The Book Of David

It’s Monday morning in the Morrison Hotel, and David Thewlis looks elegantly dishevelled in a way that only distinguished character actors can seem to carry off. Tall and gangly, with scarecrow hair and a scrub of beard, and wearing an ethnic-style necklace made of what looks like wooden beads, the 44-year old actor and writer is jet-lagged and a tad frazzled from single-handedly trying to amuse his two-year-old daughter with actress Anna Friel, Gracie, for the duration of a flight back from LA.

Fatherhood, he says, has made him less nihilistic, less cynical, less disappointed. Certainly Thewlis is a pleasure to interview, possessing an infectiously raspy laugh, firing off juicy anecdotes in an incredulous tone that seems to say, “Can you believe this stuff?”
He’s led a very interesting life. Born in Blackpool, Lancashire in 1963, Thewlis spent his teenage years writing and performing songs with punk-influenced bands like QED and Door 66 before attending the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, from which he graduated in 1985. His first screen role was a small part in Dennis Potter’s mini-series The Singing Detective in 1986, now regarded as one of the most innovative TV dramas in history, but his film breakthrough was as the motormouthed and misanthropic manic street preacher Johnny in Mike Leigh’s astonishing 1993 film Naked, a tour de force that won him a slew of London and New York critics’ awards, plus Best Actor at Cannes. Ever since, he’s been in demand with auteurs such as Bernardo Bertolucci (Besieged), the Coen Brothers (The Big Lebowski), Ridley Scott (Kingdom Of Heaven) and Terrence Malick (The New World), not to mention occupying major roles in Restoration, Dragonheart and Seven Years In Tibet opposite Brad Pitt.
However, we’re here not to discuss Thewlis’s film work, but his first novel The Late Hector Kipling, a first person narrative of a London art star that is by turns caustic and humane, its tone pitched in the Beckett/O’Brien-inhabited netherzone between existentialism and comedy.
Thewlis, it’s clear, is no dilettante trying his hand at thinly veiled autobiography or tarted-up journal entries. He grafted and crafted his way through a decade-long writer’s apprenticeship, laboriously perfecting a technique to match his raw ideas, writing and rewriting short stories and drafts of novels, some aborted, some filed away for further use, until he came up with Hector.
“The compulsion has always been there,” he explains. “Ever since I was a teenager I always wanted to write books. I read seriously and I read a lot, and I used to write songs and poetry. I’m 44 now so I was about 13 when punk came along, and everyone was in a band then. In Blackpool there were lots of venues to play. If you knew anyone with a guest house or a hotel, that was a venue. You’d get up in front of the pensioners, ’cos it was all fixed up for the little bands that used to play, they usually had drum kits and PAs, so you had a lot of young lads going, ‘I’ve learned D and A,’ and plugging in. But for me, that’s where I first started writing songs. Like rap is now: that’s how you’re introduced to poetry without it being wanky. Whereas if you’re a schoolboy writing about flowers and clouds, that’s not cool.”
Music, Thewlis says, provided him with a gateway to literature. One thinks of MacGowan and Behan, Waits and the Beats, or Patti Smith, citing Rimbaud as a proto-punk figure. Curiously, Thewlis played Paul Verlaine to Leonardio DiCaprio’s Arthur Rimbaud in Agnieszka Holland’s largely overlooked Total Eclipse in 1995.
“I kind of like that film, although it got really slammed,” he says. “He (DiCaprio) was great in Gilbert Grape, that’s what I watched when I was offered the film. It all looked good on paper. I just think it suffers a bit from Leo doing an American accent and the French girls were French and I was doing a British accent, but the director was this Polish woman and she couldn’t hear what the fuck was going on. I like it, but that’s what I hear when I see the film. And I’m the envy of every 14-year-old girl: I got sodomised by Leo! All these girls going, ‘Oh my god, you kissed him!’ It was like kissing Bart Simpson at the time.”
Having played Verlaine, it was soon after that Thewlis began seriously applying himself as a prose writer.
“I got into writing short stories,” he says, “writing seriously and taking care with them and finishing them and rewriting them, and thinking, ‘I could do this.’ And what happened was I did an interview for the Sunday Times years ago, and the guy doing the interview asked me what my plans were for the future, and I said, ‘Well, before I’m 40 I’d like to have written a novel.’ So the journalist put it in the magazine, and on the Monday I got all these calls from various agents. I got a great literary agent, and I was very chuffed and went around telling everyone ‘cos it sounded posh. And nothing happened for a few weeks until I rang him and said, ‘Do you want to see something I’ve written, by the way, seeing as you’re my literary agent?!’ So I gave him a story I’d written about this film I’d done, I don’t know if you ever saw it or heard of it, The Island Of Doctor Moreau.”
Yes, indeed. Marlon Brando, Val Kilmer and John Frankenheimer at odds in one of the bizarrest film shoots this side of Apocalypse Now. I believe is the appropriate term is ‘camp classic’.
“Yeah, exactly. I’d been asked to write various articles about what a disaster it was in the making for Time Out and The Guardian, but it sounded like whingeing, like I was paid a lot of money to go to Australia and make this film with Marlon Brando, and it sounded pathetic. So I rang them and said, ‘Listen I’m not going to write an article, I don’t want to publicly talk about this.’ But it was weird, ’cos then I started writing it for myself, in a cathartic form, just as a piece of fiction, third person, past tense, making Frankenheimer the director the main character. And I didn’t get up from the desk for two or three days, and it had turned into about a 60-page short story.
“So I gave my agent this, and he sent it to various people, Picador, Penguin, Faber & Faber, they all really liked it. And he sat me down in front of all of them and they were like, ‘Can you turn this into a novel? It’s fantastic.’ And I said, ‘Well I can’t really, because it’s all true!’ And they were like, ‘No, no, no, surely it can’t be, this bit on page 15 where Marlon Brando orders a latex dolphin with his head on it that he wants to give birth to in the movie?’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, that happened!’ And they go, ‘Well, what about this bit where the director has been fired and is now living in the rain forest and he visits the set with a flame thrower, dressed as a monkey?’ ‘Yeah, that’s true!’
“And a lot of it was kind of libelous, not against Marlon or Val so much, but against Frankenheimer particularly. And they ran it through their legal department to see if I could maybe just change the names and a few details, but it was still going to be obvious that it was a monster movie set in Australia from the point of view of a British actor. And for the point of the story, the Brando character had to be Brando, the biggest movie actor that ever lived, for the comedy of it. So I wasn’t sure I wanted to trash these people publicly in a novel.
“So from there they said, ‘Well, you’re a good writer,’ and I said, ‘Well, I’ve got some other ideas,’ and that’s how it came about.”
Certainly, one can sense something of Beckett’s mad mutterers in Thewlis’s role as Johnny in Naked. That film, like most Mike Leigh projects, evolved through a long process of workshopping and improvisational rehearsal sessions, rather than working from a script.
“There isn’t a finished script ever with Mike,” Thewlis says. “You work with Mike on a character based on someone real, who is not you. It’s an identifiable character who I knew.”
Several of the reviews at the time mentioned Mark E Smith.
“I used to listen to The Fall for research, but it was based on someone you wouldn’t know. I won’t say his name, ‘cos he’d kill me if he ever found out. And Mike has this policy of never mentioning who it was. But it’s based very closely on these people, it’s not an impersonation of them, but every time you’re faced with a dilemma in an improvisation, you go, ‘What would he do? Would he stay or go?’
“I’d be out in town in character, which Mike would often send you off to do, you’d spend four hours wandering around London on your own, not as yourself at all, doing things you would not normally do, causing scenes you would not normally cause, being braver than your natural self, standing in the street and shouting like a maniac but getting away with it because you don’t have your inhibitions ‘cos you’re going, ‘It’s not me.’
“And you’re spending more of your waking hours as this character than as yourself, so it becomes quite overwhelming. I’d have a Hare Krishna come up to me wanting to have a word, and whereas I’d normally be, ‘I haven’t got the time mate,’ when I was him I was like, ‘Yeah come on, let’s have a fucking word! I’ll have a very big word wiv ya! Do you wanna go for a coffee? How long have you got?’ And people handing out leaflets, I’d talk to every one of them, I’d talk to down-and-outs, I’d talk to policemen, anyone who wanted to fucking talk, I’d talk to them.”
Did he absorb any of that role into his own character afterwards?
“Not so much afterwards…well, maybe in the long term it did make me a little more confident, because once you’ve stood in the middle of the street and shouted, you do lose certain inhibitions I guess. And there’s still a bookshop in Marylebone High Street in London I can’t ever go into. I think I fucking wrecked it, I flipped out in there, I cleared the shelves."
Thewlis has had the good fortune to work with a quite remarkable list of actors and directors.
“Bertolucci, the Coen Brothers, Ridley Scott,” he says. “None of them ever like what you expect until you meet them. I mean, Terrence Malick is a total surprise. He’s quite self-effacing and quite bumbling and slow and doesn’t come over as a great genius. Takes forever to say something. Totally, entirely lovable. Bertolucci doesn’t come over as an intellectual but a much more emotional man. The first time he had me and Thandie Newton on set he just cried at our meeting, at the read-through. He’s like, ‘I’m so…to have you here at last in my room, I’m so (sniff), I think for so long on this.’ Me and Thandie were looking at each other! A very, very lovely man.
“But then John Frankenheimer on Dr Moreau, he’d done The Manchurian Candidate and The Birdman Of Alcatraz and all these other films, he was quite an awful tyrant, a really unpleasant figure, I really hated him. I’ve said that before in the press, and he’s dead now anyway, so…he was your worst idea of a director, almost like a Monty Python figure, just short of the bullhorn and the whip. He would turn up in, like, a safari suit. He was like a Fast Show character. He made certainly every woman on the set break down in tears at some point, and several of the men. People just walked off the picture, and he just lost control of the thing.”
To complicate matters, Thewlis, the lucky bugger, was squiring his co-star Fairuza Balk at the time.
“Yeah, that’s another thing that was fucking confusing me. Not to denigrate Fairuza, but it was not a good idea at that time, it just added to the chaos. ‘That’s all going off over there – why don’t me and you start fuckin’ and really get this thing inflamed!’ (laughs) It really was like that. And in the middle of it I went horse riding with Fairuza one day and I broke my leg. So here I was in the middle of it, just thinking, ‘I am having a breakdown, this has all gone horribly wrong.’”
He’s well over it now. Thewlis is intent on developing the germ of his second novel as soon as possible. He will, he hopes, avoid the mistake he made first time round, writing reams of observational material longhand in a notebook, later struggling to shoehorn those passages into a narrative. This time he’s determined to avoid writing anything that doesn’t push the story forward.
“I was very isolated when I wrote the first one,” he recalls. “I was not in a particularly good place, I was a little pissed off with the way my life had gone in terms of relationships. I was living on my own at the time, thankfully, ‘cos I’d just walked out of a relationship that was awful. Just after I left Dublin actually, I’d just been making Endgame, which was all about, ‘I’ll go now. I’m gonna leave, I’m gonna leave.’ On the last day of shooting, the woman in question came to visit me and I realised here in Dublin that I just had to get away from her. We’d had another argument and another argument and another argument and we went back to London and something happened that I don’t want to go into, but it was very badly behaved of her, and I walked out about three days after coming back from Dublin.
“And eventually I saw a cut of Endgame, and (laughs) it was so in my head, right down to the last shot where he’s got his hat and coat on, and he’s like, ‘I’m leaving,’ and he can never leave. And I felt like this with the relationship with this woman: ‘I’ll leave you. I will so leave you.’”
There’s no doubt about it, it’s downright eerie how art can be precognitive. Rimbaud once said, “In everything any man wrote...is contained...the allegorical idea of his own future life, as the acorn contains the oak.”
“I don’t know what the logical explanation for that is,” Thewlis says, “but the acting, when I’m in something, I find there’s often repercussions in the outside world. Or sometimes your relationship with the other actors later on becomes similar to the relationship in the film. That’s the best example I can think of, in Endgame, that was so what was happening in my life right then. Walking away from this tyrant, but never being able to do it. It just hit me when I arrived here this morning to Dublin, ‘cos I thought, ‘When was the last time I was here? It was nine years ago and I was doing Endgame. And why is that significant? Cos that fuckin’ bitch came over!’ And that was when I decided to leave her. I didn’t associate it with this mantra of, ‘I’ll leave you, I’ll leave you, I’ll leave you,’ but when I saw the finished film I thought, ‘That was the story of our relationship,’ even though it was about a man and his father. And again, apocalyptic and dreadful and blind and crippled. It presented the two year relationship I’d just had as the story of Endgame. So, if I shoot a room full of critics in a few years…” (laughs)
Film critics or book critics?
“Oh, just the whole fucking lot of them!”

The Late Hector Kipling is published in hardback by Picador