Nice Work If You Can Get It
Drug dealer turned raconteur HOWARD MARKS talks about the forthcoming movie adaptation of his memoirs and reflects on Ireland’s controversial clampdown on headshops
Tara Brady, 01 Nov 2010
Howard Marks hasn’t been this busy since he controlled a great big chunk of the global hash trade. We’re already used to seeing the author, raconteur and former marijuana smuggler make his imprint across various media, but this month, Marxists can look forward to new vocal work with Peter Hook’s band Freebase and Mr. Nice, a tremendous new film of Marks’ cult memoir.
“I’m very happy with the film,” says Marks. “I had no creative input. I’d dig out transcripts if they were needed. I visited the set for my own curiosity. And one night Rhys needed to know what lullaby I used to sing to my kid. But I didn’t know what they were using and not using. I’m delighted with it.”
Sitting in the Clarence Hotel, just hours after the Irish premiere, Marks is happy to give the film two thumbs up. It helps, of course, that Mr. Nice stars Rhys Ifans, one of Marks’ old Welsh buddies.
“Oh hell, I’ve known Rhys for 14 years,” says Marks. “We always said to one another he’d play me in a film of my life. There will never be another like him. I found no one who thought somebody else would do better.”
One wonders why it has taken this long for Marks’ wildly romantic adventures to appear in the multiplexes. Born in Kenfig Hill near Glamorgan in Wales, Dennis Howard Marks was a bright kid who read Physics at Balliol College, Oxford. Between majors he was quickly seduced by sixties counter-culture in general and the medicinal benefits of cannabis in particular. His career as an international drug smuggler was, he reckons, entirely accidental.
“If I had ever sat down to think about it I would have decided smuggling was stupid,” says Marks. “I was a comedian at heart. If I wasn’t I wouldn’t be going around telling the entire world about it. What kind of crook does that?”
He was, in this comic spirit, prepared to cleverly exploit his supposed connections with the IRA, the Mafia, and M16 to bring about colourful trial proceedings.
“It was a kind of a circus,” recalls Marks. “To a large extent. The film probably plays that up a bit. They obviously have to amalgamate and condense things otherwise we’d still be sitting here watching it. So in the film there’s one court scene instead of many and one ex-wife not two. It would have been cheaper for me if the film was right.”
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