Originally written for Little White Lies in November 2011. Read the original article here.

Cult icon Bruce Robinson has been notably absent from filmmaking for an agonising 19 years since his last fateful dalliance with Hollywood left him disillusioned by the industry altogether. The Withnail & I director makes his highly anticipated return this week with a sterling adaptation of Hunter S Thompson’s drunken opus The Rum Diary, once again featuring a stand-out performance from Johnny Depp as the Gonzo mastermind’s deranged alter ego. I caught up with Robinson to discuss his legacy.

You’ve been doing press for a while now haven’t you? How’s it been going so far?

We’ve just come back from America where we’ve been doing this every day for a month. San Francisco, Austen, New York, Berkeley. It’s enervating. I’m not used to doing it. Johnny lives his life like this. I don’t know how he does it.

Obviously the strongest link between Withnail & I and The Rum Diary is probably alcohol, but when it came to adapting Hunter’s book did kind of expect people to have preconceptions because of your previous work?

Well I suppose to a degree they do. I mean I read bits and pieces in the newspaper occasionally about myself and I’m always sort of portrayed as the Hunter S Thompson of Hay-on-Wye, you know, which is basically a two thousand person town with a clock tower in it. So the alcohol, yeah, I got a reputation for alcohol, partly justified and partly not. A lot of it is bullshit, but yes, I do like red wine. It’s very tasty.

You recently described yourself in an interview as being full of rage.

Yeah.

As a writer and a filmmaker how important do you feel it is for you to be able to channel that rage? Do you need that rage?

Well yeah, I do in a sense. I’m quite a political person and it’s one of the things that will get me out of bed at six in the morning. I mean writing, as anyone who writes knows, is an incredibly disciplined job. It’s not like glug, glug, glug and I’ll type it with the end of my nose when I feel like it. It’s a very disciplined job. But I am full of rage about certain things in the society that I would love to change but can’t and it’s a great motor to be angry about things.

I’m a very pacifistic person though. The idea of violence is abhorrent to me. I wrote a line once for a screenplay, High Rise, a JG Ballard book and the line is ‘There’s no better way to say I hate you than a bayonet in the gut and you don’t need words for that’. But I don’t like bayonets in the gut and I think that words are never going to change anything. Science changes things. But hopefully you can use them as an antidote to the supine quality of our country at the moment. We are so supine now, the British, we just put up with anything. I don’t understand quite why. But yeah, to answer the question, anger gets me out of bed.

You’ve drawn quite heavily on your own personal experiences which have been quite harrowing. Do you find it cathartic writing about those experiences?

Yeah in a sense I think that anything anyone writes, you write from inside. I don’t write Teletubbies because I don’t feel like a Teletubby. But all of the things that have happened to me in my life do somehow register somewhere and they come back in my work disguised as something else. And someone said that Johnny had brought me out of retirement, which in terms of cinema is very true, but I write seven days a week. None of it gets read or published or turned in to films, but it doesn’t mean I’m not doing it. I have to. It’s part of me.

How proud are you that 25 years later something so personal to you as Withnail & I is still revered by multiple generations?

It’s not so much proud I don’t think. Proud wouldn’t be the word. I’m bemused by it and of course terribly pleased by it because in terms of it being a personal film, that was my life. I lived that. And when I was living that with one light bulb, travelling around the house with no furniture and having just the one light bulb so that if I was upstairs I’d have to take the bulb upstairs and if I was downstairs I’d have to take it downstairs, to have experienced and lived through that and then written Withnail & I as a novel on this kitchen table, freezing cold in Camden town: ‘Is it a packet of fags or is it fish and chips?’ Well it was a packet of fags of course. And to have written that and for people to be able to relate to that even, as you say, 25 years later is fab. But I never had any idea that Withnail & I was going to be that or that it was going to last like that or that it was going to kind of enter in to the vernacular of us. I heard someone on the radio say ‘Oh, he’s a very Withnailian character’ and that’s fantastic to hear things like that.

So you still find it gratifying then?

I hadn’t seen the film for 10 years and my kid and I, who’s 17, my boy, he came back from school and he said ‘Oh, my friends at school have been talking about Withnail & I,’ which he knew was something I’d done. ‘Can we have a look at it?’ And so we sat in front of the TV with a couple of beers and watched it. And it hasn’t aged. That’s an accident, that’s not design. I didn’t make it thinking ‘I’m going to make a film that won’t age,’ but it hasn’t aged and that’s the thing that surprises me about it.