The Importance of This Film to Richard E Grant: “I had always wanted to write about this experience of growing up in this last gasp of an empire. I’d seen White Mischief, I’d seen Out of Africa, I’d seen Cry Freedom, I’d seen all the things that were either very romantic about Africa or political. There was nothing that I’d seen that actually dealt with this sort of last minute panic, if you’d like, from a personal point of view. That didn’t have wild animals running around or people in safari suits and all the traditional things that you see, or starvation riots and dictatorships that have beset so much of the continent now.
Originally I had this idea to write a kind of Raymond Carver-like Short Cuts of many different stories told from multiple viewpoints. I suppose because I didn’t really have the self-confidence that my own story had sufficient dramatic heft or weight to carry a whole movie. Then people said to me, ‘It begins with adultery, then there’s divorce, then addiction, then death, first love, lost love, unrequited love, your father trying to shoot you, amateur dramatics on top of that to sort of comedically balance it out. Why do you think there’s not enough story?’ So once they had pointed it out to me, I then I suppose had the courage to stick to my own story and think that that was of sufficient interest to sustain the whole movie.”
Reaching Audiences With a Very Personal Story: “My intention was never to make an arthouse movie where you excluded people or was made for four people to see in Wichita. I want people to see it. My experience of it now showing at the Toronto, Dallas, Palm Springs and Tribeca [Film Festivals] is that even though it’s idiosyncratic to my childhood in Africa at a particular point in historical time, 35 years ago, the bottom line is it’s about family and what goes on behind closed doors. The public show and private face of what goes on - and that is common to everybody.
I know from responses we’ve had that it’s almost been like a combination Jerry Springer/Oprah Winfrey-like response because people come up to me and say, ‘Oh my God, this is exactly what’s happened in my family.’ And I think, ‘I’ve never met these people, they haven’t lived in Africa or in the time that I was living there, but all the elements that are in it at some point touch other people’s lives.’ So I know it has a broader appeal than just a British audience or people that have some kind of colonial connection, or so it seems, unless they’re all lying…”
Defining the 'Semi' Part of the 'Semi'-Autobiographical Label: Grant explained, “It’s only semi in that there’s historical license and dramatic license taken because it’s things that have happened over 10 years that have been consolidated down into a three year time scale for the movie purposes, for the narrative. Otherwise it’d be like Gone with the Wind, you’d be here for 10 years. So that was the reason. Otherwise, everything that happened, happened.”
Is Wah Wah a Love Letter to His Father and an Indictment of the British Upper Class?: Grant answered, “It’s a combination of affection and also taking a critical view of it because people living in this acutely snobbish social pecking order, the equivalent of the King and Queen being the High Commissioner’s wife and then going down to the sort of mudflats of people who were in trade industries, was so preposterous and so acute that you couldn’t really make it up. There’s people living a standard of living and a way of life that they couldn’t possibly sustain when they went back to England. They had a great deal of leisure time, very cheap servants and they lived almost like 19th century aristocrats.”
Is the class system depicted accurately in Wah Wah? “Yeah, it was absolutely feudal in the prewar empire sense of that,” said Grant. “The woman who was our housekeeper died six months ago and she had been working with my family, and looked after my father more than any doctor did while he was dying, for the last 40 years. And my father paid for her children’s education, so there was this benign feudal [system]. It’s difficult to understand now in post-colonial history that there was this co-dependent relationship that people had. It’s very easy in retrospect now to knock it and say, ‘Oh, well, these people were exploited.’ But speaking to them and going back to Swaziland, I never encountered any animosity or discomfort about that. It was just accepted that that was the status quo then, 35 years ago.”
