Trailer
Plot summary
Howard Marks grows up in the Welsh valleys and wins a scholarship to Oxford at nineteen to study philosophy and physics. A Latvian exchange student, Ilze Kadegis, slips into his room looking for a hidden passageway and leads him to a store kept by Graham Plinston, one of the university's leading marijuana dealers. Ilze introduces Marks to cannabis, and he becomes a steady customer while their studies suffer. Teacher training in London follows, along with a hasty marriage to Ilze that soon frays, and trouble at the university over his long hair and flashy suits. When a plan to bring hashish into England through Germany collapses and Plinston is arrested, Marks drives the load through customs himself and sells it in London to the oil sheikh Saleem Malik.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Mr. Nice (2010)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Rhys Ifans portrays Howard Marks, a Welsh marijuana smuggler who ran one of the biggest global cannabis smuggling operations from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, mostly while on the run, and who allegedly cut deals with the FBI, the Mafia, the IRA and MI6.
- After serving time in Terre Haute, one of the "toughest" prisons in the United States, Marks stopped smuggling and dealing in cannabis and gained wider fame as a pro-cannabis campaigner, stand-up comedian, television show panelist and even prospective Member of Parliament.
- Mr Nice was filmed in 2009 in Benidorm, Spain, and features a 1960s pop-inspired soundtrack by Philip Glass alongside period songs by Deep Purple, Pink Floyd and John Lennon.
- In development hell for over a decade, the film ended up as a collaboration between smaller studios including Independent Productions and the Wales Creative IP Fund, with Marks himself the main consultant for the film and for Ifans.
- Marks's 1997 autobiography Mr Nice became a best-seller, ranked the number one book regarding drugs on Amazon, and a film adaptation of the book was petitioned.
