The Rum Diary
A Rum Do
by James Mottram
Living Abroad Magazine
December 2011
Bruce Robinson, who directed Johnny Depp in The Rum Diary, talks work, Withnail and falling off the wagon on Puerto Rico.
It’s a typically
misty
English November
day, and Bruce Robinson is clearly longing for the balmy temperatures
of Puerto Rico. “It was fantastic,” he enthuses, dreamily. “A fantastic
country.”
On and off, he spent nine months there preparing and shooting his new
film, The Rum Diary, a comic odyssey starring
Johnny
Depp as a boozy journalist who arrives in the Caribbean island’s
capital San Juan
in 1960 to land himself a job on a crumbling English language newspaper.
Adapted by Robinson from
the Hunter S. Thompson novel, it marks the 65-year-old British
director’s first
film in almost twenty years. His last effort, the 1992 thriller Jennifer
8, was mangled so badly by the studio
that Robinson swore he’d never direct again. And he didn’t, until
Depp—a huge fan
of cult comedy Withnail and I, Robinson’s
1987 debut about two out-of-work actors—came calling. 
First asking him
to write
the screenplay, he then lured him into going behind the camera. “He’s
very persuasive.
The very fact that he is who he is, I just thought ‘Why not? What have
I got to
lose?’”
A former actor himself, Robinson’s respect and admiration for his star is genuine. “He’s a total, true artist is Mr Depp. And sometimes he takes your breath away. He’s a fabulous painter. He can play rock on a guitar as well as anyone in any band I’ve ever known. He’s a terrific actor. He can write. Christ, when everyone was standing in line in front of God, he was called forward. He really is an incredibly talented man—it just oozes out of the bastard. He’s been given a multiplicity of gifts. And when he said, ‘Will you have a go at directing it?’ It was ‘For you, yes.’ I like him enormously.”
So how did the locals
react to see the Pirates of the Caribbean
star? Were they amazed? “Everyone’s amazed to see Johnny Depp! You
don’t need to
go abroad to get people going nuts when he’s about. I’m not a
superstar, so I don’t
pay much cognizance to all of that. But wherever Johnny is,
there’s
always a big
crowd of people wanting the photographs, the handshakes and autographs,
the whole
thing. He’s got an enormous fanbase. But while everybody else couldn’t
wait to go
home for the day, Johnny—very graciously—always waited around as long
as was necessary
to talk to the fans.”
While Thompson’s book
is set in Puerto Rico, it didn’t make the island an automatic choice to
shoot on. “We scouted
places in Mexico that were very
beautiful,” Robinson remembers. “It’s not my call this, but you have to
weigh up
security issues as far as Johnny is concerned. And is Mexico as safe as
Puerto Rico?
I don’t know . . . but probably not.” 
This, plus the fact that shooting
there would
add a level of authenticity—“if you’re in the right place, the extras
are going
to look right”—meant that Robinson had little choice but to leave his
farmhouse
in Herefordshire for the Caribbean.
Unsurprisingly, he loved living and working there. “It’s a very friendly place on all levels. The people, the weather, which is usually very, very good there . . . it’s like California in the summer, with salty breezes around it. It rains a bit but it’s pretty good. It’s a delicious place to be, I think. I wouldn’t mind going there again.” Did he not find the heat unbearable? “Not for me, I didn’t. I really love hot places. I never found it really unbearable. At night sometimes, it would be very, very hot. And if you’re shooting all night, that does get a bit stiff.”
Still, it was a “tough
shoot”, if only because Robinson was on the go from 5am until 11pm, six
days a week
for almost two months. “But because it was Johnny’s shoot, Johnny’s
film, and he
was very happy with everything we were doing, it meant that it was a
bit of a joy,”
he adds. “There were a few days when I sat in the trailer and went ‘Oh,
my God,
what am I doing?’ But very few out of fifty
days—maybe two or
three—would I think
‘I’ve been sucked back in this and I don’t want to do this.’”
The only problem, it
seems, was the wine. “I have to say one of the things about Puerto
Rico, because
it is hot and it’s an island so everything is imported, is that the
wine doesn’t
travel too well there,” laments Robinson. 
And as the man who created
that great
drunk, Withnail, demanding “the finest wines known to humanity”, this
was an issue.
Luckily, his drinking partner came with provisions. “Johnny’s always
got first-rate
wine. He’s very interested in high-quality French wine. So very often,
when we were
going out to dinner, he’d bring his own.”
Prior to starting The Rum Diary, Robinson had been sober for six-and-a-half years, but making a comedy about booze-loving newspaper hacks, he just couldn’t help himself. “The sober side of my head was saying ‘Don’t go there’ and the creative side of my head was saying ‘You can’t write it if you don’t.’ So I drank medicinal quantities of wine while I was writing it.” He’s making no apologies, though.
“If you listen to Beethoven
or Tchaikovsky with your ears, and you look at Goya and Leonardo
DaVinci with your
eyes, why can’t you have art in your mouth? 
Some of those wines that
I’m extremely
fond of are like an art form, so therefore I’m not going to necessarily
cut them
out of my life.”
Revitalized by The Rum Diary, Robinson is now readying himself to shoot his 1998 semi-autobiographical novel The Peculiar Memories of Thomas Penman next year, in the slightly less glamorous locales of London and Kent. But would he work in Puerto Rico again? “I think the likelihood of going there to work on another film is zero,” he says, if only because the chances of setting another movie there are slim. “But if I was going to the Caribbean, Puerto Rico would certainly be around the top of the list of places to re-visit.”
The Rum Diary is in cinemas now.