A second chance at the past

London — WHEN Richard E. Grant set out to write his first screenplay -- drawn from a grueling-yet-exhilarating boyhood in the then-British colony of Swaziland -- he knew the story of his parents’ dysfunctional marriage had jaw-dropping elements. But would it conform to the rules of movie narrative?

“Real life doesn’t follow a three-act structure,” the 49-year-old actor said recently over lunch in a southwest London gastro-pub. “But I knew that witnessing my mother’s adultery in the front seat of the car at age 10 was the beginning, my father trying to blow my brains out in a drunken rage was the middle, and his bizarre funeral was the end.”

His father’s actual burial, in which an evangelicized Swazi priest jumped into the grave to try to raise his father from the dead, ultimately proved too weird for audiences -- it’s now a quietly sad coda -- but the other two scenes are integral parts of the seriocomic “Wah-Wah,” which Grant directed two years ago in Swaziland. It stars Gabriel Byrne and Miranda Richardson as the parents, Nicholas Hoult as Grant’s young alter-ego, Ralph, and Emily Watson as Ralph’s American stepmom, whose dismissive term for posh, chirpy Britishisms supplies the title. The film opened Friday in L.A.

It took Grant more than half a decade to realize his bittersweet coming-of-age tale. When asked what kept him going through up-and-down financing, a casting slog, location shooting and fighting to keep the tone he wanted, Grant blurts out, “Ignorance. Because you don’t know when you begin it, that it’s going to go on that long.”

Naturally, his 20 years of experience watching directors work -- from Bruce Robinson on Grant’s cult-hit breakthrough “Withnail & I” through Martin Scorsese (“The Age of Innocence”) and Jane Campion (“The Portrait of a Lady”) -- gave him a heads-up in dealing with crises, and on a tenuously financed, $7-million indie, they crop up easily.

Robert Altman in particular -- Grant’s director on “The Player” and “Gosford Park” -- was inspiration when a Swazi government minister told Grant mere days before the start of filming that he didn’t have the necessary work permits, threatening to derail the entire project. “When Jude Law withdrew from ‘Gosford Park’ five weeks before we started shooting, all the money collapsed,” recalls Grant. “Altman didn’t tell anybody, kept papering up the cracks, and the thing got refinanced with Ryan Philippe at the last minute. I thought, ‘I just have to try to do the same, tell people it’s going to happen.’ And we got a stay of execution. If you believe it enough, you sort of will it to happen somehow.”

Grant could also attribute his problem-solving strength to his own experience overcoming the shame of his father’s addiction and mother’s infidelity. Indeed, “Wah-Wah” grew out of therapy Grant began at 42, after he became so depressed one day that he couldn’t get out of bed. Upon learning that he was the same age his father, Henrik, had been when he’d been cuckolded and lost his colonial standing as independence neared, and that Grant was then the same age, 10, as his own daughter, Olivia, he believed he’d reached a “subliminal meltdown” point about his childhood issues.

Psychoanalysis led to a rapprochement with his mother. “After a lot of cajoling, she finally wrote to me from Africa and explained what it was like to be a young, frustrated, not-allowed-to-work wife of a colonial grandee in the ‘60s. It was a voice I’d never heard before,” says Grant. “I met up with her, and 35 years of misunderstanding and hatred and enmity was completely obliterated when she asked me for forgiveness. She just broke down.”

As for capturing on film the landscape -- and often the exact spots -- where he grew up, Grant is especially proud, but it’s been hard to accept how AIDS-ravaged Swaziland has become. “It’s hidden away, but the country is 58% HIV-positive, the highest for a country in the world,” says Grant, who went to university in Cape Town, South Africa, before moving to London in the early ‘80s. “The king was very keen we show the country as favorably as possible, but I said to him, ‘My film is not about Swaziland now, it’s the end of the ‘60s.’ ”

The hurdle now is for movie audiences to do some accepting of their own. Not just the exoticism of life in the colonial outpost of an empire on life support, but that a scary-drunk father and a callously philandering mother can -- thanks to “Wah-Wah’s” lighter moments -- be sympathetic figures. “My intention was to show as much as possible how and why people do what they do,” Grant explains, citing the film’s emphasis on how obliterated the dad feels about his personal and professional turmoil. “If you can understand that, people will go along with almost anything.”

Of course, Grant is speaking the language of one who’s had his own breakthrough, which for him is no wah-wah.

Had he made this movie 10 years ago, he notes, his story might have become “a slash-fest.” But he sounds relieved “Wah-Wah” isn’t, he says, “like so many movies where ‘this is the bad guy, this is the bad woman.’ It would have been so lopsidedly without any compassion or forgiveness.”