John Cleese launches one-man-show to help pay the bills

But for several years I didn’t have a particular major project and you see most of the things that people know me for I have written myself, or co-written. Now if I had been Hugh Grant I would be lucky to have Richard Curtis writing me excellent scripts, but in fact, I did get two or three very nice smaller parts in “Rat Race” and “Out of Towners” and I much enjoyed doing “Frankenstein,” but I wasn’t working on major projects like movies, which I would subsequently perform. Now since the divorce, I have to pay about $1 million a year until I’m 76, nevertheless my overall earnings have dropped so what I can do now is start writing one or two things that I will eventually perform. I’m working on a movie script, which I think is a very strong idea.

Q: Are you talking about the Dreamworks Animation picture, “The Croods?”

A: No, the one I’m talking about I’m writing with an old friend of mine called Lisa Hogan. That is called “The Invasion” and it’s about the extent to which people go to avoid paying taxes.

Q: That sounds promising.

A: It’s a good flick. It’s based on a situation that kind of nearly happened to me in 1999, when I was suddenly told that having cashed my pension in, the Internal Revenue Service would take 40% of it if I was in America for more than a certain number of days, which astounded me because the pension had been building up for more than 35 years in England and didn’t seem to have much to do with America at all. But I was assured that was American law. So I had to keep leaving the country for a period of months in order not to stack up too many days here. So the movie’s based on that. The other thing that I’m doing, which is one of the main things I’ve leased this little house with (daughter) Camilla is that she and I are just settling down now to work on the musical of “A Fish Called Wanda.”

Q: So your latest efforts are financially motivated?

A: The truth was, I was not getting offered any very good film parts. If anybody had sent me a cracking good script I would have done it, but there was very little around, particularly for people of my age.

Q: Is your tour something you had been wanting to do for a while?