FILM

The story of drug dealer extraordinaire Howard Marks is a familiar one. So why has it taken so long for ‘Mr Nice’ to be made into a movie? Because of the climate of fear at the BBC, explains director Bernard Rose. Robin Askew is on Rizla duty.

So you want to make a film about the nation’s most famously lovable dope dealer, who has spent much of his adult life getting high on his own supply. Just one problem: the smoking ban, which makes it illegal to smoke in the workplace. For those who toil in the film industry, the set is their workplace. “We had a whole team of special effects people who were faking it, I said with a straight face,” sniggers director Bernard Rose. “I’m actually telling you 100% the truth here,” he adds, recovering himself. “We didn’t flout the law. We were actually very careful to obey it.” More giggles. “We did all the smoking stuff in Spain, where it’s legal.”

The film is ‘Mr Nice’, based on Howard Marks’s autobiography of the same title, which tells the extraordinary and highly entertaining story of how this boy from a small Welsh coal-mining village won a place at Oxford and went on to import enough marijuana to get the entire nation high, enlisting the help of the IRA and being recruited as a spy by MI6 along the way. This was the bestselling non-fiction book of 1997. The film rights were swiftly snapped up by the BBC, where the project remained in limbo.

“Actually, I didn’t know anything about Howard Marks,” confesses Rose. “I was sent the book by the BBC in 2003 and really enjoyed it. I think it was good that that was my first exposure to it, because I could see that it was a movie. I then went to see Howard do one of his stage shows. In that period, he used to perform sections of the book and you could see how laugh-out-loud funny it was. Reading the book, it wasn’t necessarily obvious how good the jokes were.”

Various writers had a bash at a screenplay, but nobody could get it right. So Rose decided to have a go himself and quickly identified the problem with previous versions “They were very unsuccessful because people had imposed their stamp on it. And I thought you have to let Howard speak in his own voice, because that’s what the charm of it is. There’s no point in trying to stifle that.”

Next problem: BBC timidity. Rose gives credit to the creative types for nurturing the project, but hatches were being battened down in the wake of ‘Sachsgate’. “At the point where we delivered the screenplay and said ‘OK, we want to proceed to production now’, the lawyers in their libel department just couldn’t countenance it. We had a lot of trouble getting libel insurance anyway, but they wouldn’t go anywhere near it. The BBC is subject to all sorts of pressure that an independent producer isn’t. At the time when we made this, it was in an incredible period of fear.”

With independent finance conjured up by Luc (son of Nic) Roeg, the production finally got into gear. There was never any doubt about who would play the lead, as Rose had written the screenplay specifically for Marks’s pal and fellow Welshman Rhys Ifans. But in addition to this being the director’s most high-profile, mainstream production in decades, it was also the first time he’d made a film about a living person. Any problems over creative control there?

“Of course that has its problems. But on the other hand it was based on his text, so in a sense the film is Howard’s version of events. I let Howard be as involved as he wanted to be, but Howard’s a very kind of, erm, laid-back person. That’s the only way you can really describe him. He’s not somebody who would impose his view on anything. He came down to the set a few times – I think because he liked hanging out as much as anything. When we were in Wales and we were shooting some of the stuff from his childhood, it was very nostalgic for him. I remember saying to him a couple of times, ‘Is this as it was, Howard?’ And he’d say [Welsh lilt] ‘Ooh, it’s uncanny. It’s exactly as it was. Exactly.’ Then we’d go somewhere else and I’d go, ‘How is this?’ and he’d say, ‘You know, it’s completely uncanny’. This went on for a while until I said, ‘You can’t remember anything can you, Howard? ‘Not a fucking thing,’ he replied.

“I think Howard understood that the only way it could function as a film was to take an objective view. There are key differences between the film and the book, if you actually analyse it, in that there are things that Howard glosses over in the book because he’s writing in the first person. Ultimately, there are two interwoven stories in the film. One is the story of him as a dealer and the second is the progress of his addiction. That’s something that Howard doesn’t talk about in the book, but in the film it’s kind of obvious.”

Establishing the right tone must have been a tricky business. Marks’s charm as a raconteur renders many of his experiences hilarious, but there are some pretty dark twists and turns to the story, notably when he gets banged up. “What happens to him to begin with is all very funny. It works for him and he’s having a great time. But it gets to the point where frankly it’s not. It causes a lot of chaos in his family and he and they end up suffering horribly for it,” acknowledges Rose. “To have ignored that in the film would have not been to do it justice. If you ended the film at the point where he was at the Old Bailey, then it would be a romp. But obviously the film really darkens after that.”

To say Rose’s career has been a tad eclectic wouldn’t be doing it justice either. After serving an apprenticeship on The Muppet Show (no, really), he made his name with the stylish arthouse fantasy-horror flick ‘Paperhouse’ back in 1988. He also gave us the fabulously overblown Beethoven biopic ‘Immortal Beloved’ and has indulged his Tolstoy obsession with adaptations of ‘Anna Karenina’ and, more recently, ‘The Kreutzer Sonata’. Most significantly, 2000’s splendid ‘ivans xtc’ (a loose adaptation of Tolstoy’s ‘The Death of Ivan Ilych’, fact fans) seemed to be both a Hollywood bridge-burning exercise, being based transparently on the true story of powerful Tinseltown agent Jay Moloney, and the point at which Rose turned his back on conventional film-making in favour of emergent digital technology - until ‘Mr Nice’ brought him back into the mainstream. “That was the tipping point,” he agrees. “I’m planning to make some more movies like that, but it doesn’t mean I don’t want to make some other stuff too - and do some more mainstream and bigger budget stuff. I think the beauty of the equipment now is that if you feel like going and doing your own little movie, you can just go do it. You don’t have to make a big deal out of it.”

Although ‘Mr Nice’ is constructed in a fairly conventional fashion, Rose contends that the experience of learning how to shoot and cut digital material has inevitably fed into his 35mm work. He’s also made some interesting stylistic decisions, such as having actors performing in front of undisguised archive footage. Presumably this was for budgetary reasons. “No, it actually wasn’t cheap to do,” he corrects me. “It was always planned to do it like that, because what I really wanted to avoid was having captions telling you what year you’re in and where you are. The film doesn’t have a single caption in it the entire way through. There were a lot of different places and a lot of different eras, so I had to find a different way of telling you where you were and what year it is. The way to tell people where they are is to show landmarks. But obviously landmarks in period films are really hard to do without using the footage, which is what we did. In terms of the year, it was to do with the texture of the film. We know what the 60s and 70s look like in terms of the films of that period, so I tried to make it look like the film changed texture with the different years. If you look at the stuff from the 80s and the stuff from the 60s in the film, it’s radically different. So it has a really important narrative function.”

‘Mr Nice’ certainly succeeds in portraying the highs and lows of illicit drug use. But what of Howard Marks’s unwavering anti-prohibition stance? Is that something the director endorses? “I think I do actually, to be honest with you,” he says after a pause. “I think it’s pretty obvious that prohibition has failed. The only intelligent thing from every point of view – from a law enforcement point of view, from a taxation point of view, from a public safety point of view – would be to legalise drugs. If you’re going to legalise one drug, it really means legalising the lot. Let’s face it: most of the most dangerous drugs now are legal. If you look at all the recent celebrity deaths, they’ve all been drugs prescribed by doctors, from Michael Jackson to Heath Ledger to that poor girl who was in ‘8 Mile’ [that’ll be Brittany Murphy]. A lot of these drugs that doctors dish out like confetti are derivatives of illegal drugs. Once they’re given a fancy name they’re dissociated from their street origins, but it’s the same stuff.

“Then of course you have the second problem, which Howard doesn’t often talk about, which is the issue of addiction. If you were to ask me, on a personal level, do I think smoking marijuana is a good idea, I have to say no, it’s really not. It’s a terrible idea. I think it fucks you up, especially if you smoke it every day. It’s highly detrimental to your health and your mental health. But I still don’t think it should be illegal because there are plenty of things that you could say the same about, notably alcohol and cigarettes and all the legal drugs that anyone can get a prescription for.”

'MR. NICE' OPENED ON FRI 8 OCT. FOR REVIEW, CLICK HERE.
 

Copyright Robin Askew 2010 

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