28 Feb 07
Hollywood high: Chateau Marmont on Sunset Boulevard
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. He wrote the screenplay.
'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 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 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. 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 ***** in here scribbling away?'
