Richard E. Grant's compassion for the past

Richard E. Grant's life in Swaziland's expat community provided rich pickings.

It's hard to know what to ask Richard E. Grant about his latest film. Or what more he might have to say. After all, his latest film Wah-Wah is all about him, the younger version. It is based on his life growing up in Swaziland as his parents split in a storm of adultery, alcoholism and anxiety about the end of their colonial life as the sun sets on the last little African outcrop of the British Empire.

Grant wrote it, directed it and somehow survived to tell the tale in his The Wah-Wah Diaries: The Making of a Film. The book is his second volume of memoirs after 1996's engaging With Nails.

The first one traced his career from his 1986 screen breakthrough Withnail and I to his adventures in Hollywood, including a grimly hilarious portrait about working on the Bruce Willis megaflop Hudson Hawk ("I knew while I was making it I would never ever be asked to work with those people again. I thought, why not?")

If revisiting that troubled upbringing on screen wasn't hard enough, Diaries explains the experience of shooting in Swaziland. And Diaries charts Grant's running battle with the movie's French producer Marie-Castille Mention-Schaar. His bitterness at her "staggering incompetence" during its production remains today, even though the film has made it to the big screen and is playing in Britain, South Africa Australia and soon, New Zealand.

"I thought right up until the last minute before it was shown at the Toronto Film Festival a year ago we would never a get a distributor. So the fact that it has got out there in as many countries as it has done is a [expletive] miracle."

No, he and his producer haven't spoken since, he chuckles down the line from his holiday home in the South of France, where he's risen early to take his tall frame for a morning run. And he hopes the book will serve as a warning to anyone else.

It, and With Nails before it, are reminders that for a guy who has been on screen for 20 years, he is refreshingly honest about the ego and money-driven nature of the film business. He can't identify any great reason for his candour, except that it's just more interesting that way.

"Having grown up on autobiographies and biographies, I have always been frustrated by the fact that very often they are written usually when people are very old, or ghost-written. And you get this rosy, glowsy, everyone-was-wonderful-darling kind of throwback of how things operated.

"Having been in showbiz now for 25 years the stuff that actually goes on is much more interesting than that."

That frankness is also a hallmark of Wah-Wah which, as well as a portrait of a disintegrating family, casts a wry eye on the expatriate community becoming the last pith helmet brigade, as Swaziland approached independence in the early 70s.

That is, complete with "the three-B tenets of colonial life - boredom, boozing, and bonking". Oh and being more British than the British.

"I think as soon as you have any group of people who are hermetically sealed off from their home culture there is this sort of hothouse effect that happens. They become more New Zealand than New Zealand, if you like, when they are away from New Zealand. That seems to happen all over the place. It is sad and funny - people are living on the cliff edge and past their sell-by date in this last gasp of Empire."

Grant still feels attached to Swaziland - he wears two watches, one of which is his late father's, fixed to Swazi-time - but aside from capturing the place and period, it's a film about a difficult and often traumatic childhood, filmed where it happened.

So was making a film about it - and the stress that entailed - meant to be therapeutic?

"My father's dead, I've had a reconciliation with my real mother so I suppose that essentially enabled me to look back, rather than in anger, hopefully with compassion, trying to understand how and why people did what they did.

"It is remote from any life I have experienced since."

LOWDOWN

Who: Richard E. Grant, actor turned director

Born: Richard Grant Esterhuysen, May 5 1957, Mbabane, Swaziland

Key Roles: Withnail & I (1987), How to Get Ahead in Advertising (1989), Warlock (1989), Henry & June (1990), L.A. Story (1991), Hudson Hawk (1991), The Player (1992), Dracula (1992), The Age of Innocence (1993), Pret-a-Porter (1994), The Portrait of a Lady (1996), Spice World (1997), Gosford Park (2001), Bright Young Things (2003), Colour Me Kubrick (2005)

Books: With Nails: The Film Diaries of Richard E.Grant (1996), By Design: A Hollywood Novel (1998), The Wah-Wah Diaries: The Making of a Film (Macmillan, out now)

Latest: Wah-Wah opens at cinemas on Thursday, September 7