Withnail & I reunite at LFF

It‘s been 20 years since everyone‘s favourite fine-wine-guzzling thesps went on holiday ’by mistake‘. With Richard E Grant and Paul McGann sharing stage space at a ’Withnail and I‘ reunion held at the BFI Southbank earlier this month, the LFF have managed to nab their long-awaited screen reunion in the form of a 12-minute short. Writer/director Duncan Wellaway tells Time Out about his film ’Always Crashing in the Same Car‘ and how he managed to get these two cinematic icons back in front of the same camera.

How did you go about casting Richard E Grant and Paul McGann?

I wrote the script at least six months before I gave it to Paul and was lucky enough to meet him at a film festival. I didn’t really tell him which part I wanted him to play, but between us there was a kind of unspoken agreement that he would play the darker role of the two. He had said to me after we had approached a couple of other actors, ‘Why don’t I try and give it [the script] to Richard?’ and I said, ‘Richard who?’ completely straight-faced because it wasn’t even on my mind to reunite Withnail and I. I just thought: that’s never going to happen; too much time has gone by.

There seems to be a shift from the original power relationship in ‘Withnail and I’. Did your approach to the dynamic between the characters change once you had cast both actors?

It didn’t really, no. The differences outweigh the similarities really but because I didn’t write it for them, so I can’t really take credit for deliberately trying to turn that relationship on its head. The chemistry between them in this film is totally different from what it’s like in ‘Withnail’. In ‘Withnail’ they’re like the odd couple. They’re like Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau, whereas in this film I guess they’re like a married couple that have been together for too long and hate each other and are ready for a divorce.

How fitting was the placement of your film in the shorts category ‘Power, Corruption & Lies’?

It’s perfect. I actually know the programmer, who after seeing ‘Always Crashing…’ was a bit thrown, a bit shocked. If you watch it again though, once you know the twist, you get more out of it. So when he watched it the second time, he said, ‘I’m definitely going to programme this for the LFF’. It may sound slightly arrogant, but I don’t know if he actually built the programme around that film because it does encompass all of those things: power, corruption and lies.

Were there any underlying current events influencing the story?

The characters that the film portrays are based on real people. The class of people that the film is about has become so corrupt and almost happy to rub it in other people’s noses. It was just pure anger that drove me to write something that leaves people with a bad taste in their mouth. I’m not interested in being really preachy about a subject, I’d much rather try and downplay that and take something that’s really philosophical, like politics, and turn it into something physical, turn it into an actual type of human behaviour.

What was it like witnessing Richard E Grant and Paul McGann at work?

The chemistry between them was fantastic. When they were together it was quite magical. Because the film is basically quite a long, drawn-out telephone conversation, the way to shoot it is to film each side of the conversation separately. If you’re lucky you can get the other actor to read in the same room, but if they’re movie stars they can say ‘well no I don’t want to get up in the middle of the night just to sit off camera’. The first night of the shoot though, when we got all of Richard E Grant’s really intense office scenes, where he’s on the phone basically losing his marbles, Paul was in the room with him. It was really sweet and simply shows how much respect and fondness they have for each other, that they both agreed to do that. They were both really exhausted because it was 6 o’clock in the morning but had a big hug at the end of it.

‘Always Crashing in the Same Car’, London Film Festival short cuts ‘Power Corruption & Lies’ (90 min) Fri 19 Oct 16:15, Sat 20 Oct 20:45, NFT3

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