoping to sexually conquer Marwood. Shot in 1986, the year Crocodile Dundee ruled the box office, this terribly British tale of debauchery and desperation was hardly a gilt-edged money-spinner. As Grant puts it, “The idea of a film with an unpronounceable title, people in it who nobody had ever heard of – no women, no car chases, and certainly no crocodiles… it seemed as unlikely a prospect as anything.”
Robinson had been working on the story, on and off, since his days as a struggling thesp in ’69, living with actor-friends, including the late Vivian MacKerrell – said to be the chief inspiration for Withnail. “I didn’t scurry around in my mate Viv’s wake with a notebook copying the epithets,” corrects Robinson. “There isn’t a line of Vivian’s in the whole film. Of course, they [the characters] were massively influenced by the life I was living at that time, with my mates in Camden Town. But we were all Withnail and we were all ‘I’.”
For all the “comic dramatisation”, says Robinson, it was stirred in with truths. A year before writing, like Withnail and Marwood, he did take a trip to the Lake District with another flatmate, Mickey Feast, driving in a Jaguar belonging to Robinson’s then-girlfriend, actress Lesley-Anne Down. That same year, he’d landed the role of Benvolio in Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo And Juliet, and faced the Uncle Monty-like predatory attentions of the director off-set.
Bashing out Withnail And I in story form on his old Olivetti typewriter, Robinson then put it in his drawer and went back to his misery. It would take another decade-and-a-half for the film to become a reality, by which point Robinson had gained an Oscar nomination for his script for The Killing Fields. With the story now a script, and debutant Robinson attached to direct, Withnail producer Paul Heller found half the £1 million budget from a property developer in Washington.
The rest came from HandMade Films (or “HandJob Films” as the team nicknamed them), the company behind Monty Python’s Life Of Brian, The Long Good Friday and Mona Lisa co-founded by The Beatles’ George Harrison and his business partner Denis O’Brien. “George, he was one of the good guys,” remembers Robinson. “Without him,
'They were massively influenced by the life I was living bruce robinson
it would never have been made.”
As for O’Brien, “I don’t think Denis for a moment understood what it was… I just don’t think he got it at all.”
That was never more apparent than on the first day of shooting. Ralph Brown, cast as Danny – the drug dealer who skulks around Withnail and Marwood’s flat – recalls “the famous story” of his director, in the Lake District, “standing on a stool and saying, ‘Hello, good morning everybody, my name’s Bruce Robinson and I’m the director of this film and I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing so any help you can give me is gratefully received!’ For which he got a round of applause and a great deal of support.”
CASTINGLY Unfortunately, O’Brien didn’t see it that way. In his eyes, those early rushes, as Withnail and Marwood arrive at Uncle Monty’s cottage at night, “were as black as your hat and as funny as cancer”, as Robinson puts it. “So this delegation comes up to the hillside in Penrith at Wet Sleddale where we were shooting the fucking thing, and they say, ‘Uncle Monty has got to be a Kenneth Williams-type character and you need to flood the thing with light.’” Robinson called their bluff. “I just said, ‘Fuck off! If you want that type of movie, you’ve got the wrong guy.”
By this point, Grant was approaching meltdown. Withnail was his very first film, his very first audition even, and getting the role had been traumatic. Predictably, he was not first choice, with Robinson offering it to Daniel Day-Lewis. “I had lunch with Dan in the Ponteveccio restaurant in the Old Brompton Road,” says the director. “I’d done absolutely bugger all and Dan was a fast-rising film star. I did offer it to him and he turned it down. I think he’s a smashing actor but I’m rather pleased he did; I don’t think anyone could’ve done as well as ‘Fatty’ Grant did!”
Robinson calls his star this name “affectionately”. When he first saw a picture of Grant, shown to him by the film’s acclaimed casting director, Mary Selway, he looked “like a young Dirk Bogarde with chops on him. I said, ‘For Christ’s sake, I’m looking for Byron. I don’t want a porky boy!’” Eventually, he auditioned him – and became increasingly impressed when Grant read the film’s famous “FORK IT!” line, throwing the script at Robinson in his excitement.
As for Marwood, Robinson offered it to Kenneth Branagh, who declined. “And who would blame him?” he shrugs. “Obviously the fireworks and the champagne are in the Withnail character. And so again Ken Branagh was on his way up and a major, major talent that I’m deeply respectful of, but he wanted to be Withnail and I just didn’t see him as that.” Paul McGann, then hot off BBC series The Monocled Mutineer, was called in. McGann’s agent had misheard the title, telling him it was called ‘Whistler and Me’ – about the painter. When he read it, realising what it was,
he was desperate for it. “Even if it had been some awful, obscure dog, it wouldn’t have mattered,” he previously explained to Total Film, noting just how much he wanted a movie – any movie – then. “We didn’t know anything – we were fresh. And I can safely say, ‘If I’d never done another movie, it would’ve been alright.’ It was just such a buzz to be in a picture.”
Similarly, the character of Danny – inspired by a hairdresser who later went into the City – was shopped around. Even Timothy Spall went up for the role. “I was pretty much at the end of the queue,” smiles Brown, who turned up to the audition wearing ’loons, a waistcoat, nail varnish and a gypsy bandana. He then spent all his prep time working on saying, “You’re looking very beautiful today, man” – Danny’s opening line. “I did it a million ways before I found it, the way
I do it in the film.”
In Robinson’s eyes, Withnail And I was a family affair, with his former drama school pals on board, such as David Dundas, who provided the sweetly melancholic score, and Michael Elphick, cast as Jake, the poacher who threatens Withnail “with a dead fish” when they enter the Crow pub in Penrith. “Elphick turned up at about half-past seven in the morning raging on some fucking gin or whatever he’d had that night… cocaine… and it was a very weird shoot, that day,” says Robinson. “Fucking great actor but he was a wild bloke!”
In many ways a movie about two men – rather like late-’60s London – coming down off their trip, the film isn’t as hedonistic as its reputation suggests, says its creator. “There are no drugs in the film. At the top of the movie, Marwood is referring to the fact they had taken some amphetamines, some speed. He’s sitting in the bath… you never see them thereafter take a drug until the Camberwell Carrot [see Close Up, opposite] turns up. When it does, Marwood – i.e. me – gets the horrors on it. I’ve never been into drugs at all in my life, except for red wine.” If Robinson was partial to more than the odd bottle of ’53 Margaux (“Fucking nectar,” purrs the filmmaker, who you suspect, like Monty, has kept a sensational cellar), Grant was not so inclined. He didn’t smoke and he was teetotal, but one night Robinson plied him with vodka and champagne – getting him so drunk he got dizzy and vomited. “We have a very combative relationship,” smiles Grant, noting it wasn’t the only bit of sick-inducing sadism inflicted on him by his director. Take the scene in which Withnail, demanding to have some booze, swigs some lighter fluid (something Robinson reports that MacKerrell did “on a very bleak Sunday afternoon”). “[Bruce replaced it with] this unbelievable industrial strength vinegar in the lighter fluid can after rehearsals, where it’d been water,” recalls Grant. “That was the thing that was the most uncomfortable. It burned my throat and I vomited all over Paul’s shoes. Just as the take happened.”
PULLINGS STRINGS Then there was the Sunday lunch scene in Penrith. “My character hadn’t eaten for three days, I had to eat very, very fast and stuff my face with drink the whole way through,” says Grant. It didn’t help that Richard Griffiths, fresh from a film in Italy, hadn’t learnt his lines to play Uncle Monty. He kept messing up, while Grant had to keep eating. “Eventually, [I] had to have a vomit bucket – I had three legs of
lamb and eight kilos of potatoes and I couldn’t fit it down anymore.
The rest of the shoot? “It was a bloody nightmare, the whole thing,” says Robinson. Fortunately, however, George Harrison made things easier when it came to post-production. Engineering use of his own Beatles’ track ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ for the soundtrack, he also helped acquire snippets of Jimi Hendrix’s ‘All Along The Watchtower’ and ‘Voodoo Child’ for the driving scenes (shot on the newly opened M25). “Hendrix’s estate won’t allow anyone to use Hendrix music in the context of drink and drugs and rock ’n’ roll,” notes Robinson. “George managed all of that kind of stuff.”
The film’s distribution was somewhat mishandled; Withnail And I suffered one particularly disastrous test screening (the audience made up of German students unable to speak English), and would disappear from cinemas after just four weeks. “It didn’t do anything for six or seven years,” said McGann. But absence makes the heart grow fonder, with the film finding a life on VHS and revival screenings. A further boost came in the 1990s, with a re-release in the cinemas and the inaugural Loaded magazine featuring an article titled ‘Withnail You Cult’ by editor James Brown.
By this point, it was already a student rites-of-passage. “Living in Bristol, you can set your calendar by it,” noted McGann. “That part of September when the new intake has just come in, and they’ve drunk their first grant cheque and seen Withnail… and I know when they’ve seen it. They usually holler across the street.” It even got (affectionately) abusive. “Some kid had chalked outside my house, “Perfumed Ponce,” with an arrow pointing to my front door! I love that!”
Then there was the Withnail drinking game – match the characters’ beverage consumption across the movie (not easy when they’re knocking back quadruple whiskies). “I’m just grateful nobody died from doing it,” nods Grant. “That’s the horror.” Auctions saw Chris Evans pay £8,000 for Withnail’s ragged Harris check coat, while another buyer snapped up Uncle Monty’s cottage – Sleddale Hall – for £265,000 (bidding started at £145,000).
Yet it’s survival over the years is about more than simply “students eating a curry, getting pissed”, as the director puts it, reciting his endlessly repeatable dialogue. A poignant tale of male friendship, it’s also a wonderful state-of-the-nation snapshot. “Somehow he’s managed to do England in all of its complexity,” says Brown. “It’s north v. south, city v. country, it’s class, it’s race, it’s education and it’s gay and straight. There’s a lot going on, even though it feels on the surface to be an anecdotal jolly and people trying to get wasted.”
Withnail and i is availaBle on dvd and Blu-ray.