BAFTA A Life in Pictures: Richard E Grant

[Edith Bowman] Whispers, all the whispers.  Hello everybody, how are you all?  What a lovely way to spend a Sunday afternoon, thank you all for being here.  Welcome to A Life in Pictures with Richard E. Grant, a career that has provided so many emotions for us as film fans and, for him, an incredible depth and variety of performances as an actor. Let’s take a look at some of his work.

[Clip plays]

[Applause]

[EB] Ladies and Gentlemen, please welcome Richard E. Grant!

[Applause]

[EB] Hello, how does it feel, hearing all those characters and snippets of your life in this world?

[Richard E. Grant] It’s brutal!

[EB] [laughter]

[REG] You just feel ancient.  Yeah, it’s just weird, it’s your whole… yeah, unnatural.

[EB] We’ve got an amazing selection of some of your work to highlight and talk about this afternoon, but I wanted to know, for me personally, what made you want to become an actor?

[REG] Oh God, I have no idea where, how, how to really answer that because, when I look back at my childhood I have photographs of, um, making shoebox theatres when I was seven, with cut-out scenery and characters from magazines stuck on lollipop sticks going through the sides with a bedside lamp and then glove puppets which I made and then string puppets and then I used to get Pelham string puppets for my Christmas and birthday presents every year, so I had a marionette theatre in my parents’ garage, was in every school play that I could probably try and get into, involved in the amateur theatre club in Swaziland, where I grew up, so the line of it, to me, if I look back is very clear, but where that comes from, because I have no theatrical antecedents in my family at all, I don’t know.  At some level I think it chooses you, and, by the same token even when I’ve read the script and I know, think what the character is, when you actually come to do the takes or do the scene in the theatre, when you actually start doing it, I have no idea what it is that happens, you just, I think, react to what you’ll react off.  So in trying to understand what it is, or delineate, you know I’ve seen some actors be very technical and go, well you know “oh on this thing I did this”, those Michael Caine workshops where he says “you look in one eye and you don’t blink” and all that stuff, I couldn’t, I wouldn’t be able to pull any of that stuff off, just react to what’s coming at you really.

[EB] [Laughing] Yeah, What would you say is the biggest lesson you’ve learnt in your career?

[REG] I think, accepting that “No” is invisibly tattooed on most people’s heads when you’re trying to get a job.

[Laughter]

[REG] Ah, there must be actors here!

[Laughter]

[EB] That’s very loud laughter wasn’t it.

[REG] It’s just you, you just have to, once you get inured to that thinking “well, fuck it they’ve said no, I’m going to keep trying”, and, um, until somebody says yes.  I also had one teacher called Bunny Barnes who was Scottish, taught me the piano and bad French and good English, who I then stayed friends with during my adult life and she died ten years ago at the age of eighty-nine, and we corresponded by letter, because she was hopeless at email, um, and we stayed friends for, uh forty, forty or fifty years, and, having one person that believes in you, right from the beginning, who happened to be a teacher as well, that has been invaluable to me and I feel, I feel so indebted to her for having faith, because my father, who was the head of education in Swaziland during its British protectorate years, was so worried because he said to me “I think that to become an actor you are going to spend your life in tights, make-up and avoiding a buggery”

[Laughter]

[REG] Now it’s interesting because when I quoted that exact line in America last month, total silence!

[Laughter]

[REG] And I love Americans, but…

[Laughter]

[EB] Welcome home!

[Laughter]

[REG] Yeah, so thank you!

[Laughter]

[REG] Anyway, I’ve been wearing the tights and the make-up but I’ve managed so far to avoid the last bit!

[Laughter]

[EB]  Um, you formed friendships and, and lifelong friendships pretty early on as well with your first job, with Withnail and I

[REG] Yes

[EB] In particular with Bruce Robinson, um, when that film is mentioned to you, what’s the first thing you think about, with Withnail and I?

[REG] Daniel Day Lewis, because, thank God, the fucker turned it down!

[Laughter]

[Applause]

[EB] It was meant to be!

[REG] Because otherwise I know I would not be sitting here talking to you in your fabulous green velvet pant suit today, your onesie

[EB]  Wearing your perfume!

[REG] Yeah, I know because the, the, I know the casting process. Daniel had opened in Room with a View and Beautiful Launderette on the same day playing an effete Edwardian and a gay South London punk in the other. And both movies opened on the same day in America, which was unbelievably fortuitous for him and the critics couldn’t believe that it was the same actor, so he was offered absolutely everything, including Withnail, um and chose to do The Unbearable Lightness of Being instead, which would have been my state of mind if I hadn’t got that part.  And so they had, many, many people, from Bill Nighy to Kenneth Branagh, up, down and sideways, Edward Tudor-Pole, had all gone up to meet Bruce Robinson for this part and he said, Bruce Robinson said, that none of them had said his dialogue that had made him laugh or the sound that he’d had in his head, so the late, great Mary Selway, um, casting director, had seen me in an improvised thing called Honest Decent and True that Les Blair directed, with Ade Edmondson and Gary Oldman, and, from that, because I played a very odd character in that, and it was all improvised, she said “Bring this guy in” and he said no “he looks like a fat Dirk Bogarde, I’m not seeing this fucker”

[Laughter]

[REG] No. However, in his defence, during my nine months of unemployment in 1985, I had read in some magazine, you know, standing in W H Smith endlessly looking through those things, hoping I wouldn’t be thrown out, um, had said if you are six foot two, you should weigh twelve stone and I thought well I weigh eleven stone, this is what I’m going to do, I’m going to Schwarzenegger myself into a career!  So I took weight gain powder and I went to Dreas Reyneke in Notting Hill Gate and Lynda La Plante’s ex-husband, Richard La Plante, was a sort of muscle Mary

[Laughter]

[REG] Apparently that’s what you call them, and he sort of pumped me up and after nine months I did get up to twelve stone, but to say that I looked like a fat Dirk Bogarde is a bit rich! Anyway, I then went into this audition and, eh, I’d come out of Notting Hill tube station wearing a 1940s raincoat that I got from Oxfam and had a leather-bound copy of Robinson Crusoe that I was reading at that time on the tube journeys, so a monsoon opened up from the skies just as I got out of the tube station and I had to walk up to Peel Cottage, which was, I don’t know, ten blocks away and I was drenched so I looked like a drowned rat by the time I came in and I said “I’m so sorry Mary” and she said “No, no, this is perfect for the part!”

[Laughter]

[REG] Um, and I did see somebody very famous scooting out the door and I thought “Fuck, they’ve got the part already!” so I then met Bruce Robinson and was holding the script and he said “uh, what did you think of it?” and I said, “well, I think it’s ball-achingly funny and brilliant and blah-blah”, which was obviously the right thing to say and he said “would you read the first scene?”, so I did, which was set in the kitchen, and I had one line “Fork it” and I missiled, the script went this way and I had my fingers like this and I went “FORK IT!” to him and it made him laugh, and of course I didn’t know that these two words would be the entire reason why I got cast because he thought “well if he says two words correctly maybe we can get the rest out of him after weeks of work”, so this mad fucker made me audition for another two weeks with other actors, and I was completely convinced that I was being used as a sort of guinea pig to read in while the person who was playing the part was sitting in, you know, Marbella, on a mobile phone, and so then, eventually, after two weeks of stuff, I did get cast and the irony of that is that, having played an out-of-work actor in that film, every job, almost without exception, that I’ve had in the last thirty-two years has been as a result of playing that part, so I’m indebted to that bastard for casting me.

[Laughter]

[REG] Oh, and the other thing is, he said, as soon as I was cast, he said “you’re going to have to lose all that weight”

[Laughter]

[REG] So I called Gary up and he’d just played Sid Vicious and I said “how have you lost all the weight Gary?” and he told me that he went on tuna fish weight loss powder from Boots and lemon juice so I went on that and having spent a year gaining twelve, uh, fourteen pounds, I then lost it in a week and, you know, played the part, so that’s a very long answer to your short question.

[EB] But a bloody great one! We’re going to take a look right now at a short clip from Withnail and I and then we’ll talk more about it after this.

[REG] OK

[Clip plays]

[Applause]

[EB] How much of, uh, how much of Withnail was on the page and how much did you create him through working with Paul and also just talking about him?

[REG] Uh, there wasn’t a comma, or a full stop that wasn’t scripted, or a word.  Every single thing was, Bruce Robinson was an absolute stickler for that, and I told him that I loved Robert Altman’s work, he was so disparaging because he said “oh, all that improvisation shit!”, excuse my language, he said that, having busted his balls for years  trying to get dialogue to sound as good as his dialogue is he doesn’t want some actor coming along and going “oh, I’m just gonna improvise or I’m going to change it on the day”, so he was as script –specific, micro-managed of any writer that I’ve ever come across, but when the words are as good as that, um, it’s a real pleasure to say them and he did say to me, after the first week of shooting, that he wanted to do another film about a man with a talking boil called How to Get Ahead in Advertising after we’d done this one.  I thought “yeah yeah, yeah, it’ll never happen” anyway it did, but he said “the way that you do my dialogue is the way that I hear it in my head”, so I’m just sorry that that’s only happened twice, um, and I never got to do another one with him.

[EB] That said though, that scene in particular I believe he didn’t want the laugh, is that right?

[REG] He was furious, he was absolutely furious because he quite rightly said that in order to play comedy, he said this right on the first day of rehearsal, um, you have got to play it absolutely dead straight because if you think it’s funny or you telegraph to the audience that you’re sort of winking at them, it’ll be dead in the water and then he would quote Peter Sellers and say “that’s why Peter Sellers wasn’t funny” and I go “Peter Sellers was really funny” and he said “no, you can’t” and, if anybody laughed on the set, at anything, he would go “Cut!” and we’d shoot again because he said you have to play the thing absolutely as seriously and in the moment as possible because these characters are in a state of such desperation and destitution that you can’t play it with any sense that it’s funny. Having said that, there was a scene in a bar called The Mother Black Cap where I’d come back, Paul McGann had gone to the loo, and thought that somebody, you know, he’d read some graffiti about fucking arses and thought this guy in the bar was going to do this to him, so he comes back and said “we’ve got to get out of here” and I think I said, I had a line, said “What fucker said that?” and as I turned I’d taken a bite out of a pork pie and a piece of pie got stuck in my mouth and it made Bruce laugh and he kept that take in, but on this scene that you’ve asked about, um, there were two dogs, pug dogs, in the lady extras that were sitting behind me that were in Eastenders, the dogs were in Eastenders

[Laughter]

And the dogs, not the lady extras!  They were, you know, because their breathing is so inbred and whatever so that [makes snuffling sound] they have that sort of funny noise that they make, and I love pugs by the way, um, I didn’t hear that during the rehearsals, but as soon as they called for silence during the take all I could hear behind me was [makes snuffling sound] and I thought it was the two ladies laughing.

[Laughter]

So every time, and Bruce said “don’t swear in front of them” and he cast the woman, Mrs Blennerhassett who ran the café to look like Mrs Thatcher because he hated her so much and um, so he said “don’t do the swearing in rehearsal” so I didn’t do that, but every time we came to this take and I heard the pugs going [makes snuffling sound] doing the laughing and then I had to say “We’re going to liven all you stiffs up a bit”, I never managed in over fourteen takes and he was absolutely furious so anyway, it’s in there. 

[Laughter]

[REG] Sorry Bruce!

[EB] Do you take away something from every experience with a director, do you feel that you’re constantly learning with every project?

[REG] Yeah, yes, definitely.  Because every director is so different to the one that’s been before and the expectations that they have are so different. Very often, in my experience, they expect you just to do it, so they don’t really very often give you an enormous amount of direction, so that is something that you’ve got to cope with as well, of thinking well, you’ve got to rely on your instinct or your imagination or a combination of those two things, um, to do it and just hope that they don’t fire you or cut you out of the thing.  Um, but, has that answered your question?

[EB] Well, let’s take Jane Campion as an example, and what that experience was like and what you learnt from working with her on Portrait of a Lady?

[REG]  That was 1995 and she was, she was, so, I had so admired The Piano and when I went in to meet her she immediately asked me very personal questions and I know that she had lost, she’d had a child, her first child died, so at the very moment that she won the Cannes Film Festival and the Oscar and everything, she’d had this great personal tragedy, and our first child died half an hour after she was born in the second week of rehearsals of Withnail and I so at the very moment of great sort of professional breakthrough and opportunity which that film, you know, unquestionably was, did and have, we had this terrible personal tragedy at the same time, so I talked about, we talked about that, and so we bonded about something that had nothing to do with the film at all, Portrait of a Lady and I don’t know whether that got me the part or, I have no idea, but it felt as though we’d gone into sort other arena that, I’ve certainly never experienced that with a male director before, um, and the other thing that, that Jane Campion has is she’s the best actor as a director I’ve ever come across, she could improvise and walk into scenes, and if she didn’t think it was going right she’d just come in and, play, not Jane Campion, but she’d improvise in the scene to try and get something to liven it up or to find something in the scene, and that was very unusual to have a director do that, because I’ve never that before, where somebody’s left the, you know, the position of being at the monitor or the camera and just come into a scene and started improvising stuff.  So, that’s a great gift that she has, and she’s also a stickler for wanting everything to be as unobvious as possible, so she said to me right at the beginning “you’re going to have a beard, I don’t want to see a vestige of Withnail in you, she was very prescriptive in that way, but because I loved and admired her so much, you know, I just willingly went with whatever she did.  The other great experience I had on that in terms of getting advice from people, I worked with Sir John Gielgud, who was in his mid-nineties at that point, and I said “what is your advice for old age?” and he looked at me and I was thirty-seven and, you know, full of shit, and he said “cultivate younger friends”. I said, stupidly, I said “why?” he said “because when I go through my phone book now, everybody I want to call is dead”, so, and the other thing he did was hilarious because we were filming in Wiltshire in a lovely country hotel and Nicole Kidman was on a very, very strict diet and fitness regime and so she would go to bed sort of on the clock of 9 o’clock every night and John Gielgud was with a nurse because he was in ill health, sitting on a separate table and we were all told “don’t disturb Sir John Gielgud” and it was right in the middle of the O.J. Simpson trial and he heard us talking about it because I was obsessed with it and he said “oh my dear, may I join you at your table”, so he came over and we were all sort of like this at Sir John and he would talk about things from 1937 or 1924 as though they’d happened yesterday and only about the theatre. When I asked him about Hitler he said “oh my dear I have no interest at all” so

[Laughter]

every time I hear Brexit I think Sir John would just go “oh my dear..”

[Laughter]

…it sort of gets me through the day of madness!

[Laughter]

I said are you following the O.J. Simpson and he said “oh yes my dear”, he said “Kato Kaelin, very big cock” and 

[Laughter]

so he would be there talking about Kato Kaelin and all this stuff (he was the surfer that lived next door to O.J. Simpson by the way, who was blond and all sort of like that), he was very taken with Kato Kaelin, so he would sit with, you know, two bottles of wine and go through the menu, and just, he’d gossip and talk till one in the morning, so all this stuff that you had to leave Sir John alone, that went out the door, while Nicole was having her beauty sleep, so I loved him for that.

[EB]  We’ve got a lovely scene actually with you and Nicole from Portrait of a Lady which we’ll take a look at right now and then we’ll come back and talk some more after this.

[Clip plays]

[Applause]

[EB] You um, you watched the start of that scene and then as soon as your feet appeared you quickly turned round, do you not like watching yourself?

[REG]  No it’s gruesome.

[Laughter]

[REG]  And my wife who’s here will attest to this, that the first time I saw a rough or a semi-finished version of Withnail in a screening room in Soho, I gouged blood out of her wrist holding it so tight because I was so horrified by what I saw and heard and said to Bruce Robinson in a terrible state afterwards “please take my money back, I’m so sorry I’ve ruined your film” and so it’s, I think it’s that I’ve never really got used to it, because it’s unnatural to see yourself and I’ve always thought of the analogy of, unless you’re a voyeur, it’s like sex, you don’t want to see yourself having sex but you like doing it, but you don’t want to see the record of it. 

[Laughter]

Obviously this audience does

[Laughter]

So it’s, because all you see and hear is what is wrong, you don’t see, it’s very hard to dissociate and find out what is right, I think, so it took me a long time to ever watch Withnail again, because I had to at a anniversary, a 30th anniversary screening last year, and I could see it because obviously I was so much, double the age that I was then, I could watch it and try and enjoy it as the audience who were watching it were, but I could still see all the things that were wrong and so it’s excruciating.

[EB]  Never got easier

[REG] No, and I’m just grateful that other people haven’t felt the same, some critics have!

[Laughter]

[EB] You mentioned earlier Robert Altman the completely different way of working than Bruce in encouraging that adlibbing and Gosford Park, what are your memories of that experience?

[REG]  Uh, I’d worked with him on The Player first, then, and that was an extraordinary experience because I was supposed to do a biograph…what do you call them, bio picture, of Toscanini with him in 1989 and, because I met him in Paris while I was doing Henry and June, and he always called me “E. Grant”.  I said “we going to do this movie?” and the whole thing collapsed because it was before The Player and his resurgence or renaissance and because that movie went down four weeks before we started shooting I thought the chances are I would never, ever work for Robert Altman because he was already old at that point as far as I could see, and I’d seen Nashville as a student twenty-seven times in a bug house, because, if you try and appreciate, pre-DVD or video or online streaming to see a movie 27 times took, you know, that took determination.

[EB]  Commitment

[REG] Um, so I’d seen that I was just obsessed with the way he worked and I knew that he liked actors that were, uh, shaped like pipe cleaners with long faces, Keith Carradine, you know, all of those Olive Oyl type characters, so I thought well, if anybody is going to cast me in a movie, Robert Altman will be the person to do it. So, when that fell through I was at the absolutely horrendous, disastrous premiere screening of Hudson Hawk in LA, with a roomful of the most famous people on the planet, who disappeared faster than gun smoke before the credits had even rolled at the end and just as it was about to start, tap on my shoulder, and it was Robert Altman sitting with Tim Robbins, and he said “what are you doing here, E. Grant?” and I said “I’m in what you’re about to see and you will never employ me, or, you know, we will never be friends because it’s an absolute turkey, why are you here?”.  He said “I’m doing research for a film about Hollywood called The Player that I’m about to do, will you come and be in it in a month’s time?” and I said “if I’m not locked up or made a prohibited immigrant in America yes, because of what you’re about to see”.  And Hudson Hawk was an absolute dog, so he really saved me and my point is that the experience of working with him on that, where you have a script and then the freedom to improvise around that, and then subsequently on Pret a Porter, which was Ready to Wear in America, he works in a way that really takes you back to the democratic nature of working in the theatre, in that everybody is basically paid the same, he didn’t spend money on Winnebago’s and fancy make-up tents and any of that kind of stuff, so you’d be standing behind Lauren Bacall or Sophia Loren on the Pret a Porter film waiting to have your make-up done, and there were two tiers of salary, it’s the only time I’ve ever been paid the same as Julia Roberts.

[Laughter]

So, working on Gosford Park was again, the same experience, that he had, he’d have two, Andrew Dunn was the DOP, he had two cameras going simultaneously, so you never knew, because it was such an ensemble, and Julian Fellowes had written such a smart script, you never knew whether you were in close up, in wide shot or in the frame at all, which is very liberating as an actor because it means that you, you have to be completely in your character and in the moment and there was no possibility, as happens with some actors, where they kind of go “oh well it’s not my close up, I’ll just, you know, phone it in, I’ll read the lines, or, you know, not even be there” as in the case of Bruce Willis, who wasn’t for the off lines, he’d just, you know, be in his hotel room, and you’d have a Hungarian script editor going [speaks unintelligibly in Hungarian accent]

[Laughter]

I loved that!  Um,

[Laughter]

I haven’t worked with him again!

[Laughter]

So, oh shit this is being recorded, okay

[Laughter]

So the point is that Altman said, when I asked him about this, he said “if you take a frame of a picture” which, you know, a movie essentially is, he said “I’m as interested in what is going on in the left-hand corner and the bottom-right as what’s going on in the middle” and that sometimes worked brilliantly for him and at other times it was to his detriment because the things were so freewheeling and there is an innate desire in us, I think as human beings, is to follow a story, even if it’s very, very fractious or fragmented, a story is a thing that, you know, pulls you through the thing, um, and he had as a director and as a human being, same thing I suppose, he had the most acute hearing of any person that I’ve ever come across and he was old when I worked with him.  He could hear what that projectionist is whispering right now and he was as interested in that as what somebody over there might be saying.  Uh, so in Mash he famously invented this system where sixteen to eighteen actors were miked up at the same time so you had this overlapping dialogue which he said is what happens in real life, rather than you wait and, you know, because even now on films, uh, they don’t, most directors or sound departments are horrified if dialogue overlaps, so I suppose it helps with the editing process that they can cut everybody in or out, but he was amazing for that. So, the other thing he did, he always employed musicians so that on a Sunday night, wherever we were shooting we could have entertainment for free.

[Laughter]

He also had a joint at the end of every day and as I’m allergic to alcohol and love marijuana it was perfect!

[Laughter]

And he also did this other thing, which you think, you know, sounds so obvious, but was unique to him, he would invite all the actors to see the rushes or the dailies, whatever you call them, every night, so it meant that every single thing that somebody was in got shown on a screen, so it had an audience once, so even if it got cut, you would then, you saw the work and it meant that everybody saw what kind of movie you were making and it got everybody on the same page as it were. And the other great thing that I realised, when I wrote and directed my own film, was that by doing that, and I slavishly copied that, you have an audience reaction, so if you have five takes that come up, the one that works with an audience, you know immediately so if it gets a laugh or the quality of the silence is acute, the audience guides you, even if they are partisan actors and crew who have worked on it.  So that when you come to the edit and you’re sitting in total silence with one other person in a little room with a monitor, that information really helps inform how you edit your picture. And I thought that was such a smart thing to do and he loved actors, so I’m very sorry that he died when he did, but, you know, he was in his mid-eighties, had a new heart, because he’d had a heart transplant, and I got to be in three of his movies, so it was, and the fact that Pret a Porter was such a dog, disaster, you know, the other two were hits. And the shooting process was exactly the same, so I loved him.

[EB] We’ve got this beautiful, very small clip from Gosford Park and just you talking about the atmosphere he creates, it just exudes it I think in this scene, so we’ll take a look at it now.

[REG] OK

[Clip plays]

[Laughter and applause]

[EB] Oh Dame Maggie Smith, oh just, amazing, that little laugh of hers at the end, as an ensemble, when there’s this incredible collection of people, was there much rehearsal involved with this film, or, because there’s so many of you?

[REG]  There was no rehearsal, we kind of rehearsed on camera as it were, because trying to corral that huge number of actors at the same time was such a logistic nightmare that only on the shooting days did you have everybody there, and we started shooting, Alan Bates and I, oh and I loved him, um, worked upstairs and downstairs, whereas most of the actors did all the upstairs stuff in the first six weeks of the shoot and the second six weeks were, apart from a bit of location for the, um, the shoot that happens, were at studios, were kitchen scenes that were created by Robert Altman’s son, who’s a production designer, at Shepperton Studios. But what what’s so fascinating is that, uh, I had an occasion where, and I won’t say which the actor is, but somebody said to me, who was playing one of the posh people, “you can’t sit there” and I had to say “sorry, I’m an actor, you fucker”. 

[Laughter]

It got so completely into the world of

[EB]  Wow! Jesus!

[REG} “you are downstairs, you have no right” so I thought “ah, he’s a method actor!” 

[Laughter]

And I think he just did it unconsciously because it was like “you can’t sit there because, you know, you’re a footman”

[EB]  Yeah, get out George!  The next couple of films that we’re going to specifically show clips from and talk about have incredible performances from leading ladies, The Iron Lady and Jackie

[REG]  Oh yeah

[EB] We’ll start with Iron Lady and this is a wonderful film that was written by and directed by a female and Meryl in this kind of leading role and you play Michael Heseltine. When you’re playing someone who is real, who existed

[REG]  He does still exist

[EB]  Still exist, and

[Laughter]

Can we double check?  No, I’m joking!  Who was a larger than life character, who the world has an opinion of really, where do you start when you’re approaching how you play him and how you find your interpretation of him?

[REG] YouTube was absolutely amazing because I could see him on Question Time arguing with various people and he had a “r”, well he has a “r”, so I imitated that and, you know, sadly for me, my part was so small, everybody, once I told people I was playing Michael Heseltine, they said “oh have you got the Mace swinging scene in the movie?” and I said “no, I don’t”, because apparently he picked it up in the midst of Parliament and did a bit of Tarzan stuff as he was nicknamed. But what was so useful is that he had written, he’s very dyslexic, but he’d obviously dictated his life, his autobiography, so there was a great tome that thick, by him, and then there was Margaret Thatcher’s autobiography, I don’t know whether she wrote it, so I had the great opportunity of reading his version of the exact same events that she then had, um, and his vaulting ambition was absolutely apparent in both versions, his version and her version, of this story, and Phyllida the director was very, very determined, I don’t know whether she’s a sadist, I seem to bring this out in some directors, but she insisted that I dye my fucking wig, you know I had to dye my hair.  Everybody else had wigs, I said “but everybody else has got wigs”, she said “no you’ve got to dye your hair”. It took about six processes – it went orange and blue and everything under the sun and it still looked awful, um and apparently, I’m only saying this because when Michael Heseltine was interviewed about whether he was going to see the movie or not he said “most certainly not” as he was quoted and he said “and they employed somebody that didn’t even have the right hair”, so, you know, he was born and has more hair now than I have ever had in my life, so anyway, that was my experience of Michael Heseltine. But, working with Meryl Streep, that is like, and I know everybody in this room has said it before, but if you feel like you’ve worked with somebody who is really great and there were absolutely amazing actors in Gosford Park that you’ve just seen, but when you work with Meryl Streep it is literally the Rolls Royce of our profession and she is on, you know, that’s why she has more Oscar nominations and wins than anybody breathing before or since.  And her generosity and willingness to work with everybody and collaborate is bar none, I literally worshipped at her feet.

[EB] I love the thing that you said before you started filming you asked someone’s advice who’d worked with her and they said that she likes to laugh, was the thing that they told you, that she laughs a lot.

[REG]  She does and you’ll appreciate that we were filming Houses of Parliament scenes because it was the same architect that did the City Hall in Manchester, I think it’s Manchester or Liverpool, I’m not, sorry, might be Liverpool, and so, we filmed all that stuff in there and to see her break into an Abba medley, dressed as Mrs Thatcher

[Laughter]

is one of the great joys of my life as an actor, because anybody who said “oh she’s very technical, she’s very serious”, bollocks, she was absolutely hilarious, and because she is such, you know, she’s such a God of our profession, or Goddess, I couldn’t bring myself to call her by her name so I used to call her Beryl, um and still do!

[Laughter]

‘Dear Beryl’ in an email because it’s somehow, calling her Meryl I could go Mmm, mmm, or hello Mmm.  But I was very star struck by her and still am.

[EB] I love that. We’re going to take a look at a brilliant scene, it’s a real ensemble piece this, but this is brilliant, from The Iron Lady

[Clip plays]

[Applause]

[EB] An amazing script by Abi Morgan

[REG] Yeah

[EB] For that film, just incredible. Then with Jackie, and with Natalie and this breath-taking performance that she has, going into that and taking on this role of Bill Walton, did you, do you have a conversation with her in terms of working out how she’s going to play Jackie so that, you know, you can, compliment that, in particular for this scene that we’re about to see, you know, are there conversations like that that are had?

[REG] Um, no, no, there were no conversations at all like that. What really affected the atmosphere of the film more than anything was that the bombing that had happened in Paris in that nightclub was I think two miles away from the studio where we shot, so everything was in lock down, Paris was in a state of mourning in a way that I’ve never experienced in any city, anywhere, so that, combined with doing a story about a woman suffering such grief and shock at the assassination of her husband, um, and the fact that the director worked exactly in the same way that Martin Scorsese did on Age of Innocence in monastic silence, so that really surprised… I understood why he did it for Jackie but I never really understood quite why it had to be like that on Age of Innocence where, if anybody even whispered he was like [unintelligible reprimand]. You know, you’d get this sort of machine gun of, you know, don’t dare speak, and I said to Michael Ballhaus, who was the DOP, he just died last year, he was on Dracula and then I went straight on to Age of Innocence, you know, went from one to the other, and I said “was this like this when you did Goodfellas and all these films with incredible violence in them?” and he said “oh yes, with Scorsese it’s very, very quiet like in the monastery” and I thought right okay, so you had to be very, felt very respectful doing that in the exact same way that this director, worked on this, it was very, very quiet and the French as a crew were very respectful of him because they admired him so much, in a way that crews in England I don’t think, and that’s what I love, there’s always a sense of humour about it and not taking it that seriously, but the auteur worship in France of a director is such that the director wants this, so whatever they do, it’s like sort of blindfolded believers, so you get a whole different atmosphere on a set like that, whereas I think at Shepperton or Pinewood you’d hear “bollocks” quite a lot before…

[Laughter]

… nobody would take it that seriously. So, but having said that, it was appropriate to the subject matter, and he also did this thing, not unlike Jane Campion, in that every scene that we did he would swap the dialogue round, so he’d give me Jackie Kennedy’s dialogue and she’d be saying my dialogue, but then we’d move and I’d be sitting in this chair, then I’d be standing over there, and so he said, because he wanted it to be a stream of consciousness of what Jackie Kennedy was going through, he wanted it to be told from multiple points of view, so you never really knew what was going to be in the movie or not.  It was, I’d never worked in that way quite like that before and I think that he made a really smart film as a result.

[EB] We’re going to take a look at it right now

[Clip plays]

[Applause]

[EB] So great

[Applause]

[EB] That wonderful score, that wonderful score from Mica Levi as well, just, ah, it’s great.  There’s so many films that we could talk about but we only have a limited amount of time and I want to talk about the now and I want to say huge congratulations for Can You Ever Forgive Me? which is just incredible

[Applause]

and well done for what I think is your first award of many of the award season.  You’ve just won the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Supporting Actor, so congratulations on that as well

[Applause]

[REG] Thank you, thank you.

[Applause]

[EB]  How did this role come to you?  You just got sent the script and it jumped at you?

[REG] My brilliant agent, Sue Latimer, uh, sent me a script exactly, well, middle of November, two years ago, and said you have 24 hours to read this and make a decision and I said “what the fuck is this, Mission Impossible?!”

[Laughter]

It’s going to explode on me! And she said “no, no” and then I said “who’s died or who’s dropped out?” and she said, you know, “put your paranoia aside” (I have the master key to the penthouse and the cellar suite of paranoia) um, and she said, you know, “don’t concern yourself with that”, um, “just read it and see what you think”, and then I saw that it was Nicole Holofcener and Jeff Whitty and I knew Nicole Holofcener from her films that she’d written and directed, Jeff Whitty from having written Avenue Q the musical, so I knew there was going to be a smart script to begin with. And then the director was Marielle Heller, who I knew from, as a director from Diary of a Teenage Girl that I’d so admired, and then it said oh Melissa McCarthy is playing Lee Israel and I thought that sounds really good, so I read it and said yes immediately and then my worry was at what level was Melissa McCarthy going to play Lee Israel because, you know having seen her in St Vincent, where she was a very serious character actor, character actress in that, then to some of the most extreme characters that she’d played in comedies, I wondered whether this was going to be a movie star vehicle for Melissa McCarthy.  Then I read the script and Lee Israel’s memoir, Can You Ever Forgive me? was so obviously the voice of, her sense of humour came through, but she was such an impossible, anti-social curmudgeon, and I thought well how is, is Melissa McCarthy really going to leave all vanity at the door and subsume herself into this part?  And when I got to New York in January, middle of January last year, I said to Marie, the director, “when am I rehearsing with Melissa?” and she said “oh no, you’re not”.  I said, “what do you mean we’re not?”  She said “we start shooting on Monday, oh no Melissa’s only coming in from LA on Friday and she’s got costume, hair, make-up wig, all that, fitting all day.”  I said, “no, you don’t understand, I won’t be able to stay, I won’t sleep for 72 hours if I only meet her on the first day of shooting, I won’t remember a line” so she went and spoke to Melissa about it and Melissa mercifully had exactly the same impulse so they carved out two hours in the day and a meal on that Friday and we met and talked about, and I immediately saw at what level she was pitching this part and she lowered her voice and her sort of whole sense of gravity shifted and I saw that she was very insistent that she have a wig that had grey roots showing and really dowdy clothes and we got on. Within the first five nanoseconds of meeting her, we just got on at such a profound level and that really informed how we made the movie and I think we shot in 26 days, I worked for 20 of those days and on the days that I wasn’t working I would go in and we’d have lunch together and have dinner together, so that, in my experience doesn’t really happen. Apart from Steve Martin playing Boggle everyday on LA Story, you know, in 1990, that doesn’t really happen on movies because, you know, most actors I know, as I’m sure they’ll attest if there are any in the room, you read the schedule, you so want the job, you go “oh how many days have I got off and I can go and do this, go and do that?”

[Laughter]

But with this film we really had this real connection and stayed great friends beyond that, which is unusual.  You know, I’ve always thought that you would form great friendships, lasting friendships on movies, but the reality is that you don’t because you have this very intense experience when you’re working together and then, when you then meet the person six months or a year later or two years later you very often in my experience realise that what you really had in common was the making of the movie and the people that were driving you nuts, so having lasting friendships out of that is fewer and far between than I had hoped or expected, but the ones that I do have I value enormously and she is one of those people.

[EB]  The relationship in the film is so important to the storytelling in the film between these two people, and it could have gone the other way, you could have gone for dinner with her and gone “oh my God, this is going to be the most painful 26 days ever!” It’s, someone making those decisions to put you two together, they see something, they see, it’s like chemistry, I don’t know what it is, some kind of science that this is going to work.

[REG] Yeah, but it’s still taking a chance, because I think if the equivalent, not that I’m doing, because you know I’ve been with my wife, married 32 years and together 35, um, that I can imagine from internet dating or a dating profile, that you have to put down, well, these are all the things that would make you seem suitable for the other person, but that still doesn’t affect what happens when you have two human beings that meet, you can have the greatest casting on paper that doesn’t always work on movies, and I can give you a long list of those.  So the fact that this happened in the way that it did was a real bonus, and the fact that, the other thing that I was so struck by was I was trying to find and equivalent in movie terms of what the relationship was in this Can You Ever Forgive Me? and I thought of Midnight Cowboy, John Schlesinger’s masterpiece of the early seventies, of John Voight playing Joe Buck and Dustin Hoffman playing Ratso so brilliantly, that you’ve got two people who are complete social misfits in a state of near destitution, living in New York, you know, the richest city in the world practically, and surrounded by millions of people but so lonely and so isolated they form this real oddball co-dependent relationship that is a kind of platonic love story and I thought that was the template in my mind for what this relationship should be. And the other thing I was struck by is that they meet in the bar for the first time and you go, as in most friendships, you go through this, or love, you go through this sort of honeymoon phase of it, and then the loyalty phase and then the almost inevitable betrayal and then the poignancy of a reconciliation which they have in a scene right at the end of the movie when Jack Hock who I play is dying of AIDS and Lee Israel is having to, having been completely estranged from him, is having to ask his permission to write him into the story of Can You Ever Forgive Me? So it just seemed to sort of deal with the A-Z of friendship more than anything else, even though the plot is all about forgery and all of that, the core of what the story is, is that, and, amazingly, when we saw it at Telluride, I was sitting with Melissa at four o’clock in the afternoon at its world premiere up in the ski resort in Colorado with an audience like this that we had no idea whether it was going to play or not with people or what they would pick up on, and it was the relationship of these two characters and their friendship, as dysfunctional as it was, that made people feel something, so that’s been a real bonus.

[EB]  Everyone’s felt lonely, I think that’s what in these characters people relate to definitely.  We’re going to watch that wonderful moment right now where you guys meet in the bar.

[REG]  Oh OK.

[Clip plays]

[EB] Amazing

[Applause]

[EB] Were you given much room to, to play on this film or was it kind of script and quite rigid?

[REG] Everything was scripted. I never see that as rigid. If the script is as good as this one is, then it gives you the freedom to try and do things.  There were only two words that I improvised, which are not in that clip, um, in the bar and I think I introduce myself and say “Jack Hock, big cock” came out of my mouth. 

[Laughter]

So that, and Marielle Heller kept that in the movie! That was the only improvised thing and it just came out. 

[Laughter]

[EB] How much is known about Jack?

[REG] Very little is known about him. I know that he was from Portland in Oregon, he died in 1994 at the age of 47 of AIDS, so, mercifully, I wasn’t from Oregon, I’m almost 62, so and he was blond and tall. And the other thing that he was distinguished by in that he had a stubby cigarette holder because he thought that was going to stop him getting lung cancer, so I asked the prop department if I could have that to use because I thought that that sort of almost Peter O’Toole-ish sense of self and affectation said something about his character and Arjun, the fantastic costume designer, kind of gave me all this Spandau Ballet neo-romantic type stuff from the early eighties that was now on an advanced middle-aged man in the early nineties, you know, threadbare and long past its sell-by date, so that really helped me enormously.  And I also knew that he’d been in jail for two years because he had held a taxi driver up at knifepoint, um, arguing about a taxi fare.  He was also a kleptomaniac, um, and

[EB]  Quite a lot then

[REG] And the other thing, as Lee Israel conceded in her memoir is that, once she had been rumbled by the FBI, and could no longer go out and sell these forged letters, she got Jack Hock to go and do them and she would expect that he would get maybe 4 to 500 dollars a piece, and he’d come back with two grand, skimming some of the top of course as well, but, so I knew from that that he obviously had the street smarts to go out there and charm people or just do something to fleece them. So that is really what I had to go on, and the relationship I had with Melissa.

[EB]  Does making films like this as an actor inspire you, make you want to go on and make more films as a director, because you made Wah-Wah back in 2005, which was a very personal project, but is that a want of yours to make more films?

[REG] Yeah, I’d love to do that. I’ve been involved in two others in the interim 12 years since Wah-Wah, which collapsed 4 weeks before we started shooting because that final 10%, to get the bond or the bank, whatever it is, fell through, so, um, five years ago I started making perfume instead, which has been very lucrative. But yes I would like to, but you know the market for indie films like this which are completely human without special effects, um, those are the kind of things that I am most passionate about and to get those financed is incredibly hard now and the film that I’d done just before this was Logan, which was this multi-million dollar, you know, endless long shoot, was the final Wolverine thing and there was a crew of 300 guys, with you know, their arms were thicker than my thighs, which is not that much, but you now, there was so much hardware and cranes and testosterone in the air so to then go to a predominantly female produced, co-written, directed, leading actor, was such a contrast to that and most of the scenes never involved more than 2 or 3 people, so you really had a conversation. And for an actor not to have to spend your time in special effects or weird make-up or doing louma cranes or drones or stunts, all of that kind of stuff, you really get to act with somebody, so that is hugely enjoyable, and is almost a throwback to the kind of movies that I love, those independent movies that Altman, Scorsese and Coppola made in the early seventies, you know before the tent pole movies of Jaws and Star Wars took over.  Having said which, I’m in Star Wars at the moment so fuck it.

[EB] Oh! Can you say anything?

[REG] Oh, it comes out on the 19th of December, 2019 and the other thing that was extraordinary about it is that you don’t, well, I wasn’t allowed to read the script, so you go into a conference room that has closed-circuit television, closed-circuit cameras, two bodyguards at the door, you leave your phone at the door, you sign your name in and you go and you read it, and it’s like Fort Knox, and then you come out again, you sign, that you leave and on the days that you work you get a sealed envelope with your dialogue in there and you have to sign that out and sign it back in at the end of the day and in very large letters it says “IF YOU DO NOT RETURN THESE YOU WILL NOT GET SIDES ANYMORE” and it’s serious and there are visible security people and plain clothes ones on the sets and going from the trailers to the studio, which is, you know, from here to that door, you have to wear a cloak and a hood because there are drones from the Daily Shame going over trying to get pictures of people, so it is a lock-down on a scale that I’ve never experienced before. But having said that, when you walk into the studio, and it’s not all green screen, you see the actual world that I’d seen since I was 20 years old in 1977 is a complete astonishment and J.J. Abrams, who’s directing it, and is an extraordinary person, with energy off the scale, um, I said to him on the first day, when he cast me, “please just pinch me so that I know this is actually happening to me, as I’m from Swaziland” and so every day I go to work and he, you know, pinches me on the shoulder so that I know I’m actually in Star Wars, the final one.

[EB]  I love it!  Right, it’s time for some questions from you our audience.

[REG] Thank you for all your questions, thank you.

[EB] Oh, my absolute pleasure, are you joking, thank you, thank you so much.

[Applause]

[EB] We have some microphones so who would like to start? Don’t do that shy thing.  Right there great, in the middle, if we can get a mike, do we have someone else we can get another microphone?

[REG] Marvellous hair

[EB] Yeah, he has good hair. Your hair is great! Hello!

[Q] Hello!  Thank you for coming, it’s been a

wonderful conversation. I particularly enjoyed you being candid so in that spirit I wanted to ask do you have any tips on how to really enjoy a shoot, and conversely what makes them hell?

[REG] That’s a great question, thank you very much. Sorry, what’s your name?

[Q] John

[REG] Hi John. I’m Richard

[Laughter]

Well it is weird you know, I’m sitting here and I don’t know your names but you I think know mine. Before I started shooting Wah-Wah I had the great good fortune to meet and have dinner with the late, great Mike Nicholls and I said, “what’s your advice?”  He said, “get good catering”, which is so true because the amount of shit that I’ve eaten on films, makes everybody miserable, and the second thing is, actors can always act faster than they think they can and I said “explain that a bit more”, and he said, “there’s a disease that’s come into American movies where people go ‘well John, I’m [pause], I’m thinking [pause] about answering your question [pause] in this way that I can buy more screen time for myself and bore the shit off audiences”

[Laughter]

So he said “get them to say it at real speed like those 1940s movies and so when I did Wah-Wah, and I had an amazing cast of people, Gabriel Byrne played my father, Emily Watson my step-mother, Miranda Richardson my mother, Nicholas Hoult played me at 14, Julie Walters played my aunt, I mean it was a gift, so I did say to them that I’d had dinner with Mike beforehand, so when I had got a take that I was satisfied with I would then ask the actors and it was all technically in the right place, I’d say to the actors, you do one, just whatever you want to do, which I always think is a gift to an actor because it frees them up to not think about, you know, what the director wants, and they just do what they want to do, and I said, ‘the last one that we’ll do, let’s do one for Mike” and I explained to them that you just had to do it at speed and almost without exception the best takes were the ones for Mike, also because they were the last ones that we did. But meant that nobody is thinking about what they’re doing, they’re just doing it and that was invaluable advice and it’s something that I’ve always thought, you know when I’ve been doing scenes, thinking to myself, or in the absence of direction, “what would Mike Nicholls do?” and he’d say “just get through it because in real life people don’t, unless they’ve got real problems, they don’t tend to break every fucking line up so that, you know what I mean?

[Laughter]

So I hope that that answers your question John?

[Q] And the hell, the hell?

[REG] Sorry?

[Q] The hell, the worst ones?

[EB] What about the hell?

[REG] The worst advice.

[EB] What makes a scene, a set hell?

[Q] No, what makes them hell?

[EB] What makes a scene, a set hell. Bad food?

[REG] Oh, bad food.  What makes a scene hell is micro-management. I worked with [pause]

[Laughter]

[EB] Someone!

[Laughter]

[REG] I worked on a film with a foreign director in Prague and he would say “Richard, you are breathing!” I’d say “what?” He said “before every take you are going [breathes out]” and I said, “maybe you should take the headphones off because I have to breathe in order to say the words”, he said, “no, no, every time I’m hearing it on here, you’re going [sharp intake of breath]”

[Laughter]

So that drove me nuts. So I thought well Frank Sinatra is the only person that you never hear take in a breath, so every time I would say any line of dialogue, I would do that so that you didn’t hear any breath going in, so as a result I’m an almost lifeless, corpse-like dimension in the film!

[Laughter]

Micro-management, yeah.  Just leave the actor to kind of get on with it and not nit-pick on every single thing that they do because I think it’s not unlike dealing with dogs or children, actors, you know, if you encourage them and praise them they will do almost anything for you, seriously, in the best possible way, you know, we’re there to do it.

[EB] OK, oh we’ve got a couple here, if we could just get a microphone to some of them that would be great. Anyone else

[REG] I will.

[Q] Um, yeah, it was really interested to hear you talk about Robert Altman. I did know somebody else who knew him and told me a few stories, but, I understand for example that McCabe and Mrs Miller was the film where he invented the everybody can hear everybody like you can in real life, but I’m not sure if that’s true, but…

[REG]  He did it in Mash.

[Q] Yeah, Mash was after McCabe I think.

[REG] No, it was first.

[Q] Oh, just wondering all these great people you’re talking, you might not want to do it, since you’re actually being recorded, who was your, as a movie-goer, who is your favourite director and possibly favourite film, if you can think along those lines at all?

[REG] Favourite director is Robert Altman, hands down, because he was the, yeah, I felt that his understanding of actors and his appreciation for what they did, was enormous.  Having said that, if you asked Bob for a direction, he wouldn’t give you any, he said, “I don’t know, you’re the actor, you do it, I’ll just cut anything that makes you look like an asshole”

[Laughter]

So from that point of view he was totally unprescriptive. But the best writer I’ve worked with is, hands down Bruce Robinson so the discipline of having to do every single thing that he has written, that in itself is a great, there’s a discipline on the one side, but then, the freedom to, you know, to expand on the characters that he gave me in both those films was an incredible experience as well, so it sounds like they’re contradictory, but, he’s essentially a writer and being a writer myself I honour that, I know how hard it is to make stuff that sounds like people are just having a conversation, that then has an on-going effect of, you know, to form a narrative, so, yes, Altman and him. And the actor that I have really had the best working experience with has been Melissa McCarthy on this film and I think it shows in the relationship that we have, it’s just unlike anything that I’ve had before, so I know how lucky I am.

[EB]  Favourite film?

[REG] Oh, favourite film, I don’t know.  I worked on a film with Denholm Elliott and Julie Walters called Killing Dad, that if you will appreciate this, it came out on a Wednesday at the ABC in Shaftesbury Avenue and it was on video 10 days later and was an absolute disaster, but the joy of working with Julie Walters was absolutely amazing, so, again, the experience of the friendships of the people you work with, but maybe not the end result, is, in the final scheme of things, as an actor, that’s the thing I remember the most. Not that Killing Dad was my favourite film, but I think that, almost inevitably, Withnail and I, because it was the first film that I ever made with Bruce Robinson and we formed such a lifelong friendship from that and I Ioved working with Paul and Ralph Brown, who played the drug dealer, and the late, great Richard Griffiths, and the crew on that movie said “this is such a unique atmosphere that has been created on this, when you make more movies, you will realise how unique this experience was”.  I am working with people now on Star Wars, who were working on that film and they still talk about it, they said “yeah, we told you, you’d carry on working” and that it was such a good experience when we did it, so I suppose because it’s given me my entire screen career and is the reason that I’m sitting here talking to you all today, that has to be the film, that I, you know, and it has this on-going life that it’s like a dog that will not be put down.  Every year there are a new generation of kids that seem to adopt this film, for whatever reason that I have no understanding of, so that would have to be it.  Thank you for your question.

[EB] Can I go to the back, yeah, we’ve got time for two questions, the girl at the back there, do we have anyone down the front, and the lady here.  We’ll get 3 in quickly.

[Q] Hi Richard

[REG] What’s your name?

[Q] My name’s Dominic.

[REG] Hi Dominic

[Q] Yeah, really enjoyed today, it’s been absolutely fantastic, so thank you very much for coming in.  My question is, I know you’ve touched upon it a little bit already, but I was wondering if you could maybe talk a little bit more about working on The Age of Innocence and what it was like working with Scorsese and Daniel Day Lewis as well, because, I’ll be honest, I absolutely love that film, I think it’s fantastic.

[REG] Thank you. Dominic, on the first day the generator broke down. We were shooting in New York with a theatre for an opera scene and I got summons by Sir Daniel Day Lewis, well, Danny Lewis wasn’t knighted then, into his Winnebago, and I prostrated myself and I said “oh Daniel, I’m here because you turned down Withnail and I! And he said “Arise!”

[Laughter]

[EB] Amazing!

[REG]  Having said which, for the next 3 months he didn’t speak to me.

[Laughter]

I kid you not, because his character hated my character in the story, so I went into the make-up trailer the next day and there was Michelle Pfeiffer, Winona Ryder, Miriam Margolies and Daniel and I said “good morning” to everybody and apart from him everybody else said “good morning” back and he didn’t speak to me, and I said to Michelle Pfeiffer, I said (whispers) “have I done something, what’s up?” and she said “method”.

[Laughter]

OK. And the on my last day with the late Alec McCowen we finished I think a week before the main unit did, Scorsese, Martin Scorsese said “oh, two great English actors”, (clapping), gave us an applause off on our last take and Daniel broke out of, you know, Archer, his character, and came over and embraced me, and I was like “Jesus!” because I used to avoid walking past him because it’s very unnerving if you’ve had 3 hours while the generator broke down speaking on the first day of exchanging people that you knew in common and great common ground to then meet the person the next day and literally be blanked was very disconcerting, especially if you’re paranoid like I am, so when he suddenly said “oh Richard, it’s been such a pleasure, I’ve loved working with you!” I was like “Jesus Christ!” But thank you for reminding me of that Dominic!

[Laughter]

[EB] We’ll go across to this gentleman here, hello!

[REG] Hi Will

[Q] Over your 30 year career of acting

[REG] Yes, my son, yes

[Laughter]

[Q] You’ve been there before the internet, the birth of the internet, and now the teething days of the internet, have you found it easier to gain parts that you’ve been cast for because of the internet now, because it’s so easy to do self-takes and websites are just… and da, da, da, which we will go on.  Do you find that easier now?  And also, do you think it will be harder now for actors such as myself and for other people maybe in the room to gain parts because the Internet is so vast and everything is so quick now?

[REG] OK, it’s a great question. The, what I love about self-taking is that you have the opportunity to re-take yourself if you don’t like what you’ve done. As painful as I find it to do, you can reshoot until you feel that you’re happy with the scene that you’re sending off. What I find unnerving is that you don’t go into a room and meet anybody, but the advantage of that is if you’re of a nervous disposition, which I am, I think you might be the same, when you go into a room you freeze or you think, “oh my God”, or you see somebody who is obviously right for the part but you’re sitting in a room with six other people who look the same as you and are more famous than you and you think “what the fuck am I doing here in the first place?”, being able to send it off is, I think it gives you some vestige of control about what you’re doing, but at the same time, there is the anonymity of just self-taping and then sending it off and having no feedback whatsoever, and that’s unnerving. I’ll give you an example, I was, my wife and I were driving to an antiques fair in the South of France, as you do, and I got a call from Sue Latimer, my agent, who said “oh, you’ve been offered that part that you self-taped for in the final Wolverine movie with Hugh Jackman”, and I started arguing with her and I said “no, I haven’t, I haven’t self-taped for this”.  She said “yeah, you did”, so we had to pull over on the motorway and I said “well, I don’t want to argue with you Sue, but could you please just send me by email what I’ve sent in because I have no fucking clue what you’re talking about”. So she did, and there was a scene, you know, sort of usual gobbledegook stuff, techno gamgim that you have to do, and I looked at it and it didn’t have the name Logan on it, or what the character’s name, or anything about it at all, sixteen pages of this stuff, and I said “I’ve been cast from that? she said “yeah, do you want to do it?” I said “yes, I do” and the same thing happened with Star Wars, I was sent a generic scene, an interrogation scene from a B feature movie from the 1940s, a war film, um, and I knew from the language that is was something, nothing to do with Star Wars, so I learnt the scene and self-taped it and sent it off, you know, into the ether, had no response and then 2 months later got a call saying “J.J. Abrams is sending a car to meet you at Pinewood Studios, do you want to go?” “Yes please!”

[Laughter]

So I think that is a great advantage of it and the other thing is, it doesn’t matter how long you’ve been doing it, you still have to audition, and I realised this because when I was in my mid-thirties, my wife, who’s a dialect coach, was coaching Donald Sutherland on a film called A Dry White Season and I met him and he’d been such an inspiration to me because he grew up in Canada, he had a very long face, was very tall and had worked with Robert Altman, and I thought, you know, that’s somebody who’s the kind of guy who you could be if you were ever going to get into a movie and I said “Donald, Donald, at what point do you stop auditioning?” because I was thinking what do you have to do when you don’t go and, you know, fan dance, and he said “no, you’re thinking about it all wrong”, he said “you have to go in thinking “I’m going to test these people out, whether I want to work with them, and I don’t know if this is a sort of trick because it’s all loaded against the actor, but he said “they want to try and find somebody that’s going to be the right fit for the part, so if you go in willing and wanting to do an audition, that is a huge mind-set advantage for you to have, and it really changed the way that I thought about auditioning and now try and enjoy it as much as it is possible. About the Internet, the other thing that I’ve found most dispiriting about it, which makes Can You Ever Forgive Me? such a period movie, because people talk, whereas if you go into a restaurant now or on the street, or in a bus or tube or whatever everybody is, that’s the silhouette of our age, they are looking down, so, and I noticed this most particularly when I was on, I think it was 4 episodes of Girls, with Lena Dunham, and when I got there I was so excited to work with all of them because I’d seen the first 3 series, and between every take nobody talked and they said to me “you ask a lot of questions, you talk a lot” and I said, “well, you know, I’m here” and they said, “what did people do before mobile phones?”, I said, “we talked to each other”. So that to me is a great loss that, in this need to communicate with other people, there is a kind of loneliness that it seems to me that you don’t communicate with the people that are literally around you, and I find it very dispiriting and I sound like a really old fart now, you go into restaurants and you see families who are on their mobile phones, or people on dates who are looking on their mobile phones and I think “who the fuck are they talking to!?”

[Laughter]

“They’re here for each other, so I just think that maybe they are just poly-amorous.

[Laughter]

But thank you for your question Will!

[EB]  And we’ve got our last question from this lady down here.

[Q] Hi

[REG] Hi

[Q] My question relates to Can You Ever Forgive Me?

[REG] I have to introduce you, this is Karen Stokes, you’re part of something called The Regiment because of my initials and you came to the first Withnail reunion screening about 20 years ago, with a group of obsessed fans and you’ve flown over from Dublin to do this.  I’m absolutely gobsmacked and feel I should pay your airfare but I’m not!

[Laughter]

But please give us your question!

[Applause]

I have the memory of an elephant!

[Q] You’re worth every mile Richard. My question is in relation to Can You Ever Forgive Me? So obviously, we’ve to wait until February I think for the release date in Dublin?

[REG] Yeah, February 1st

[Q] But me being the stalker that I am I’ve been watching every, you know the PR trail that you’ve been doing in Canada, Italy, America, all the interviews in relation to Can You Ever Forgive Me?

[REG] Longer than the whole shoot!

[Q] Yeah. But one thing that strikes me is that a lot of the headlines, you know, are ‘Relaunched his Career’ and from the point of view of a staunch, die-hard fan like me, I wanted to say “I’m sorry, he didn’t go anywhere, he hasn’t, he’s always been around”, so my question is how does that make you feel, you know this kind of sense that it’s re-launched your career, you know, whereas as far as I’m concerned you’ve always been around, you didn’t go anywhere, so does it make you feel good or?

[REG] It does make me feel good and thank you for your question and your loyalty is absolutely extraordinary. I do mention you to my wife every now and again and say, “yeah, if you think I’m that impossible, there’s somebody in Dublin who thinks”

[Laughter]

She said, “She doesn’t live with you!”

[Applause]

Um no, I’m very aware and grateful that you know, you do these movies, you can play bigger parts or smaller parts, but something that hits the zeitgeist or connects with people, that you can’t predict and so, I’d always thought in my experience of working in America and being in movies from here that were shown in America, that there was such a, you know, if you try and put yourself in a pigeonhole of playing cynical, effete, entitled, arrogant, whatever those things are, long-faced kind of parts that people, certainly in America where there’s a need for that almost Emma Thompson like warmth and connection, that hasn’t happened to me in my career, but it’s happened on this film and I think because this character is so vulnerable and wants to be liked in the story, it’s such a contrast to the curmudgeon of Lee Israel as played so brilliantly by Melissa McCarthy, it’s been a way in, so, like when I was at the Governor’s Honorary Oscar Ball two weeks ago and every person there was, you know, every single face was famous, Tom Hanks came up to me and he said “you’re perfect in the perfect movie, we love you!” and Steven Spielberg was standing right behind him, I thought “what the fuck?!”

[Laughter]

And then it was, you know, Lady Gaga, and Clint Eastwood and all these people, it was, and then what was interesting, it was the number of people that said “we saw you in Withnail and I and we’ve liked you since then” and I thought “you may have liked me since then but you haven’t employed me since then!”

[Laughter]

So, this has been the sort of, you know, it literally just felt like that, and I know the reason I’m sitting here today is as a result of that, so it’s renaissance, bring it on!

[Laughter]

I’m grateful, whatever it is. And you know, more than anything, this whole experience and this sort of award season that I’m now Fox Searchlight have got me channelled into doing, which I’m very grateful for, absolutely fits what John Lennon said just before he was murdered, that life is what happens in between making your plans.  I couldn’t have predicted anything like this would have happened and I thought that at the age that I am, I met and interviewed for a novel that I wrote 20 years ago, the late, great Roddy McDowell, who’d been a child actor and was in Planet of the Apes and he said “how do you see your old age?” and I’d just turned 40 and I said “I haven’t thought about it” and he said “think about it”, he said “because from now onwards your parts, whatever fame, recognition, money you’ve had, is going to be dwindling, and you can either become like 98% of actors, in his opinion, bitter and twisted, pissed off, he said, end up like Michael Douglas, where you’re like raging that you’re not still playing the leads, this is Roddy McDowell who said that, not me, I am merely reporting a dead man’s words

[Laughter]

And, he said “or, you can go, you can be the 2% of people who go, I have been so lucky, who I’ve worked with, where I’ve been and what I’ve been paid and my recognition for that is so off the chart from where you really began” he said, “and you can make that conscious decision” and the older I’ve got I’ve realised the wisdom of that because there’s so much stuff that you have to deal with in this profession where you get dumped on, or ignored or all the stuff that happens, the humiliation of it is on-going as any actor will attest to, I’m not singing the blues about that, it’s just the nature of the profession, so to have this sort of renaissance or this sudden sort of mushrooming of interest if you like at my age, at this point of time, is unbelievable, I’m so grateful, but thank you for your loyalty, thank you for coming!

[Laughter and applause]

[EB] Thank you so much for being here, for your questions, ladies and gentlemen, please put your hands together for Richard E. Grant.

[Applause]

[REG] Thank you so much, thank you.

[Applause]

[EB] Thank you so much.