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Sir Sean
Connery, aka the "big yin"
There was never any doubt over Sean Connery's nationality. He
left Scotland in the mid-Fifties to pursue an acting career and,
unusually, was an international star before going to Hollywood,
because of the phenomenal success of James Bond. Scotland doubled
for the Balkans in From Russia With Love (1963), but Scotland's
only genuine superstar has had few opportunities to work in his
native land.
Highlander was his last Scottish feature before Entrapment (1999).
He was able to use his position as Entrapment's producer, as well
as star, to insist on it shooting partly in Scotland, and so he
was able to participate in the national film boom. He has also
been involved in discussions with Sony Pictures to build a film
studio in Edinburgh, where he was born.
Occasionally the established "Highlander" image of Scotland and
Scots was challenged. Whisky Galore! was almost contemporary -
it was set during the Second World War; and it was set outwith
the Highlands - just, it was set on one of the offshore islands.
There were no kilts, but it was still a very rural vision of Scotland.
Some of the most interesting and enjoyable "Scottish" films have
been one-offs, such as the wonderful cult horror film The Wicker
Man (1973). It was an English production that used Scottish locations
(and Scottish notions of Christian purity) to chilling effect
in its story of a sinister sect, on a remote island, indulging
in all sorts of strange goings-on, including orgies and human
sacrifice.
Its star Christopher Lee regards it as his best film. Bertrand
Tavernier came to Glasgow for Death Watch (1980), with Romy Schneider
and Harvey Keitel, in which a dying woman agrees to let her final
days be filmed. The "Highlander" stereotype was also challenged
by the My Childhood trilogy (1972-78) from the late Bill Douglas,
a stark, unsentimental record of a boy progressing from childhood
in a bleak mining village, through a children's home to military
service.
The films found a significant audience in arthouse cinemas, but
they were small-scale, highly personal works - neither shorts
nor quite full-length features - and they do not fit readily into
a discourse on trends within Scottish cinema, to the extent that
one of the few books on the subject simply ignored them.
Bill Forsyth and the quirky highlands
The "Highlander" stereotype was also challenged by the quirky
comedies of writer-director Bill Forsyth. His debut feature That
Sinking Feeling (1979) was the story of a group of Glasgow youths
who carry out a daring robbery, stealing sinks from a warehouse.
It was made with amateur actors on a budget of £6,000, but got
an international release.
Forsyth's real breakthrough came with his next film Gregory's
Girl (1981), in which the main characters were a ragbag assembly
of pimply schoolboys, living in a sprawling concrete "new town"
in Central Scotland. Their lives revolved around school, home,
the school's hopeless football team and an awkward, pubescent
interest in girls, one of whom emerges as the football team's
star.
Thanks to Hollywood, Scotland did have an instantly recognisable
international image, which native film-makers could build on,
play with, and subvert. And that is what Forsyth did in Local
Hero (1983). Not only did he desert Central Scotland for the Highlands,
but he recruited a Hollywood star, Burt Lancaster.
Lancaster plays an American businessman seduced by the idyllic
lifestyle he finds there, just as Gene Kelly was seduced by Brigadoon.
Forsyth subtly undermines the established image of Scotland as
a Celtic dreamworld frozen in the past, with little touches like
jet planes thundering over the glens, a black church minister
and the cute, little rabbit that is rescued from the road by a
visitor and cooked for dinner by the local hotelier.
Forsyth's films provided invaluable experience for Scottish crew
and established the idea of a viable, native Scottish film industry,
though it was to be another decade before the idea really took
root with Shallow Grave. "This could have been any city," Chris
Eccleston's disembodied voice declares in the opening voice-over.
But it wasn't any city, it was Edinburgh (with Glasgow providing
temporary studio space for interiors).
Shallow Grave pays off after Scots dig deep
Freed created Scotland in Hollywood; the makers of Shallow Grave
created Any City in Scotland. The Shallow Grave team were a bit
like the Beatles in that the whole was greater than the sum of
the parts. John Hodge was a junior hospital doctor with a vague
notion to become a film writer. He scribbled down the outline
of Shallow Grave on scraps of paper in his spare time.
Andrew Macdonald was gifted with a sharp mind and silver tongue
and confidently introduced himself to Hodge as a film producer
when they met at the 1991 Edinburgh Film Festival. The grandson
of writer Emeric Pressburger, he had been a message boy on Revolution
(1985) and assistant director on Venus Peter(1989). Danny Boyle
(the only non-Scot) joined them from a background of theatre and
television.
It is easy to attribute Shallow Grave's success solely to this
talented trio, but there is more to it than that. It does not
cost much to record a song, but for Shallow Grave Macdonald needed
£1 million (one million pounds).
Scotland was already waking up to the cultural and economic potential
of film even before Shallow Grave. The Scottish Film Production
Fund put public money into Shallow Grave at the script stage.
At this time Glasgow was in the process of setting up the Glasgow
Film Fund, a pool of public money established to attract film-makers
to the city. Shallow Grave was the first film to get support from
the fund, which in turn was able to redirect its share of Shallow
Grave profits into other films.
Success breeds success, and it is impossible to underestimate
the snowballing effect in the Scottish film boom. The boom cannot
be attributed entirely to the success of Shallow Grave however.
It did not open in Britain until January 1995 and 12 feature films
shot in Scotland in 1994. Scotland had a national film locations
agency before England, and the increase in film production was
at least partly due to its activities.
Braveheart,
Trainspotting and an industry is born>>
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