The Whole Nine Yards

London Evening Standard, Arts
Friday, May 19, 2000

HOW TO MAKE A KILLING IN LA: From Sir Humphrey to Bruce Willis may be a quantum leap but Yes, Minister co-creator Jonathan Lynn has no regrets, he tells Alison Roberts…

It's an intriguing career that embraces Sir Humphrey Appleby at one end and Bruce Willis at the other. Jonathan Lynn, now 57, co-wrote every single episode of Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister before moving to Beverly Hills, where he directs comedy films starring actors of the Steve Martin/Eddie Murphy variety. Back in London to promote his latest movie, The Whole Nine Yards (featuring Willis as a professional hit man), which opens today, he professes mild astonishment when the photographer and I say we hear shades of LA in his accent. I think he looks American too, in his baseball hat and cool sunglasses (though the sweater looks suspiciously M&S). How did a man from Bath, the creator of Jim Hacker, end up in Hollywood?

"I didn't make a decision to leave England," he says, a bit defensively. "I made a decision to stay in Los Angeles." That was 10 years ago, when the success of My Cousin Vinny, starring Joe Pesci as the hicksville lawyer, put Lynn on the LA map. He last directed a movie here in 1989 - the no-brain caper Nuns on the Run. And then it seemed to him (and to many others in the business) that the British film industry was truly on its last legs.

"Nuns on the Run was the only British film made that year which was scheduled for theatrical release," he says. "The only one. Shepperton was closed down. British films were very earnest and there was general shock-horror at my decision to make a film that was 'merely' entertaining. So when I went to Los Angeles I was more than happy to be in a place where that was okay and where people didn't have delusions of grandeur about their films."

Which is why he stayed. He says, sweetly, that he'd come back to London to make a film if he could get one off the ground here.

He describes The Whole Nine Yards, meanwhile, as "screwball noir", a handy coinage for a movie which combines the clownish talents of Matthew Perry (aka Chandler of Friends), the softly spoken menace of Bruce Willis, and the comic kookiness of Rosanna Arquette. As Lynn says, it's a film singularly lacking in morality. Pretty much everyone in it wants to kill someone, though they're finally redeemed, as they surely have to be, by lurrve. It's only when you get to the ending, the redemption bit, that Hollywood stamps its imprint; otherwise, as Lynn also says, it feels rather French. He cites French gangster flicks Borsalino and Shoot the Piano Player as similarly anarchic - though The Whole Nine Yards is not the kind of movie which merits its hours' worth of analysis in the pub afterwards. This is probably why it went straight to the number one spot at the US box office on it's opening weekend.

But Lynn's elastic CV doesn't just embrace British sitcom and Hollywood screwball. It also includes novel-writing and acting (he was in the original London cast of Fiddler on the Roof). It lists directing and scripting musicals; prolific production of stage plays (The Glass Menagerie with Tennessee Williams himself) work at the National Theatre, in the West End, at Stratford, and every pit stop in between.

"It wasn't my choice to make comedies," he says. "I just got labeled that way. I'd love to make suspense films, thrillers. The only thing I don't like is to be preached at, from the stage or in a movie." He says the Hollywood studio bosses "don't care" where he comes from or where he got his degree (Cambridge, at it happens, in law). Neither do they have "the remotest idea that I worked in the theatre".

"The question is: can you make money for them? It is completely meritocratic that way." And the more he talks, the more he reveals the man who created Sir Humphrey, since it's clear he loathes pomposity, that he can't be bothered with the inner circles and secret handshakes which still regulate a great deal of British life, artistic as well as governmental.

He's immensely gratified to see Sir Humphrey passing into English language as a cipher for "intelligent obstructionism" and he's most animated when talking about the ways in which Sir Humphrey's successors still function.

"How did Jack Straw turn into something worse than Michael Howard?" he asks, mildly exasperated. "How did that happen? It must, surely, have something to do with Home Office, with what happens to politicians within it. Nothing changes. The first episode of Yes, Minister was called Open Government, about how Sir Humphrey stopped Jim Hacker's attempts to implement just that. Why couldn't John Prescott manage to coordinate a national transport policy? See episode five."

Lynn and his writing partner Sir Antony Jay won numerous awards for Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister. The spin-off books sold well over a million copies in hard back and sat in the best-seller lists for three years. Even the Americans have taken Sir Humphrey, Hacker et al to heart, though the show's most famous - notorious - fan was Margaret Thatcher.

"Hmm," says Lynn, with the weariness of a man who's been asked about this a thousand times. "I was rather despairing about it because I thought people would associate the show with her and her policies, and some people did seem to think it was in some way a Tory comedy. I used to tell people that Tony Benn liked it too. There was nothing remotely political about Yes, Minister."

And that's the way Lynn likes to make his films - no lecturing, no evangelizing, and as little pass-the-sick-bag morality as he can get away with. Strictly speaking, he should be a household name in Britain, if only for the Yes, Minister series. He's not, though. It's perhaps part of a price a British director pays when he fails to indulge in "delusions of grandeur".