The Rum Diary - Bruce Robinson interview

BRUCE Robinson talks about being lured out of retirement by Johnny Depp to direct The Rum Diary and why it proved a pleasure to direct. He also talks about the casting of Amber Heard and how she took everyone’s breath away and why he’s not bothered about criticisms of the movie or the fact that no one in America went to see it. He was speaking at a UK round table...

Q. Can you tell us a bit about how you were tempted back to Hollywood with this project?
Bruce Robinson: Not Hollywood at all, but tempted by Johnny… I mean I had no aspirations to be a film director ever again in my life and that’s absolutely true. I made a promise to myself as a matter of fact that I’d never do it again and kept the promise for 17 years. Then I was on vacation in Spain and I got a phone call and it was Depp. It was quite surprising, I don’t know how he found me, in Seville. It was: “Oh, it’s Johnny here, have you read The Rum Diary?”; “Uh…no”; “Well, I’m getting a copy to you tomorrow…” And tomorrow The Rum Diary turns up and: “Do you want to write it?”

Well, I’m a screenwriter basically so I said: “Yeah, sure, I’ll have a go at it.” And I did, so then he called me up and he said: “Well now you’re going to direct it!” And there was a bit of a friction over that. It’s kind of almost facetious to say it but, you know, here’s the world’s number one film star, you know, bullying me saying: “You’ve got to do this!” And I mean it’s extraordinarily flattering, firstly, and secondly it was very difficult to say ‘no’ to someone of his stature inside the industry. I mean I did say ‘no’ in the beginning, but he was so, kind of, confident about it and kept on about it, so I thought: “Well, its not my chops on the screen, the risk isn’t mine, ‘cos if I fuck this up, so what? You know, I haven’t done anything anyway!”

So he, uh…. oh god, sorry guys, I’ve got have a fucking fag, does anybody object? No? I can’t stand it, been sucking these things [chucks a cigarette substitute on the table] all day… So, I mean his confidence in the material and in me having a go was the thing that kind of snapped it. It was his risk really, not mine.

Q. How reassuring was it to have his protection that your vision would be the one that…?
Bruce Robinson: Well, enormously so. There’s a lot of Hunter S. Thompson disciples carping about the movie in the States, I’m told. I haven’t got a laptop, my son’s got a laptop and he says: “Oh there’s another one here!” And it’s: “How dare he make this film like this without a fucking Yeamon [a character dropped for the film] in it?” But the reality is that there’s an enormous difference between a book and a movie. If you’re so in love with the book take the fucking book into the cinema… 600 people reading a book, it’s a ridiculous thing to say. The fact is that the book firstly is a very early piece of Hunter-esque writing and you see these seeds of what is going to come out of this book, and secondly there are two lead characters, and that might work as a narrative in a novel but when you’ve got one big film star it doesn’t work.

So, there was Yeamon and there was Kemp, and I realised that Hunter S. Thompson had split himself down the middle into two separate characters and as soon as I realised that – retrospectively it seems very very obvious, but it wasn’t at the time – I threw one of them overboard and all the Thompson fans started freaking out. But what am I to do? You can’t win. But it’s like that thing, you know… David Lean did Great Expectations, which is a 600-page book, and you’ve got 90 minutes to tell that story, you have to squeeze things. You have to. [But it] doesn’t bother me, I mean, fuck it. My only interest in it is we’ve had a kind of a… you can’t say the film’s bombed in America because no-one’s been! [Laughs] That’s kind of the tragedy!

A film bombs if you open $25 million first weekend and the next weekend it takes 8 and 6… that’s a bomb. But this film was extraordinary… just nobody turned up. It’s very weird isn’t it? But then again, you see, it’s a little film. And my stuff doesn’t appeal on a broad front anyway. Who wants to go and hear dialogue any more in movies? We don’t want to hear dialogue, we want to hear Shrek mumbling… don’t we?

Q. Have you spoken to Johnny since it opened?
Bruce Robinson: I thought you were going to say: “Have I spoken to Shrek?”! [laughs] Have I spoken to Johnny? Ummm… yes, yes I have, he’s great. He’s honestly a wonderful, brilliant guy. The only loss is the financial loss but that’s not my department anyway, my department is trying to make the best film I could, and I’m not in a million years… I mean, my favourite film-maker is Luis Bunuel, if you opened a thousand print movie of Bunuel in the United States, well I know bloody well in Farmingdale, Illinois they’re not going to take the chicken off their head to get in the fucking truck and go and see it, they’re just not. So, I mean, I’m unknown compared to Bunuel. It’s kind of daft to think that there’s an enormous audience… I think there is an enormous audience, but it’ll be a sort of audience that will find the film and hopefully like this film. But people who like seeing chipmunks carrying Heckler and Koch machine guns aren’t gonna go and see this.

Q. What’s Johnny’s take on the film’s success?
Bruce Robinson: Well, I mean, that is the problem, I’m saying all of the American media are saying: “Oh, this movie’s bombed.” But how can it bomb if no one’s gone? It’s very weird, the audience… you know they have people with computers doing audience ratios and stuff. I think it breaks down over the spectrum of the theatres of the United States to 7 and 3/4 people in each cinema, for each screening. Which is not great news… for the financiers. Me? It’s got nothing to do with me. My job is to try and make the film, which ain’t Citizen Kane, and no one’s pretending it is. There are errors in the film that I wish I hadn’t made, but my intention was to make entertainment with some good laughs in it, that’s all I wanted to do. It’s not like going to a Catholic church service, it hasn’t got anything to say other than: “I hope you laugh!” And: “I hope you’re sucked in and find it a bit glamorous and amusing.” That’s all it was meant to do.

Q. Can we talk about Johnny’s performance in the film? He’s not playing Hunter S. Thompson, obviously, but there are elements of his Hunter S. Thompson performances in there. How difficult was it keeping him from going the full Hunter if you like?
Bruce Robinson: Well, we obviously discussed that before we started shooting and it was very apparent to me that it would have been a different kind of negative comparison. “Oh, Robinson’s trying to remake Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas…” Terry Gilliam is a friend of mine and he’s an extremely talented man. But I didn’t want to remake that… I mean, what would be the point? Plus, in the period this film was set, in ’59/‘60, Hunter Thompson was a very handsome young man. He used to model clothes to get money and stuff in Puerto Rico.

So, my interest was pre-Gonzo and I wanted to try and have a look at this guy… it’s a key line in the film for me certainly, where he says: “I don’t know how to write like me…” That’s the great problem that anyone who writes has. “Where is my voice?” You know. A writer I don’t enjoy, Bernard Shaw, said: “When you start writing like yourself, you’ve got a style.” Then you have a style as a writer. I wrote for years until I thought: “Christ, that sounds like me.”

And so that was the side of it I wanted to look at in here, and I think one of the poisonous elements of The Rum Diary in terms of the few criticisms I’ve read of it is this constant harping on Hunter fucking S. Thompson, and that it’s not like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I mean, put that in another context and say: “Hamlet? Well it’s not like Romeo and Juliet!” Well, of course if isn’t! You know, Thompson wrote this book with a fictitious character, of course based on himself, and it’s got nothing to do with Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. This was actually written I think 15 years before he got to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and it’s always bringing it back to that central fulcrum of Hunter Thompson.

This is a fiction written by Hunter S. Thompson, and you don’t need Johnny with a false bald head and shorts and machine gunning everybody and blowing things up, I didn’t want to write that. As a matter of fact, my first rule with this thing was that I didn’t want a gun, under no circumstances was there going to be a gun anywhere in this film. It’s the only thing I find tedious about the criticism is this constant comparison between this and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I suppose it was inevitable, but it’s very frustrating to me, that.

Q. Is that true of the portrayal of drug use and altered states in the film as well? Because it does represent that state of mind in a kind of toned down way, which was unexpected…
Bruce Robinson: Yeah, um, well at about the time… when I read the book and agreed to write the screenplay, the next thing I did was got as many political histories of Puerto Rico as I could. And I read a lot about the politics and the emergence of Puerto Rico and one of the great tragedies of Puerto Rico was in the ’50s big American corporations moved in there because they gave them a thing called the ‘boot strap’ programme where, for 15 or 20 years, you didn’t pay any tax if you were a company doing business in Puerto Rico. Consequently Shell, Exxon, BP all moved into Puerto Rico so they didn’t have to pay any tax, and one of the big companies that moved in there was the United Fruit Corporation, who went in there and mechanised all of the farming, practices that had gone on for thousands of years, and because it was all mechanised growing pineapples and mangoes and stuff, kicked all the people out of work. So, they’ve got nothing and nowhere to go, so they all go to New York… West Side Story. And now they all hate them in New York. [It’s like]: “What are all these Puerto Ricans doing taking all our jobs?” But they’d all lost their jobs in their own line and so…

I read a lot about the kind of politics of it, and during that reading two things turned up. One was the John Birch Society, which is a hyper right wing outfit operating in the late ’50s, ’60s, and the other was the beginning of the CIA experimenting with LSD on people because they were going to use it as a weapon, this amazing drug. So, I thought it was a novel way to use this drug in the film, via a character like Moberg, and they don’t even know how to take it. “You take it in the eye?” So that’s the way they did it in the film. But, uh, yeah, that is a slight precursor to Fear and Loathing and Las Vegas. But I can’t even remember why I wrote the bloody scene now. I wrote it… it’s an extremely difficult thing to do on film I think, to show the subjective state of inebriation. If you want to say: “Oh, someone’s drunk…” You know, a woozy camera with a soft focus works. But how do you do drugs? I don’t know. I had a go at the tongue, that’s all.

Q. How pleased were you with the ‘accusatory giblet’ line?
Bruce Robinson: Well, when I wrote it it made me laugh: “Your tongue is like an accusatory giblet!” [Laughter] I mean that’s the other thing too, there was a review that my son showed me on the Internet of some American reviewer, who really hated the movie… desperately hated it, wanted us all shot, and he said: This terrible piece… why is this terrible piece… the only thing that saves this movie is Hunter Thompson’s scintillating dialogue.” But there’s only two lines of his in it [laughs]. So, I thought: “Oh wow! Okay, I’ll take that as an inverted compliment, thank you!”

Q. Which are the two Hunter lines?
Bruce Robinson: The two Hunter lines are, “Have some fun with the fucking luger”, which is in the bowling alley, and: “We’ll be lucky to find an oil spot.” It’s said when they go and rescue the car. [There’s] not another line of his in the whole screenplay.

Q. So, how much of a tribute do you see the film to Thompson?
Bruce Robinson: See, we’re on Thompson, all the time! How much of a tribute to Thompson? Well, I only met him once. I sat in a hotel room like this for two hours and we never said a word to each other. I was invited to go and meet him and he sat where you are with a towel over his head, with all his equipment and stuff, and I sat there opposite him. And he said nothing to me, I said nothing to him and I said: “Okay Hunter, goodbye…” And he said: “Ungh” [grunting noise]. And that was it. [Laughter] It’s not… how much of a tribute is making Great Expectations to Charles Dickens? How much of a tribute is making Hamlet to Shakespeare? It’s not a tribute at all. It’s a piece of work that Hunter Thompson created and I’ve adapted for the screen.

As I said earlier, it’s the only thing that kind of annoys me… it’s nobody’s fault, it’s just the way it is, that this is all about Hunter Thompson and all the interviews that certainly I’ve done are about Hunter Thompson, and all the interviews Johnny’s done on TV are about Hunter Thompson. I think that there is a corporate perception, certainly in America, that this is about a sort of guy getting stoned, drunk and drugged in a hotel room and it isn’t. There’s a certain amount of glamour in the movie too, and a certain amount of expansiveness in the film that isn’t necessarily… it isn’t Fear and Loathing… y’know? I’m not sitting there every day thinking: “Oh, am I tributing Hunter?” I’m trying to write a story that he actually wrote and I tried to adapt, that’s all. And you either like it or you don’t, and if you don’t like it you won’t go and see it, or you’ll go and see it and hate it, or whatever you may do, you know. It’s a bit of a butterfly this one… I think.

Q. Moving away from Hunter, then, I was wondering how much of your own experiences went in there? Because I have to say I’m a massive fan of Withnail & I and I love your wonderful anecdotes that make their way into your work, and I thought I spotted one from an interview with you once which was about your friend Vivian, who I believe Withnail was based on, who has family in Islay who worked in a distillery so that’s where the Moberg scene comes from?
Bruce Robinson: It certainly does! [laughs] But it killed him, it killed him. My friend Viv, I mean Withnail is based on a compilation of people, very much myself as well, and he, the Lagavulin whiskey plant in Scotland, on the isle of Islay, all of the people in there used to nip the scotch all day, drunk the whiskey all day, and the management got fed up with these people. You know, heads like vindaloo, bowls of vindaloo, going: “Arrr, top of the morning”, sorry that’s Irish… So, they banned all the workers in the place [from] having nips of whiskey.

Now, there’s only one electricity dealer man on the island, sells irons and stuff, and suddenly he gets an order in for 50 spin dryers, which he’s never had before. So, all of these guys are buying spin dryers so they can get hold of the whiskey filters and spin this white stuff, unfiltered, neat alcohol out of the filters. And the product was called ‘yon white stuff’ and I have drunk it, and it’s just kerosene, it’s unbelievably vile. And the night Viv and I drunk it he came back from Islay and we were drinking this stuff and we had, in our bathroom, we had all these pustules coming through the walls, you know, and we went in there, suddenly I got a 4lb hammer, where it came from I know not, it was like a sort of Walt Disney cartoon or something, and we bashed the fucking back wall of the house down on this yon white stuff. Anyway, it killed him. I mean it gave him cancer of the throat. I’m perfectly convinced it’s ‘cause he drank it all the time. So yeah, well spotted. Sorry for that diversion by the way.

Q. How many other similar elements of your own life filtered into The Rum Diary?
Bruce Robinson: There are two rip-offs from Withnail… and that’s one, because the Danny the dealer character in Withnail & I, when Withnail challenges him and he says, “I could take double anything you could”, and Danny the dealer says: “Very foolish words man!” But I use that same motif in The Rum Diary where Johnny says, “there’s no such thing as 400 proof alcohol”, and the horrible apothecary looks up and says: “Words you might need to moderate.” That’s one rip-off from Withnail and the other rip-off is in the Cafe Cabrones where Sala says to him: “What are you smiling at?”; “I’m not smiling, I’m maintaining a casual face…”; “There’s one over there, a big one, doesn’t like the perfume”; “The one with the eye?” So, that was another rip-off from Withnail, but those were the only two.

Q. Can you talk a little bit about the cast that you put together for the film? Because obviously there are some very strong personalities on the screen. Did you always have the people that you eventually cast in mind? For the main sort of three or four roles?
Bruce Robinson: Well, no because firstly I’m not au fait with American actors, but I had a brilliant casting lady who kind of understood where I was going and what I was looking for. I can start answering that question with, say, Amber Heard. When Amber came in for the part I happened to be walking across – it was in Johnny’s offices on Melrose Avenue – and I was walking across to go and get a beer or something, and this vision came through the door… “God! Who the fuck is that?!” And she got the part there and then, because what I was looking for, there is a metaphor in the movie, I’m going say his name and I wish I wasn’t, but Hunter Thompson’s lifelong writing obsession was this American Dream… what is the dream? Is it a real thing or is it not?

So, I wanted a dream girl, every boy’s dream girl, you know… Doris Day, Marilyn Monroe rolled into one type of stuff. So, Amber walks in and she got the part instantly. I didn’t tell her, we brought her back, tested her, and all the rest of it. Thereafter, whenever she was coming back I would always go and loiter in the office that had about a dozen guys all working in it, to see, to look at them looking at her to see if it worked, and it did work. And so… amazing presence. I have this feeling with actors that they can’t be in front or behind of it, they’ve got to stick to the celluloid. And she just stuck to the celluloid. She glowed in the tests we did… she’s just glowing, you know, I didn’t give a fuck about the acting because I thought, you know, I’ll work and work and work until we get the show.

So, she was one… the others, Richard Jenkins, obviously, who plays the editor of the paper, is a highly distinguished actor, and when he said ‘yes’ I knew there wasn’t a problem with him because he’s such a great actor. Michael Rispoli, who’s not a very well known actor who plays the side kick, you know, Sala, and we did four screen tests on Michael, it was torture, but he had that kind of warmth I was looking for. And then Giovanni Ribisi walked in and like ambushes us, sort of: “You’re in this film, you’ve got to be in this film.” But I remember he asked: “I’ve read this, I don’t know what it is. What am I in this?’ And I remember saying [in Moberg voice]: “Well, what you are is kind of nasal…” And that was it. It was the only direction I ever gave him for the whole character. And so [in Moberg again]: “Oh, I get it!” But very frustratingly and annoyingly he refused to come out of the part, so every time at the end of a take I’d go up to him to talk to him about something and [Moberg again]: “I’m no fuckin’ good am I? I’m just no good!”

I got to the point of saying: “Please, Giovanni, look I just want to talk to you about something…” And [Moberg]: “Okay, well, just go ahead and talk…” You know he wouldn’t come out of it. And then he had to fly up to New York and he had all these filthy blackened fingernails and that mac he wouldn’t take off. Imagine him getting on the plane, you know. [Moberg]: “I’d like a scotch…” But he’s a superb actor that man. He pulls it off doesn’t he?

Q. Did you have any particularly great on-set moment with them? Are there any exciting anecdotes?
Bruce Robinson: Not really, it was a bit acerbic actually, between me and Richard Jenkins at the beginning, at the top of the shoot, because he has an infinite capacity to freak out, and go mad, and I would stop the takes. But it’s always difficult with a distinguished actor to say, ‘cut’ because they don’t like it. But I had to because he wasn’t leaving himself, in my view, anywhere to go. He needed to be particularly freaked out at certain parts of the film, and if you freak too much too early in the film you’ve blown it, you’ve got nowhere to go and so… but no, I mean anecdotally, not really. It was an absolute joy to make and I’d do it again with them. I’m not so sure I’d do it again with anyone else but I’d do it again with them.

Q. So this doesn’t mean that you’ll be returning to directing on a regular basis then?
Bruce Robinson: Oh no, no. No it doesn’t. I have converted a novel I wrote into a screenplay, which I may well do. But it’s a tiny little English film, a couple of million quid type film. I might do that, I don’t know. I mean I’ve been working for 14 years on the same book, about the Whitechapel murderer, which is kind of an obsessive passion of mine at the moment. But the problem is, I spent half a million pounds on the research of this book and it’s unbelievably expensive because you can’t just walk into the Metropolitan Police and say: “Okay, get it all out, come on I want to see it…” Because all of those, we remember very well the dodgy dossier over Iraq… well, exactly the same thing applies to Jack the Ripper, all the Metropolitan Police files are all completely faked, they’re all complete bollocks all of them, so it’s a difficult area to be working in.

But it’ll take me another two years to finish that. But you know the thing about the directing thing is you take a great film-maker like Ridley Scott, he does movie after movie after movie… this one’s a dog, that one’s not bad, that’s brilliant, this is a dog, that’s brillian… but my stuff can’t be like that because it’s kind of esoteric. So, if I make something and I fuck it up, I’m persona non gratis [sic], which truly doesn’t bother me. If you like the Thomas Penman film we’ve just been talking about, if it’s only 2 million quid and it’s a totally dialogue-driven film, so what? I’m not selling the house.