Interview with Bill Nighy—Slartibartfast
Credits include Love Actually, Magic Roundabout (the voice of Dylan) and Shaun of the Dead.
Robbie Stamp: Did you know Hitchhiker’s?
Bill Nighy: Yes, I was very familiar with Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I read it when I was a youngish man as had everybody I knew on the block, because it was a huge book. I had enjoyed it enormously, laughed and appreciated it, and then subsequently—almost more satisfyingly—I bought it for my daughter, when she was about thirteen or fourteen. If you ever wanted to put something on a cover of Hitchhiker’s Guide, not that anybody should pay particular attention to me and my daughter, you could put “my daughter fell off her chair,” because she did … there was a bang behind me and I turned round in a slight panic thinking something terrible had happened. In fact what had happened was that she’d literally fallen off her chair laughing. The other thing which was very appealing and nice about that particular experience was that she found the book so beautiful, funny and kind of funky that she read me almost all of it in order for me to share it. And it was just such a treat to watch her face and see her reading enormous chunks. I bought them all then: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe and So Long, and Thanks for all the Fish. I think they are a remarkable achievement. I think he was a seriously, seriously gifted man and his books are more than just funny, they’re more than just sci-fi. He was a very, very intelligent man and these books are informed by that. I’m very, very glad that they’re in the world.
RS: You are absolutely right; they’ve just got a very rare mixture of humour and intelligence. My daughter, age ten, has just discovered them and she loves them. I think that that bodes well for the movie and I really hope that we will hit a whole new generation of teenagers and that next summer we should be the funny, hip, cool movie to go and see.
BN: Well, that’s what I thought when I read the script. I thought I just wanted to be in it because I love the whole thing. It’s very superior. The jokes are world-class. It is profoundly amusing and exciting and interesting and thought-provoking— all those little things he throws in like the definition of flying being throwing yourself at the ground and missing, things like that which just tickled me. I think the kids will go mad.
RS: So how did you come to be involved?
BN: First time I knew anything about this was when a mutual friend of Garth Jennings and me was getting married in Scotland. My friend said, “Oh and by the way he’s a director and I think he might want to talk to you about a job on Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” I nearly got a lift to the wedding with Garth, who I’d never met, but we didn’t travel together in the end. We didn’t even talk at the wedding. Maybe Garth thought it would be unethical! We probably held hands to Irish music before we ever discussed the project. I received the script shortly afterward and read it immediately and of all the things I’ve read, and there have been a few, there was absolutely no question in my mind. The minute I put the script down I phoned my agent and said if it was at all possible I would seriously like to be in this movie. I figure also from a practical point of view that it’ll be a hit, but who knows? Well, we all think it’s going to be a hit otherwise we wouldn’t be here. Then again, maybe we would actually. I think I probably would, I’d be here. But I do think it will travel and I think it’s got real appeal for everybody and it’s got everything, you know, because it operates on every level. The script is very clever, a very good representation of the book. It’s a great adventure, it’s a fascinating journey, a sweet love story and it’s a great resolution and as for an opening, you can’t do much better than blowing up the Earth in the first ten minutes. Most movies like this are about stopping that happening. So, yes, I read it and loved it. It was that simple, really. I made the phone call, then as is the way of these things lots of other things happened and we hadn’t done any kind of deal and then I remember doing a red carpet in Los Angeles where you had to speak to lots of different microphones and at the end the last question is always “What will you be doing next?” and you have to waffle because you don’t know anything or either you know some stuff but you can’t say anything and on the very last one I ran out of waffle and I said, “Well, I’m hoping to be in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” and it was the BBC and my agent phoned up the next day and said words to the effect of “What the flaming hell do you think you’re doing?” because we haven’t done any kind of deal. It ended up on the front page of the Independent newspaper. I wasn’t bothered at all. I said, “Well, you know I want to be in it,” so that was it.
RS: And now we’re in Slartibartfast’s trailer! One of the things that’s intriguing I think is the physical look of Slarti, because we’ve really moved away from the archetype of man with the white beard.
BN: The thing about beards in the movies, and I’m sure there are a million exceptions to what I’m about to say, is that often they make it slightly difficult for the audience, because you lose an area of expression, you can’t read the person’s face quite so clearly. That was mostly why we wanted to get away from the “old man of the west” look. A lot of the design I just went with because Sammy Sheldon and Garth Jennings had come up with a pretty good thing. I didn’t feel I needed to fiddle around much. The only thing that we all agreed on was that the beard was probably more obstructive than helpful and the sense of me being a kind of corporate man is just very witty, as are all the costumes. You’re not ever going to hit the image that popped into the reader’s mind the moment they heard about Slartibartfast or Ford Prefect or Arthur so you can only come up with one that you think works and that is amusing or clever that you feel confident in.
RS: What about your characteristic little snort? It’s almost like a compressed laugh, it’s just such a lovely little intimate thing to do.
BN: I don’t know if this is going to make any sense but it’s born of the slightly innocent quality that people sometimes have when they are unaware of themselves to a certain degree. They do make unlikely noises sometimes and it just seemed to fit.
RS: One of the things I’ve liked most is watching everybody inhabit their characters. We’ve brought a level of humanity, which I think is quite rare out there in the Galaxy.
BN: That’s a large part of the appeal for me and I think probably will be for newcomers to Hitchhiker’s as well as enthusiasts like me. You don’t get heroic behaviour all of the time from everybody. You get mundane human flaws and a kind of intimacy and a kind of colloquialness that you don’t associate with the genre. It probably is a kind of genre to itself almost.
RS: Slarti has this nice mix of pride and diffidence. He’s happy to be able to talk to Arthur about his job. But there’s also a tension there because he is aware that the mice plan to try to take this rather nice Earthman’s brain and his job is to deliver him on a platter.
BN: Yes, exactly, I don’t suppose he gets out much in terms of meeting folk from other places. The bloody Vogons, literally ten minutes later and he’d have been free and clear and they blow the bloody computer planet up. I love the idea that they needed a race who would do all the boring jobs in the galaxy so they built Vogsphere for the Vogons and some clever clogs put in this mechanism that prevented them from ever having an interesting idea by smacking them in the face with a paddle, which is a very witty reflection on what happens to people who have to do boring jobs.
RS: The paddles were a brand-new idea that Douglas had for the film on a flight coming back from LA. He came into the office the next morning and read it out because he liked to gauge people’s reactions. The team who were lucky enough to hear it hot off the press were rolling around laughing.
BN: Well, it’s fantastic and several million years of evolution have also turned the Vogons into relentless blighters who do the next thing it says in the manual, which is a funny reflection on bureaucracy generally. By way of contrast, I think Slarti’s just a benign figure, a nice man with a healthy compassion, who is proud of what he does. It’s like when people who make things, they show you around their workshop, their special-effects shed or model shop, and they don’t often get a lot of thanks for what they do but they are quietly proud. It’s a very sweet idea of Douglas’s, that the makers of the Earth are like this … I love the notion that there were men who planted the fields, who pumped the water into the oceans and painted the White Cliffs of Dover and Ayers Rock. In Douglas’s world that’s how you build Earth. It’s so touching, so funky and funny.
RS: And the iconic Norwegian fjords are one of the things people remember best from the whole of Hitchhiker’s. Such a strange wonderful, idea, somebody winning an award for designing the fjords in Norway, it’s a classic moment.
BN: Everyone I’ve spoken to recently, that’s what they recall. Most of them are my age and they haven’t read the book for twenty years or something and that’s the bit, even before I tell them who I’m playing, which they usually guess anyway, they say, “Fiddly bits” and “Norway” and “Didn’t he get an award?” And they remember that bit, everyone remembers that bit— they love it.
RS: I suppose you’ve worked most with Martin?
BN: Working with Martin is a joy. He is an extremely clever young comic and actor and effortless to deal with both performing and in between times, and when I heard that he’d been cast, I thought, “Tim from The Office, Arthur? Of course, of course.” He has every quality required for Arthur. He has a world-class comic touch. But apart from that he has that kind of appeal you need. He’s watchable. You need that because Arthur is receiving an incredible amount of information on behalf of the audience, so they have to experience it through him. You need somebody really very accomplished in order to be able to deliver that kind of performance. You don’t get to do all of the party tricks all the time, you have to just be the receptor. He makes it look easy but those central roles where you have to be the audience’s eyes and ears are famously difficult.
RS: I agree. And as for your experience, what were the moments that stood out for you during filming?
BN: Yesterday Martin and I were in our cart travelling through the Planet Factory Floor. It was rather good fun, with us trying to act with water cannons and wind machines operating at the same time. Grown men were feeding the water cannon with plastic cups of water, and then this enormously high-pressured cannon would shoot the spray towards us. The director was helping with the water and enjoying himself so enormously that he forgot to hold on to the cups, which got sucked up into the machine and all of a sudden there were plastic cups bouncing off Martin’s face! That was quite Hitchhikery, in my view, and summed up the fun and the energy that has gone into making this movie.