A very amateur performance

Nick Newman was thrilled to sign Burt Reynolds for his film. If only Burt had remembered his lines and hadn’t spent so much on wigs

- Nick Newman

When we saw the giant ‘idiot boards’, we knew there was trouble.

Arriving on the set of our small British movie A Bunch of Amateurs, we had been warned that our star, Hollywood legend Burt Reynolds, had ‘problems’.

That morning, he had demanded that the stunt co-ordinator be fired. There were problems with Burt’s wigs – of which more later. But the most pressing issue for us as writers was that our leading man couldn’t remember his lines. This did not bode well for the scenes in which he had to perform long speeches from King Lear.

A Bunch of Amateurs was filmed on the Isle of Man in February 2008. My co-writer Ian Hislop and I had rewritten a script about a Hollywood has-been who arrives in England imagining he is playing King Lear at Stratford, only to discover it’s not on Avon, but Stratford St John in Suffolk – an amateur dramatic production to save the local theatre.

Hilarity ensues as our antihero, Jefferson Steel, behaves badly, forgets his lines and is embarrassed by the am-dram cast. With Burt on board and the film greenlit, a stellar British cast was assembled around him – including Sir Derek Jacobi, Samantha Bond and Imelda Staunton. What could possibly go wrong?

Life began to imitate art at an alarming pace. When Burt was being courted for the role, he had said, ‘If there’s one movie I make before I die, it’s this one.’

When the 72-year-old arrived, his first words were ‘Why, when you had a perfectly good script, did you f***k it up?’

Not a word had been changed – other than to reduce the Shakespeare, as Mr Reynolds had requested. Yet still we were hopeful.