Cine Caledonia – A New Dawn

Pity the Scottish film critic. While the other art forms covered in this paper are saturated with local talent, emerging filmmakers come at a trickle; it seems like we’re forever searching for the new Lynne Ramsay. Too often we are the bearers of bad news: the bad-guys who report that the latest film made on these shores has little artistic ambition and even less chance of turning a buck at the box-office. It might seem it from reading the vitriolic copy, but there’s no fun to be had in tearing films as chronic as Not Another Happy Ending or The Wee Man to shreds.

But we are harbingers of doom no more. This month the script has changed. Over a heady autumn film schedule, UK cinemas will see a trio of fine – and very different – Scottish features fight for space on our cinema screens. There’s a coal-black comedy/morality tale (Filth, 27 Sep), a lyrical meditation on grief and mental illness (For Those In Peril, 8 Nov) and a breezy musical set to the hits of those folk-pop behemoths The Proclaimers (Sunshine on Leith, 4 Oct). Add to these the UK premieres of Starred Up, the new film from David Mackenzie, which is reported to be the Hallam Foe director’s return to form, Jonathan Glazer’s long-awaited Under the Skin, a dizzyingly sexy sci-fi mind-bender about a beautiful alien (Scarlett Johansson) seducing neds on the streets of Glasgow, and Here Be Dragons, Mark Cousins’ latest idiosyncratic essay film, at London Film Festival and you have one of the most exciting moments for Scottish cinema – ever.

It’s not just in UK cinemas and festivals that our films have been making waves; Scottish cinema has been lighting up the international festival circuit also. “We didn’t go looking for a bumper crop of Scottish films this year, but we found one,” says Cameron Bailey, artistic director of the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), which screened four films hailing from these shores this year. For Bailey, the eclecticism is what he found most encouraging about these features: “The films are very different in story, style and tone, which I find is always a good sign. If one fairly small film industry can produce intense dramas like Under the Skin and Starred Up at the same time as it’s delivering an upbeat pop musical like Sunshine on Leith and a star-driven, international co-production like The Railway Man [which stars Nicole Kidman and Colin Firth], it’s evidence that its talent has both breadth and depth.”

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“If Sunshine on Leith was a company I'd buy shares in it!” – Allan Hunter

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Allan Hunter, co-director of Glasgow Film Festival, who was in Toronto for this Scottish invasion, agrees with Bailey’s assessment. “I think there was an impression that Scottish cinema had ventured further and further down a dead-end path of social realist miserablism,” he says. “Scottish drama seemed to have narrowed its focus to the point where the only thing it seemed to engage with was neds and nihilism. There may be people who argue that is not the case but it was certainly the image people had of Scottish cinema.” The Scottish films that have emerged over the summer’s festival circuit suggest we’ve turned a corner. “I think the films we are seeing now are in some measure a reaction against that,” suggests Hunter. “There are some adventurous producers and filmmakers determined to tackle a wider range of subjects and genres and to make films that might attract mainstream audiences as well as art-house crowds.”

The filmmakers responsible for these bracing, bold films must be delighted? You’d think so, but speaking to Gillian Berrie, the producer of Starred Up and Under the Skin, it’s clear that the Scottish film industry isn’t as rosy as it might seem to onlookers. “I guess I’m not feeling great about the industry at the moment, which is probably surprising for you to hear,” says Berrie by phone a few weeks after Under the Skin and Starred Up made their world premieres. Berrie tells me that it isn’t just a coincidence that so many great Scottish films have come to fruition in 2013 – it’s a minor miracle. “I’ve been working in the Scottish film industry for nearly 20 years and I’ve been campaigning for so long for more support, more money, a film studio, and we’re still, I think, really way behind where we should be – even ten years ago, when there was a more joined up approach to this film industry in Scotland.”

Berrie argues that the mechanisms currently in place for the financing and production of Scottish films aren’t sufficient to create any significant development. “If we were going to compete with Hollywood, for example, what we would need available to us right now would be money to buy the option on a best-selling book to be able to compete with the studios and the bigger production companies in Europe, and engage A-list writers whose fees can vary from 100 grand to 250 grand a draft. So unless you can afford to buy those rights and pay that money for those writers, chances of success – really breakout success – are slim and it’s usually a phenomenon when it happens.”

What’s that I hear, you say? A filmmaker wanting more money? What’s new? But when Berrie lays out the numbers it becomes clear Scotland’s film industry is running on (almost) empty. She puts our funding in context with adjacent countries of similar size. “Northern Ireland is sitting there with a fund per annum of about 12 million sterling, for the tiny film community there,” she says. “In the Republic of Ireland they’ve got 14-15 million, and they’ve taken a major cut – they were up in the 20s. Meanwhile we’re sitting with our four million, you know, pretending that everything is fine.” Our budget seems even more paltry when compared to our neighbour to the east, Denmark, where Berrie has worked on a number of co-productions with Sigma films. “When I see the amount of care and attention going into the film industry there – 65 million a year – it just really frustrates me. We’ve such a wealth of talent, look what we can do on the small amount of money that we’ve got. Can you imagine what we could do, looking at those multipliers?”

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“Subjectivity, authenticity, vision and passion are what make good films, not movie stars and metrics” – Mark Cousins

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The question is, though, should Scotland be chasing this Hollywood dream in the first place? The irony is, a film as daring and as brilliant (and as troubled – its production took over two years) as Under the Skin, the jewel in this wave of Scottish features, needs an independent producer like Berrie for it to come to fruition; it could never be made in Hollywood. TIFF’s director Bailey says as much when he speaks to us:

“What I do see in [the films he programmed at TIFF] is real creative freedom from the filmmakers. Films like Under the Skin and Starred Up feel like they were made with uncompromising rigour from individual filmmakers. Even films made with more of an eye to commercial considerations retain a personal stamp. In my view, that’s what makes them successful beyond Scotland’s borders.”

Mark Cousins, the Scotland-based director, whose essay films The Story of Children and Film (which screened at Cannes and Edinburgh) and Here Be Dragons (which premiered at Telluride and Toronto) enrich this cinema resurgence even further, is certainly in favour of Scotland finding our own path, and suggests this as one of the reasons for Scottish cinema’s apparent rude health. “The funding mechanisms have matured, in that they came to realise that in the UK and Scotland it doesn't really make sense to try to ape the Hollywood model,” he tells me. “The people who are choosing content gradually understood that voice, subjectivity, authenticity, vision and passion are what make good films, not movie stars and metrics.”

This model clearly works for a filmmaker like Cousins. He did claim, after all, to have made 2012’s This Film Called Love, his quixotic road movie starring himself and a portrait of Soviet filmmaking genius Sergei Eisenstein, for £10 by shooting it on a low-end flip-camera. Cousins suggests that digital filmmaking and editing equipment are a contributing factor to this burst of creativity from our filmmakers: “The miniaturisation of the filmmaking process has loosened and opened up film production,” says Cousins. “Distinctive world views manage to survive the development system more than they used to, and outsiders get to make films more. If film had been digital since, say, the 20s, we’d have had more Bill Douglases and more Margaret Taits.” What a mouthwatering thought.

A filmmaker who typifies the model Cousins describes is Paul Wright, the writer and director of For Those In Peril, which debuted in Cannes along with The Story of Children and Film. When I speak to Wright, he confirms Cousins’ assertion about the freeing nature of digital. “We used a lot of mixed formats, Super 8 and my shitty camera phone,” he says when I ask about the mediums he shot on, “but the main format was the Alexa [a high-end digital camera, used on gorgeous-looking features such as Skyfall and The Life of Pi], and it just meant the way we were filming was kind of about finding these moments and fragments of these little notes, so we were able to have that kind of looseness that maybe we wouldn’t have had if it was shot on film.”

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“I just want to make a big cautionary note to the government: please don’t take this for granted” – Gillian Berrie

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When I ask Allan Hunter if he has any explanation for this mini-Scottish cinema renaissance he points to an industry that’s been learning over the past ten years or so. “There is an element of coincidence to this,” says Hunter, “but there’s also a sense of some of the people who are here working away industriously all the time getting some projects into production at the same time. I'm thinking Arabella Page-Croft and Kieran Parker at Black Camel [co-producers of Sunshine on Leith], Gillian Berrie and Brian Coffey at Sigma. All of them are experienced now, well-connected and want to make films that are ambitious and connect with an audience. I think Sunshine on Leith will be a huge, popular, mainstream hit and probably the most successful Scottish film in a generation. If Sunshine on Leith was a company I'd buy shares in it! I think Starred Up is David Mackenzie’s best film and potentially his most commercial.”

For Cousins, the most exciting aspect of this purple patch is that these filmmakers are thinking visually. “They're not hanging on to the word, as they used to, as if imagery is second rate or redolent of surface,” he tells me. “Under the Skin imagines Glasgow visually as well as it has ever been imagined. David Mackenzie’s Starred Up sounds like it's going to be a slice of realism, but it is very choreographed, almost like a musical with the musical numbers cut out. My own essay films always start with imagery – the script never comes first.”

When I ask Bailey why Scottish film has made such an impact at the big international festivals this summer he points to these productions’ pleasing disregard for borders: “These are films made with actors, writers, directors and crews drawn from wherever best suits the production. They may be Scottish films, but they’re plugged into the world.”

We’ll leave the last word to Berrie, the ferocious producer who helped Jonathan Glazer and David Mackenzie get two of these personal films with disregards for our borders on screen in the face of an underfunded national cinema. “We need a diverse range of films coming out of Scotland,” she says “from the art-house to the purely commercial. Something like Sunshine on Leith has got massive potential, and I think good luck to it. Filth as well. We’re just capable of so much more, that’s the thing. These really are wonderful films with some really talented people behind them. But I just want to make a big cautionary note to the government: please don’t take this for granted.”