The actor Richard E Grant hated so much he wrote a movie about it: “Bitter, first-hand experience”
There are plenty of ways to deal with the lingering trauma of an unfortunate experience, and for Richard E Grant, he decided to use one of the most miserable periods of his professional life as the basis for a screenplay, and he didn’t even try to hide who the target was.
It never came close to actually being made, though, so we can only hope he found it therapeutic. The actor only has one screenwriting credit to his name in a career that dates back to the early 1980s, and it was his feature-length directorial debut, the semi-autobiographical dramedy, 2005’s Wah-Wah.
Still, that didn’t stop him from channelling his frustrations onto the page, regardless of the industry’s complete and utter lack of interest. There are enough difficult actors in Hollywood that most well-known performers are bound to encounter one eventually, and if there’s one positive, it’s that Grant got his out of the way early.
After making his big-screen bow with a career-defining performance in Withnail and I, it wasn’t long before the up-and-comer fancied taking a crack at America. After dipping his toes into Stateside waters in films like Warlock, Henry & June, and LA Story, he caught his biggest break yet when he was cast as Darwin Mayflower in 1991’s Hudson Hawk, the passion project of one of the biggest stars in town.
The driving force behind the entire project was Bruce Willis, and since he was a bankable leading man with plenty of clout, he let the creative power go to his head. The movie went drastically over budget, underperformed at the box office, won the Razzie for ‘Worst Picture’, and became a shining example of what can happen when an A-lister’s influence is to the detriment of a production.
During shooting, whispers suggested that director Michael Lehmann was only there to serve as a conduit for Willis to put his ideas across, with the Die Hard icon ghost-directing Hudson Hawk. The filmmaker didn’t exactly deny the rumours, either, admitting that “it’s hard to work with a star who’s also a producer on the movie, because he ultimately has more control than I do.”
In his memoirs, Grant reflected on the disorganised chaos of making the film, revealing that he was on the set for four months but only spent around 20 days actually filming his scenes. He shared that Willis frequently held things up so he could rewatch his performance after every single take, and described the entire ordeal as “a one-way ticket out of my mind.”
A decade and a half later, he opted to put those unwanted memories to good use. “I’m writing a film called Zeitgeist, which is about the making of a disaster movie, basically The Poseidon Adventure in outer space,” he said in 2006. “It’s about how a disaster movie becomes a real disaster, and how actors really are, as opposed to the PR version.”
That sounds vague, but Grant subsequently let the cat out of the bag. “It’s fairly and squarely based on my experience working on Hudson Hawk with Bruce Willis 16 years ago,” he added. “So from bitter, first-hand experience.”
Zeitgeist was never picked up by a studio or producer, but if the actor managed to overcome his long-simmering resentment for Willis just by writing the thing, then it wasn’t for nothing.
