Sunday, Sep 7, 2008
"With Nails" author Richard E. Grant on auteurs, actors and the importance of being overpaid in Hollywood.
Oct 21, 1999 | On the phone from London, cult star Richard E. Grant asks, "How many times do you hear actors at a press conference say, 'I had a great time, I absolutely loved working with her, she is the greatest director, she is absolutely the best cinematographer, we just had the greatest time.' Meanwhile, all the people in the room are sitting with their faces on their knees and wondering, 'Why have we just seen one of the worst movies ever made?'"
When Grant was commissioned to render a public version of movie journals he'd been keeping privately, he resolved to maintain their frank spontaneity. The result is "With Nails: The Film Diaries of Richard E. Grant" (recently out in paperback from Overlook Press). It records the making of films ranging from "Hudson Hawk" (1991) to "The Age of Innocence" (1993) with the heightened clarity and giddiness of a man who apparently sees his life flash before his eyes every time he steps onto a set.
"I've always been frustrated by memoirs that are written up in P.R.-speak or some kind of politically correct language," says Grant. "At the same time, it was never my intention to write myself into an unemployable corner. I'm endlessly intrigued by how things that begin with the best intentions can either turn out to be great or complete dogs. Making a movie is tantamount to falling in love. Nobody begins thinking: I'm going to be divorced in six months' time, and hate this person, and never speak to him again, and be bankrupted by this union. You sign a contract thinking that a film is going to be the next best movie that's ever been made, it's going to take in a hundred zillion dollars and get 15 Oscars and every critic is going to put it on his top 10 list. Otherwise, no one would go and do it, it's too grueling."
Grant's torrential conversation jibes with his lunging on-screen image. He has brought a virtuoso hypersensitivity to classy English-language moviemaking for over a decade. He shambled like a debauched stork through Bruce Robinson's "Withnail and I" (1987). He was both wholesome and erotically aware as Anaos Nin's cuckolded husband in Philip Kaufman's "Henry and June" (1990). He "ponced" his way like a pro through the part of the effete ex-husband in Steve Martin and Mick Jackson's "L.A. Story" (1991). And he helped imbue Robert Altman's "The Player" (1992) with its mood of tempered hysteria. More recently he proved he could alternate between priss and swashbuckler in an ongoing series of British TV movies based on Baroness Orczy's classic novel of derring-do, "The Scarlet Pimpernel." The role of a daredevil who poses as a fop in order to rescue French aristocrats during the Reign of Terror is a perfect fit for Grant, calling on his mental dexterity, his all-out physicality and his weirdly heroic and good-humored vision of the world.
So is the role of engaged and amused recorder of the above big-screen opuses, as well as Francis Coppola's "Bram Stoker's Dracula" (1992), Altman's "Prjt-`-Porter" (1994), Jane Campion's "Portrait of a Lady" (1996) and, yes, "Warlock" (1988) and "Spice World" (1997). The book gives us a privileged soundstage view of the moviemaking process and is equally revealing as an actor's survival guide. Grant is a staunch believer in the brotherhood of actors -- and the sisterhood, too, given the strong protective bond he formed with Sandra Bernhard on "Hudson Hawk."
The greatest gift he has is the sanity underneath his fidgetiness. He's like his good friend Steve Martin: His appetite for parodying show biz is inseparable from his fondness for it. (In one of the droller asides, Martin sends a fax to Grant after the $32 million weekend gross of "Bram Stoker's Dracula": "Although I haven't seen 'Dracula' yet, I just know that you're very special in it. I would love to sit with you and just listen to what's going on in your head.")
Martin's sense of balance comes from some mysterious inner irony. Grant's comes from a genuine feeling of luck. He grew up in the small southeast African nation of Swaziland -- his father had been minister of education during the English colonial jurisdiction. He never thought he'd go from sending a fan letter to Barbra Streisand recommending his dad's estate as a retreat to meeting her in Hollywood and suggesting that she had over-scored a crucial scene in "The Prince of Tides." Of course, Grant writes in his diary that he made an idiot of himself, but we don't believe him for an instant. Throughout this book, he resembles Ray Bolger's Scarecrow. He protests that he doesn't have a brain while demonstrating the opposite with every utterance.
In your journals you seem as sensitive as a seismograph to every possible creative or political temblor. Your awareness cuts against the myth that most directors hand down -- that they shield their actors from all the business and creative fights going on off the set.
The only protection an actor gets is a flatly endorsed contract giving you a Winnebago or a car or a minder or a phalanx of assistants that will keep trouble at bay -- and that's if you're powerful or lucky. As an actor, you're so connected to the actual muck and physical reality of the film, there's no way you're "shielded" from anything. If they can put Leonardo DiCaprio underwater or whatever they did to him for months on end in some godforsaken corner of Mexico, or wherever it was, for "Titanic," then no actor gets removed from the practical pressures of moviemaking. On the other hand, when actors are accused of being namby-pamby or over-indulged -- yeah, their salaries may be ridiculous in the extreme, but if the profit margin is a hundred times that, somebody is earning the bucks, and why not the actors?
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