We were 20 minutes into a panel discussion on the use of Scotland as a movie location when someone dropped the S-word.
By that I mean "studio" rather than another word which might, in the same context, be used to describe Michael Caine's accent in the 1971 adaptation of Kidnapped. The place was the CCA as part of the Glasgow Film Festival (GFF); the time was Tuesday evening; the panel consisted of Brodie Pringle (Locations Manager at Creative Scotland) and Jennifer Reynolds (Film Commissioner at Glasgow Film Office) with me asking the questions.
Ostensibly, the topic under discussion at this event, supported by the Sunday Herald, was how Scotland, from its Highland hills to its city streets, had for decades provided a jaw-dropping backdrop to films that ranged from Hollywood blockbusters to arthouse indies. With a nod to Powell and Pressburger's Hebridean romance from 1945, the session was titled I Know Where I'm Going: Shooting In Scotland, but a lot of the talk concerned movies of a more recent vintage: Skyfall, World War Z, Cloud Atlas and, for the small screen, Outlander.
It was inevitable, certainly when the big-budget productions were mentioned, that the panel would eventually get round to the politically vexed matter of industry infrastructure, and a permanent studio in particular. A quick recap: there are currently two main proposals doing the rounds. The first, a private venture, is the Pentlands Studio project being mooted for the Straiton area outside of Edinburgh, with big plans for eight sound stages in a 260,000 sq ft development. The other depends on public money, with Cumbernauld put forward as the favoured site, the cause of much recent opposing verbiage from Glasgow City and North Lanarkshire councillors in this very newspaper.
There are, of course, pros and cons connected to both projects. Could Pentlands sustain a turnover of work on such a massive site? Ah, but they'd perhaps have better backlot facilities. Cumbernauld, on the other hand, while not directly inside the industry hub of Glasgow, is well enough positioned between the big airports and sits at the bottom of a motorway artery that heads north to the awesome scenery that so often attracts big American productions to these shores.
I've been hearing of a Scottish studio on the horizon for pretty much the entire 25 years I've been working in arts journalism. I've also seen Scotland go through cycles of being in favour with filmmakers, only to see peaks, such as the one topped by Braveheart and Rob Roy two decades ago, become troughs as tax breaks failed to materialise. Tuesday's GFF panel seemed to suggest that we were currently enjoying a peak, at least in terms of production spend, although admittedly a lot of that comes from the single purse of Outlander. However, a studio alone will not deliver a steadying hand or increased production for the Scottish screen industries; government investment, in many forms, will be needed to back it up.
We'll always want new scenes to add to the home-grown showreel that includes white-vested men running in slo-mo along a beach in St Andrews to Vangelis or a couple of radges high-tailing it down Princes Street to Iggy Pop. Happily, there's already positive word of mouth for Robert Carlyle's The Legend Of Barney Thompson, and Terence Davies will surely have rendered The Mearns glorious in Sunset Song. At least we can be sure that 2015's Coming Attractions are looking good.
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