Bruce Robinson

[DB7]

Bruce Robinson: why I turned to drink to make The Rum Diary
Bruce Robinson talks to Will Lawrence about his latest film, starring Johnny Depp .

By Will Lawrence

7:00AM GMT 04 Nov 2011

Bruce Robinson wrote and directed one of the best British comedies of the past four decades, the widely quoted cult favourite Withnail & I. In the aftermath of that success he then directed just two more films before disappearing from the public eye altogether, only re-emerging now, to shoot his first film in almost 20 years.

Now the 65-year-old has adapted Hunter S Thompson’s The Rum Diary, which he also scripted, exorcising all but three lines of Thompson’s dialogue and which features his old friend Johnny Depp in the leading role.

It brims with snapping, punchy bouts of dialogue, some of which recall the wonderful lines that weave through every scene in Withnail & I. Depp’s booze-addled journalist, meanwhile, seems very much an archetypal Robinson character. The director smiles. “Yeah, The Rum ain’t that far off Withnail, is it?”

Robinson’s path to The Rum Diary began about 15 years ago, when Depp was gearing up to shoot his first Hunter S Thompson piece, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and asked Robinson to rewrite the script. “But I just didn’t like it,” he says. “Fear and Loathing had jokes. I like situational comedy when people are being completely serious and yet you can find something extremely funny, not jokes.”

Depp then got in touch again in 2005, asking Robinson to have a look at The Rum Diary, a novel drawn from Thompson’s experience on a newspaper in Puerto Rico, which remained hidden away until Depp coaxed the novelist into publishing the piece in 1998, seven years before the writer shot himself in the head.

“I read The Rum Diary and I didn’t really like it very much,” concedes Robinson, “but I wrote it as a screenplay for Johnny, and then he asked me if I wanted to direct. I thought, 'If he’s prepared to take the risk I’ll do it.’

“Writing and directing is the same cheese sandwich. And Johnny, he’s the most important film star of our age. I’ve got a painting at my home 6ft x 6ft, which Johnny did of Keith Richards and gave me. I love Johnny.”

The feeling is mutual, with Depp’s admiration for Robinson evolving from his adoration of Withnail. Thompson, apparently, loved it just as much. Released in 1987, Robinson’s mostly autobiographical yarn about two struggling actors who go on holiday by mistake, is widely lauded for his poetic and acerbically funny writing. Robinson had scored some success as an actor in the Seventies, working with Truffaut and Zeffirelli and Ken Russell, but found the long periods of unemployment, and ensuing impecuniousness, ghastly.

“There was no enjoyment in living that kind of life for me at the time, rooting around Camden Market, eating old vegetables.” He shared a grubby Camden flat with a chap called Vivian MacKerrell, who legend now ascribes as the template for the immensely selfish and witty bottle-jockey Withnail, who’s played in the film by Richard E Grant.

Grant also starred in Robinson’s second directorial offering, 1989’s How to Get Ahead in Advertising, “the boil movie”, as Robinson describes it, which veered towards the didactic and wasn’t as well received. “My rage against Thatcher was so strong when I made that film, and that was my mistake. But, with The Rum Diary, I got the chance to tell a story without being preachy. It is there, though:there’s a subliminal thing about banks.”

The Rum Diary does indeed lament the unfairness heaped upon the people of Puerto Rico, and the tale’s atmosphere of injustice struck a chord with Robinson. A sense of injustice lurks in almost all of Robinson’s work, from his Oscar-nominated screenplay for The Killing Fields through to his four novels, the second of which, The Peculiar Memories of Thomas Penman (1998), shines a light on the darkness that clouded his upbringing. Robinson hopes to direct an adaptation of Penman with Michael Caine next year.

“Withnail is a misery. Thomas Penman is a misery. But is it not the function of the artist to take misery and turn it into art? My childhood was a pile of horse----. It was an incredibly unhappy experience for me, but writing Penman turned that into something hurtfully funny. You don’t want to write the Margaret Drabble version. You want to make people amused.”

Raised in Broadstairs, Kent, Robinson was the victim of an abusive father and has fought a running battle with alcohol all his life. He’d stopped drinking altogether six years prior to writing The Rum Diary, but picked it up again to help his creative juices flow.

“Sitting there in misery I wasn’t getting a line, but my wife, God bless her, told me to have a glass of wine. I 'medicined’ myself – the classic excuse of the alcoholic! I drank a bottle of wine a day, wrote the thing and then stopped again. There are no books in a bottle, but every time I sit in front of the typewriter there’s the voice going, 'You can’t write. You can’t write.’ So you drink and that voice might go away.”

[Timmy_Lea]

I saw him on Mayo & Kermode's film review show.
He swore.

[GRAEME]

Robinson ... has fought a running battle with alcohol all his life. He’d stopped drinking altogether six years prior to writing The Rum Diary, but picked it up again to help his creative juices flow.

Alcoholics can always find an excuse. I do hope he has really been able to stop again.

I do wish he had kept it to himself. The romance of the bottle. It was horrible hearing him peddling this line in interviews - I wonder how many self-serving addicts will quote him as they pop the next cork...