"Famous people running away from explosions. That's it. They call it production values. Audiences will queue round the block to see an unimaginably highly-paid film star running away from a fantastically expensive explosion. They think it's their money's worth. I despair that's what people have to do."
It does, however, explain why so many "thesps," as Grant insists on calling his fellow actors, move away from the obscenely big-bucks industry and into television and small production companies -- "to enact being human beings instead of cartoon characters leaping from implo-ding buildings."
Somewhere back in Grant's paternal ancestry, there were men who were Dutch or Hungarian and certainly Afrikaner. Yet he feels his father was an Englishman, working for the British government, and he, himself, is a Swazi who happens also to be English. Now living in Surrey, south of London, a brisk walk from where we sit, he will always classify himself as an immigrant.
He used to wear two watches, one telling Greenwich Mean Time, the other the time of day in Swaziland. Swaziland was his home. Where he was born. Where he grew up and where his heart is. When called upon to sing at auditions, he would stand solemnly and belt out the Swazi national anthem. He didn't mean to be funny.
He patently enjoys talking about his homeland. The singular beauty of its landscape, what he refers to as the serenity of the indigenous population, the nefarious eccentricities of the European ruling class.
"Swaziland is a small part of south-east Africa, the last country in the continent to gain its independence," he said, sounding rather as one of his father's kindly schoolmasters must have sounded as he stood by a British government-issue blackboard in front of a crowd of happy Swazi schoolkids.
Grant got permission to film in his country, granted by the King of Swaziland, and got together a star cast (Gabriel Byrne, Julie Walters, Miranda Richardson, Emily Watson, Celia Imrie) last June. It took him seven weeks to make his movie.
If Wah-Wah was a self-indulgence in its making, the finished product is a prime example of a genre rarely, if ever, attempted by British or American film-makers: a child's experience, impeccably observed through the narrow lens of the child's perspective.
We chatted on about the film for a while: how he called it Wah-Wah because that was how his dad's second wife described the conversational tone of colonialists at their leisure; the country club's choice of Camelot for the am-dram treat for Princess Margaret's official visit to mark Independence Day; and how, driven by lack of white talent to include a black man in their production, they scrupulously whited-up his face with plimsoll cleaner so Margaret wouldn't notice. Even so, she made her excuses and left in the interval. Said she wasn't feeling well, apparently. It gradually emerged, to my astonishment, that give or take the odd tinkering with the timescale, Wah-Wah is not just true, but literally true, frame by frame.
`Wah-Wah' opens the Edinburgh
International Film Festival on Aug. 17.
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