BRUCE ROBINSON (continued)
Although not strictly reclusive, he doesn't give too many interviews. His agreement to this one seemed to hinge on the absence of video cameras. And in an age when everyone seems desperate to be a D-list TV celebrity (or failing that, shag one) his disinclination to, as he puts it, 'show a leg' is hugely endearing.
We meet at his large, remote farmhouse in Herefordshire, where he lives with his wife and children and makes a handsome living at the typewriter as a movie screenwriter and author. After a long break from directing, he's currently collaborating with Johnny Depp on a film version of Hunter Thompson's novel The Rum Diary. But more about that later.
"It�s a shame my car's not here," he says as we climb into the family Land Cruiser. "I've got a really rare DB4 Convertible. There's only about four of them left on the planet now apparently."
The Aston Martin is 'in hospital' undergoing a £40,000-plus rebuild which sometimes wakes Bruce in a cold sweat at 3am. He bought it nearly 30 years ago as a basket case, for the bargain price of £8,000.
"It had been on blocks for 18 years, completely falling to bits. Getting it on the street cost about £15 grand," he says. It's probably overdue an overhaul. For the last decade, Bruce's DB4 has lived a hard life, garaged in an old barn, driven around 'like a van', caked in duck shit and up to its axles in mud.
"I have no desire to cruise about in a status symbol," he says, "I just like the shape and design of it. But it moves you into an arena you don't want to be in; you know, flash gits. And it's worrying to have. It's probably worth a million quid but you drive to a restaurant and leave it outside in the street. Perhaps I should ask the waiter to serve me in the car...
"When I was a kid, at school, I thought if ever I can get any car I fancied, it would be a convertible Aston Martin DB4. And I finally got one and for years and years I never really bothered with anything else, really."
This ambition was fired by the man whose name Robinson took for his most famous creation. An alcoholic upper class scoundrel, Johnny Withnall (Robinson added the 'i') was a friend of Bruce's father. Obliterated on booze, he took the young Bruce out for a spin in his Aston, stopping occasionally to fling open his door and vomit. Bruce was thrilled. "I must have been eight or ten," he recalls, "I can't remember if it was a DB4 or a DB2 but he used to drive in state of complete fucking Messerschmitt pilot danger. Completely pissed. And I really fancied all of that when I was a kid. That turned me on to Astons. But they are very beautiful.
"My Aston actually stars in Withnail," he says. "When they're going off on their journey, when he flicks the shades down and turns into the street on the right over there is the Aston. The set people were saying 'we've got to move those fucking cars' but I said it's all right, it�s a '61, it's in period. No problem. So it stayed there.
"But the weird thing about them is that they were massively underpowered. That straight six engine they used to sling in those was about 300 horsepower and it's just not enough," he continues. "Except my one is considerably sort of 'heated up'. It's got a very low-ratio back end and it whacks through the gears much, much faster than the normal version would. The car will supposedly go at 150 miles an hour but who the fuck wants that? I'd rather have it go like a rocket up to a hundred. After that it's appearances in court anyway, isn't it?"
He's a little more circumspect these days, but like both Withnall and Withnail, Bruce's own interpretation of the Highway Code has always been, at best, loose.
"All the things I used to love about driving, i.e. drinking and driving, are all illegal nowadays. It's a complete nightmare really," he complains. "I used to go around in that Aston full right up to the shoulder level with empties, bottles. And cans because I used to figure out how long a journey would take by them. It would be an eight can journey; four cans out, four cans back. And I would just throw them over my shoulder so it was like a sort of council recycling tip in the back of the car there. You can't do anything like that any more can you?"
Back in his struggling actor days, a frequently inebriated Bruce would drive his old Jaguar from the back seat with the assistance of a billiard cue for fun; a party piece. But he wouldn't dream of driving under the influence now.
"I'm talking about something I haven't done for many, many, many years," he says. "I haven't really drunk for about five years. I hit fifty and thought do you want to be a piss artist or be a writer? So I went for the latter."
The Jag, a 1964 model bought by Bruce's then girlfriend, actress Lesley-Anne Down, for £50 was the inspiration for the ruined Mk2 Withnail and Marwood drive to the Lake District to the strains of Jimi Hendrix's All Along The Watchtower.
"It was much better than the one in the film," says Bruce. "That was a complete fucking wreck. But it sort of looked the part, didn't it?"
It did. In fact the prop car was so convincingly decrepit that during filming it was pursued by real police, an episode which allegedly concluded with star Richard E Grant dumping the Jag and fleeing on foot across some flowerbeds. Withnail and Marwood's rural adventure was inspired by a real-life drive to the Lakes. But in the movie, their mouldering Jaguar gets them home. In reality, despite its superior condition, Bruce's Jag failed to make it back in one piece. It somehow ended up in a ditch. And when a farmer tried to pull it out with his tractor, it broke in half.
"That was a little tragedy, yeah," says Bruce, "The whole fucking car came off and went up the track. The guy I was with was amused and I seriously wasn't." The return journey, during which a hopelessly shitfaced Withnail takes the wheel, swerves wildly across the carriageway ('making time') and is subsequently nicked, is one of the film's funniest sequences. Robinson paid for the scenes from his own pocket, stumping up £30,000 of his £80,000 directing fee to shoot them after Handmade Films refused. He didn't get it back and hasn't received a penny from the film since.
"I've never seen so much as a birthday cake out of it," he says, "Unbelievable really."
Robinson remains fond of Withnail but would rather talk about his next project; directing Johnny Depp in an adaptation of Hunter S Thompson's early novel The Rum Diary. Bruce wrote the screenplay "Which actually, touch wood, has come out really well," he says. "I'm really pleased with it and it looks like we�re going to make it."
Hard-living literary icon Thompson blew his own brains out in 2005. Bruce suspects the suicide was the result of a combination of painful physical problems and a profound depression, a deep 'booze horror' built up over a lifetime of merciless heavy drinking.
"I don't think anybody can drink like that and stay alive," he says. "I met him in the Chateau Marmont, that big hotel on Sunset (Boulevard) and he was so fucked. It was the clichéd rig: He had 200 Dunhills, an industrial coke grinder you could mince trees with, huge pile of coke, huge bag of grass, two bottles of Chivas, and he was presiding over that with a towel over his head, sitting at the table. And in an hour and a half of being there, ostensibly to talk to him, I didn't say a word to him. Not a single word. He was just so blown, you know. When he went to the bathroom inside his suite it was like a pinball, bouncing off the walls. Christ, that's a sad sight."
We've adjourned for lunch in a half-empty Hay pub, where Bruce sips a heavily-spiced Virgin Mary and talks freely about his own troubled relationship with alcohol: "I persuaded myself I couldn't write without it. Which is complete bollocks, because if alcohol is full of words, why aren't all these old cunts in here scribbling away?"
The quiet boozer suddenly seems a lot quieter. Are we having a Penrith Tea Rooms moment? Is the proprietor about to have us ejected? Bruce doesn't give it a thought.
"I got this call out of the blue," he continues, without missing a beat, "Sounds fucking stupid in Hay-on-Wye. 'Johnny's on the line'. Johnny? 'Yeah, Johnny Depp.' Where is he? 'Oh, he's on the Caribbean on his fucking boat...
"I did know Johnny relatively well from past stuff. I'm looking forward to it. I've written some very insane scenes in there, very much in the Withnail ilk. And I think Johnny's a great actor, a sort of mix between Errol Flynn and David Niven."
The Rum Diary, due to start shooting in late 2007, will be his first directing job since the 1992 cop thriller Jennifer Eight; his first and, to date, last Hollywood movie.
"That was so horrible," he says, "Man, what a fucking nightmare. The most horrible fucking soul-destroying experience on every fucking level. It was actually that film that destroyed me in that part of my life."
Fraught with battles with interfering studio execs, Jennifer Eight was a traumatic time for Bruce. His research involved a terrifying Californian road trip in a Sixties Mustang convertible, riding shotgun with a real-life psycho cop who once threatened to kill him. And stress levels were so high on set that, at one point he puked over the dash of his car en route to the studio, 'spewing over the speedometer' from sheer mental and physical exhaustion. But living in L.A. did at least give Bruce the opportunity to indulge his taste for classic Americana. He bought a white whale of a convertible, a seven-litre Sixties Ford Galaxie, and developed a fascination with souped-up muscle cars with 1,000bhp blown Offenhauser race engines as ludicrously powerful as a Bugatti Veyron.
"I've always wanted to have 'Offenhauser' stuck on the back of the Aston. It sounds wonderful doesn't it?" he grins with a hint of mischief, "A tiny plate, very discrete..."
©Richard Fleury 2007. A version of this story appeared originally on the 4Car website