Ewan McGregor on directing, Trainspotting and how he would now vote after Brexit

Factor in the twinkling eyes and hawkish good looks and it adds up to quite a package: you can feel the charisma pulsing outwards from the stage, as clear a demonstration of star quality as you could hope to experience in Scotland on a wet November night.

The occasion is an out-of-season Edinburgh International Film Festival gala screening of McGregor’s directorial debut, an adaptation of Philip Roth’s 1997 novel American Pastoral. The Scot features in front of the camera too, alongside co-stars Dakota Fanning, Jennifer Connelly and David Strathairn.

Among the audience are McGregor’s parents and, sitting in the row behind the actor, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon. The two tough-looking bodyguards standing by the door are, presumably, part of her security detail.

Or are they his? After all, McGregor is the closest thing Scotland has to a Hollywood A-lister, a bona fide star who now lives in Los Angeles and whose CV reads like a potted history of late 20th and early 21st-century British and American cinema. Cult flicks? Tick. Action movies? Tick. Kids’ films, romcoms, costume dramas and musicals? Tick. Worked with Peter Greenaway and survived to tell the tale? Tick. Knows his way round a lightsaber? Tick.

But one thing McGregor had always wanted to do but hadn’t until now, is direct. When we catch up in person a couple of days after the Edinburgh screening, he tells me why it’s taken him so long to add that final entry to the checklist of achievements, and how American Pastoral came to be the film that did it.

“Somebody showed me an interview I did on TFI Friday 20 years ago, after Trainspotting had been released. Chris Evans asked me where I would be in 20 years’ time and my answer was that I would be directing and acting,” he reflects. “It was funny to see that played back because I was right. But it’s taken me that long to find the right thing to do. I’ve always wanted to do it but I just didn’t ever feel like it was something you do just for the sake of it.”

In 1999, McGregor did join eight other guest directors to film a segment of Tube Tales, a series of nine short films based on the real-life experiences of London Underground passengers. He viewed it as “a practice, in a way, for doing a feature which I hoped and assumed would come soon thereafter”.

But it didn’t. And when he finally set out to tackle that first feature a couple of years later – an adaptation of Alessandro Baricco’s novel Silk – he had his first real taste of how long, laborious and challenging the task of taking a film from page to screen can be.

McGregor was filming Young Adam at the time and took the opportunity to try to recruit that film’s veteran producer, Jeremy Thomas. He succeeded. He was also able to trace the film rights, which had initially been with production company Miramax and then British director Mike Figgis but which had since reverted to Baricco.

McGregor even spoke to Figgis about the project. “He asked me lots of clever questions about it – Had I broken down the story? Where would I start it from? – and I didn’t have any answers to him. I’d just read the novel and knew I wanted to make it into a movie. I could see it in my mind’s eye.”

But then he saw an interview with the author himself in which he said only a master filmmaker would be able to adapt Silk for the big screen.

“I heard that and thought, ‘Well that’s not me’. I got the fear and didn’t pursue it. I just gave up on it. And the film was eventually made and I always kicked myself – I had Jeremy Thomas, who has produced for Bernardo Bertolucci, who could have helped me make that film.”

In 2009, another one got away: Deep Water, a project based on the true story of British sailor Donald Crowhurst, who died in 1969 trying to be the first person to sail solo around the world. Then came American Pastoral.

McGregor had been attached to the project for three years as the lead, but in late 2014 the director walked away. The film had been due to shoot in March 2015 and, with so little time before production started, it seemed unlikely that a replacement could be found. Even then it took McGregor’s wife, Eve, to point out the obvious.

“Having talked about directing for 20 years and banging on about waiting for the right story, Eve said to me one day: ‘It’s right under your nose. You should do it’ … I called up Tom Rosenberg [head of [production company Lakeshore Entertainment] and said would he consider me as the director.”

American Pastoral tells the story of a high school reunion in which author Nathan Zuckerman (Strathairn) learns about the fate of his best friend’s big brother, Seymour ‘The Swede’ Levov (McGregor), a star athlete and successful businessman who as far as Zuckerman knew was living the perfect life with his all-American family: former beauty queen Dawn (Connelly) and cute blonde daughter Mary (Fanning). It turns out he wasn’t.

The Swede’s story begins in the 1950s with his marriage to Dawn, but the bulk of it takes place in the late 1960s as Mary becomes involved in radical politics and a domestic bombing campaign which kills several people. When she renounces her parents and goes underground with the FBI on her tail, the Swede is heartbroken. He spends most of the rest of his life searching for her but the final encounters are as cruel and tragic as the quest has been painful.

McGregor has four daughters, the eldest of whom is now at university in New York, so it’s not hard to see why the story appealed so much to him. Strip away the political backdrop and American Pastoral is a film about a father who loses a daughter and has to come to terms with the fact that, though not dead, she will never return to him.

“I fell for it really hard as an actor, and as a father, I guess,” McGregor explains. “I think probably what spoke to me immediately was that the relationship between the Swede and Mary was very, very strong. Roth didn’t have any children so it’s interesting that he was able to write such a very accurate portrayal of being a parent.”

To date, two of McGregor’s daughters have seen it. So what emotions did it stir up in them?

“Well that’s private, really. But they both liked it very much.”

The list of directors McGregor has worked with over the last two decades includes some stellar names. Alongside the arch-auteur Peter Greenaway, who cast him in The Pillow Book, are Todd Haynes, Baz Luhrmann, Tim Burton, Ridley Scott, Michael Bay, Roman Polanski, Lasse Hallström and, of course, George Lucas, who cast him in three Star Wars films.

But talk to McGregor for any length of time about directors and directing and the name he returns to constantly is Danny Boyle. In large part it’s because of the huge range of subjects and styles that Boyle covers, from comedy and sci-fi to horror and hard-hitting, naturalistic drama.

“I just feel that that’s really film-making,” says McGregor. “It’s how I feel about acting as well. I always do stuff fresh, like it’s a brand new character and a new story and a different world. I always approach it like that so I hope all the characters feel different from one another and I think that’s what great directors do. They may have a style that we recognise, but the story dictates how the movie should look and feel. And Danny is definitely an example of that.”

But there’s a strong personal connection too. The pair first worked together on 1994’s Shallow Grave and later on A Life Less Ordinary (1997). Yet it was the film they made in between those two – Trainspotting, the seminal Scottish movie of the 1990s – that cemented the reputations of both men and provided the launchpad for their subsequent careers.

Which brings us neatly to T2: Trainspotting, set for release early next year and the highly-anticipated sequel to the much-loved 1996 film. It was shot in Edinburgh during the summer and, once again, it’s directed by Boyle, another reason he’s much on McGregor’s mind as his own directorial debut hits the cinemas.

“To be back with Danny after all these years of not working together was just a great feeling because he was my first ever movie director. He defined me as an actor when I started off. I felt like his actor and I felt like we were doing something important in British cinema and something that was leaving a mark. And then not to work together for all these years has been a regret.”

And how did he feel about being back in the company of Renton, the heroin-addicted ne’er-do-well he plays in the first film?

“I was a bit trepidacious approaching the role, to be honest, because it has been such a long time and I’m very different to how I was then. I worried about not being able to find him. But the truth is I’m him and he’s me and as soon as I got on set he was back. And I was really happy to play him again. I really liked it.”

And how weird was the off-screen experience of meeting up again with the actors playing Sick Boy, Spud, Begbie and Diane?

“It wasn’t weird at all,” he says. “It felt different from the first film because we are all different and the film itself is different. What we didn’t do, which would have been a mistake, was try to remake the kind of movie we made 20 years ago. What we did do was make a true sequel in that it is its own beast. And it was great to be back on set with Bobby and Ewen and Johnny and Kelly. It was just f***ing great.”

Away from film, but sticking with affirmative marks in empty boxes, McGregor’s other achievement this month has been to navigate his way through the inevitable questions put to him about Scottish independence in the wake of the Brexit vote.

As an LA resident, he didn’t have a say in the 2014 independence referendum. “And I tried really very hard to stay out of it. I didn’t ever comment on it at the time. I didn’t do interviews on it. I was asked to countless times, as you can imagine, leading up to the referendum. Everyone was trying to get me to comment.”

In the end, a statement of his that it would be “a shame” to break up the union were taken as an endorsement of the Better Together campaign. “And the tabloid press of course found quotes I’d made from the past and I guess my stance was revealed to the annoyance of people who quite rightly thought I should shut my mouth because I don’t live in Scotland.”

However in the wake of the Brexit vote he found himself reconsidering the independence question. “I’m totally confused by it and will continue to be so until we know what Brexit will mean,” he says. “But the day after the vote for Brexit I would definitely have ticked the other [Yes to independence] box.”

But if Theresa May’s next moves are hard to fathom, Ewan McGregor’s are easier to plot. Shortly after T2: Trainspotting is released he’ll tick off another career first when he takes the lead role in season three of Fargo, the acclaimed TV crime anthology spin-off from the Coen Brothers’ cult film.

Actually, make that roles: McGregor plays both Emmit Stussy, a self-made man and real estate mogul who’s billed as “the parking lot king of Minnesota”, and his bother Ray, a balding, pot-bellied, down-on-his-luck parole officer.

“They’re not twins, but they wanted the same actor to play them,” McGregor explains. “I very much liked the first two seasons of Fargo and I loved the movie when it came out all those years ago, so the idea of being able to make a 10-hour movie, if you like, and play two people in it …” Say no more.

We probably haven’t seen the last of Ewan McGregor the director either, though if American Pastoral was the big-budget film he should have made second, his next film may be the one he should have done first: a free-wheeling, low-budget indie shot guerilla-style on the streets of Scotland. That’s the plan, anyway. McGregor has only a vague idea so far of what that film might be, but he knows he wants to make it here and to use a cast of young people.

“I realise that after 25 years of working in this industry I have gathered a lot of skills and knowledge that I’m happy to pass on,” he says. “So I’d like to make something young and vital and contemporary. And I’ve always loved romantic movies but don’t much like romantic comedies. It’s almost like there’s an embarrassment about romance or love that we have to veil it in comedy. So I’d be quite interested in making a young, contemporary romantic movie. It should be rough and ready and quick and totally indie.”

I ask him if he realises what he’s letting himself in for: a postbag groaning with scripts, each one trying hard to catch the eye of a tyro director who just happens to be one of Scotland’s most acclaimed actors. He roars with laughter – though whether out of apprehension or delight is hard to say. Either way, the challenge now is to make it happen.

American Pastoral is out now; T2: Trainspotting is released on January 27; Fargo will screen in Spring 2017