"I have kept a diary," he said, "since I witnessed my mother's adultery at the age of nine." As he spoke, an elderly woman was slowly trundling her luggage trolley so close to our knees we had to draw our legs out of her path. Richard E. Grant was unfazed, as though his narrative focus was so fine he had not noticed her at all.
He is a disconcerting fellow. This morning, at the crack of dawn, he came off the red-eye from Newfoundland and, if he was a normal human being, he'd be crashed out in his pit, sleeping off his jet lag, not spring-heeling around this rowdy hotel. I can never trust manic energy, let alone a man with eyes the color of turquoise. It's not natural.
He is not, he said (not for the first or last time), a shrink. He can only tell me he began his habit of diarising at a time when he was beset by guilt and loss. He knew something terrible and he couldn't tell anyone about it, so he wrote down his understanding of the aforementioned debacle as a way of off-loading the pressure of what he knew. And went on doing it because it became his way of dealing with the world.
"It means you are simultaneously inside and outside your own life all the time," he said, "watching yourself experiencing what is happening to you, then having a written conversation with yourself about it. It's a kind of control mechanism; an exploration and a way of keeping a record."
So excruciating is his self-consciousness, he has only once watched himself on the screen and that was nearly 20 years ago when he sat through the entirety of Bruce Robinson's glorious Withnail And I in such an agony of disillusion that by the end he was practically welded to his seat and had drawn blood from his wife's comforting hand. There-after, he was lionized up hill and down dale, but deep down he has always known he buggered up, let everybody down, missed the boat, exposed himself as a total no-hoper who would never work again.
He also knows, and will say with perfect equanimity, that Withnail was his first big break, without which he would never have worked with Altman, Coppola and Scorsese, never been the movie star who, in the mid-1990s published a memoir of his years in Hollywood that, yes, does credit to his addiction to diary-writing despite its catchpenny title With Nails, which doesn't mean anything except a lack of confidence in the undoubted charm and cleverness of its content. He shrugs that one off. What could he do? The publisher had to know best, after all -- they thought he was worth publishing.
After 60 films, things haven't got any better.
"You finish a movie and you think, there, you've done it, really well, or best you can. But if you watch it, you see it was just bollocks. You have to look at the discrepancy between what you hoped and imagined and the reality of yourself and all your shortcomings. You only see your own failure. I'd rather," he said, "stick with the first idea -- just have the experience of working -- and leave it at that. You've got to protect the old bravado."
It has been 10 years since Grant first thought of writing and directing his own story, and nine since he cocked the snook at Hollywood with With Nails, an acerbic account of his days in LA, for which he knew he would surely be punished. He does not expect to be invited back. "What is there now?" he said.
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