Scotland
in Film
Insiders
Guide to Scotland on Film
Charlie Gormley It
was the son of an American movie mogul attending the Edinburgh Film Festival who,
when being driven across the Forth Road Bridge spotted the great Forth Railway
Bridge, that icon of Scottish engineering, and asked what it was. "Oh Hitchcock
built that for The 39 Steps" said the wag in the back. "Gee, just for
a movie" said the kid. Scotland
has long lived with that mythic Brigadoon image. In the movies Scotland would
come and go like the fabled village itself, and the filmmakers with it. Three
times the great English director Michael Powell, he of The Red Shoes, came north
to make movies that would be the envy of most native Scots. The Island At The
Edge of The World and The Spy in Black and then the wonderful I Know Where I'm
Going. Hitchcock
came north but once for The 39 Steps and even local boy Sandy Mackendrick was
London based when he shot the location exteriors for Whisky Galore and The Maggie.
When a broke Orson Welles lowered his starry eyes to take a featured role in Trouble
In The Glen, he demanded a then astronomical £10,000 a week. His delighted
British producer said he would have gone to £12,500. That's what I said,
responded the ever quick- witted Welles. And that's about the best thing you can
say about the movie. Now these greats are all dead but Scotland and movies has
gone from strength to strength, an easy trick when the local film industry started
out so modestly. Twenty-five
years ago, long before Shallow Grave and Trainspotting, you could fit the indigenous
Scottish Film industry into two or three taxis. Of course there were also lots
of TV people about but they, as Billy Wilder said famously, only existed to give
the film people something to look down on. If there is little money for film making
in Scotland now, there was even less then. But for the first time a generation
of Scottish filmmakers decided to stay and work in Scotland and make the most
of it, and not to head south or west. The
Scottish checklist of movie attractions is endless. In recent years they shot
the big budget Rob Roy and Highlander and parts of Braveheart here. The nursery
slopes of discovery might start at Eilan Donan, easily the most photographed castle
on earth and then move on to the equally bonny Drumnadrochit on Loch Ness, which
featured heavily in Billy Wilder¹s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. In
the Firth of Forth, within sight of Edinburgh, stands the island where Polanski
shot Macbeth. But
for the tourist, however wealthy or diligent, who wants to dig deeper, the pursuit
of movie locations in search of the truth behind the scenes on screen can be fraught
with mantraps and false dawns. You can look in vain for that Edinburgh flat in
Shallow Grave; it only ever existed inside an industrial shed in Glasgow that,
because of sound problems, was known to the film crew as the set from hell. Likewise
Bill Forsyth's Local Hero had its village at Pennan in Caithness and the village
beach at Morar on the opposite coast of Scotland. But then filmmakers survive
the demands of their profession by cheating. All during the long location shoot
on Mull for the splendid I Know Where I'm Going, the leading man, Roger Livesey,
never left London. He was tied to a West End play and was 'doubled' for all exteriors. There
is no doubting that Deborah Kerr spent her early childhood in Helensburgh on the
Clyde Coast, the house still stands, and the town is also famous as the birthplace
of the great song and dance man Jack Buchanan. Another local figure, and he is
the only one to have a plaque dedicated to him on the sea front, is TV inventor
John Logie Beard - creator of probably the only possibility to see either Buchanan
or Kerr on screen these days. But
the great benefit in following the filmmaker's trails has been clear since the
first days of film. Take the train on the beautiful West Highland Line to Mallaig
and the ferry to magical Skye. As a proper tourist, you can train your near-pro
quality video on the landscape. But sad to say perfect images are hard to achieve.
That is when you learn that it is not wilfulness that chooses a village here and
places its beach on the other side of the country; the need for such a makeover
is driven by a desire to present something that little bit better than reality.
But then isn't that just like the movies. Sometimes
the location people double buildings or whole towns. In the movie of Edith Wharton's
House of Mirth, whole swatches of Glasgow doubled for turn of the century New
York. The City Chambers in that city has doubled for an hotel in Moscow and, less
probably, The Vatican. A local nun so overlooked the charms of her native city
that she assured the director she recognised the very rooms he had used in The
Vatican. So sometimes it's the movies, and not just religion, that is able to
transcend and shift reality. Gregory's
Girl was and is the town of Cumbernauld. On a tiny budget there was not the money
to cheat and the movie stands as a documentary record. Similarly the plaque near
the lighthouse on Skye that commemorates the making of Breaking The Waves is within
sight of an endless procession of perfect replica waves. That kind of 'breakout'
documentary input was much prized in the golden old days of 'studio' pictures.
In "Floodtide",
made in 1947, when Jimmy Logan and Gordon Jackson filmed the Glasgow Barrowland
dance hall in the real Barrowland, the local audience went wild. The reason realism
was so rare and so prized lay in the nightmare of location sound recording. Until
the Sixties, the available equipment just couldn't cope with extraneous noise.
It's the same to this day for the tourist with a video camera and fixed microphone.
When you get the pictures home the noise from what you can't see often wastes
the images of what you can. Glasgow
might be the centre of filmmaking in Scotland, but the great Alastair Sim and
Finlay Currie and Sean Connery all chose to be born in Edinburgh. When many years
back Connery returned to make a documentary of his native city, he wasn't much
recognised at posh schools like Fettes where he, as a boy, delivered the milk
and where Prime Minister Tony Blair learned his 'amo amas amats'. But back by
the brewery walls in an old tenement building where he had lived, the James Bond
hero was greeted by waves of local warmth, clutched at by local matrons who called
him 'Tam' - his given name - and remembered his mother. These
days there are tourist maps of movie locations and books on movie trivia to suit
even the most demanding movie buffs. They pinpoint everything except that tingle
that seeing his native land up there on film can give to the local. Because that
image insists that he or she has a part in the modern world, and not just as movie
goers. For the visitor I recommend a reversal of the technique devised by the
late great Francois Truffaut. When he first arrived in New York he stayed in his
hotel room with the TV on and only occasionally made forays into the city to prove
that what he saw on TV was real. The Scotland that you are visiting is the real
world. If you don't believe me, check it out at the movies.
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