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His Ripper book is motivated by sympathy for the murder victims, but also by the fact that "the whole of society were victims of these liars on his behalf. It incensed me. How dare anyone lie on behalf of Jack the Ripper?" Modern parallels run rampant. "In the same way, how dare anyone lie on the behalf of the Iraq war?"Withnail too is about victims – initially the "I" character, and then later Withnail himself becomes the victim. Robinson originally wrote it as a novel, before being convinced to translate it into a screenplay. "What's fucking weird is that the most joyful piece of writing I've ever had was Withnail and I when it was a novel," he says. "And the most difficult piece of writing I've ever had was the screenplay. I constantly tried to abandon it. I sent letters in saying 'I can't do it. I can't make it work.'"The story is based on Robinson's time living as a struggling actor in Camden with his friend Vivian MacKerrell, who died of throat cancer in 1995. The novel originally ended with Withnail returning home, filling a shotgun with the Chateau Margaux 53 he'd stolen from Uncle Monty and blowing his brains out. For the film, Robinson replaced Withnail's suicide with Hamlet's "What a piece of work is a man…" soliloquy, which Richard E Grant performed to a pack of wolves at London Zoo.TRENDING ON NOISEY: How a Kid Running an Obscure Music Forum Became the Target Of the UK's Biggest Ever Piracy Case
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