The Current Status of the Class System in England: Grant believes it’s alive and well. “The class system is one of the great sources of comedy and tragedy in English life. It’s unimaginable for it to be taken away. It’s so engrained in everything. The borders have blurred hugely because there are so many dot com billionaires running around all over the place, but essentially, it’s so deep in the English psyche that I can’t ever see that disappearing.”
The Nonsensical Title: Why did Grant choose Wah Wah as the words to represent the film? “Because I just thought the American stepmother, Emily Watson, Ruby, coming into this world which is homogenously hermetically sealed with its own tribal pretensions and small time social pecking order… She comes in and punctures that whole thing and just says it’s basically a load of Wah Wah,” explained Grant. “That seemed to me the ethos of people who were living in a society where they were past their ‘sell by’ date. Time was running out on them and created this panic.
I was given so many alternative titles like Requiem for Swaziland or Goodbye Africa or One Brief Shining Moment or all the stuff. I can’t f***ing live with that, so I’m going to stick with a movie that nobody knows what the thing sounds like. Of course the distributors pulled their hair and teeth out trying to get me to change that, but the people who’ve seen the movie get it. They don’t seem to have a problem with it so I’m very grateful that it stuck.”
