On Friday, two Hollywood honchos - Mike Heard of 20th Century Fox and Vicki Gabor of Walt Disney Pictures - said that Scotland needs a 45,000sq-ft movie studio. They had just been on a tour of Scotland, and were raving about our mountains, castles, beaches and the like, but said that, because it rains in Scotland so much, if major film productions are to be shot here, they would need a well-equipped studio space to provide weather cover.
This seems to make sense and, coming from such senior figures, the point should be taken seriously. The economic impact of major film production would be considerable and a studio would be a great new resource for our film-makers.
But look into it and the idea starts to look less workable. There are two practical reasons why. Some years ago, Sean Connery and David Murray tried to get a film studio going outside Edinburgh - with backing from Sony - but the figures just didn't stack up. There have been other attempts too. In each case the business plans could not envisage sustainable year-round bookings for such an expensive facility. Many of the world's movie studios - even the Pinewood Shepperton complex near London - toil for business. It makes no sense for Scotland to become a seller of studio space - partly paid for by public money - in what is a buyers' market.
More importantly, the film industry is half way through its biggest technical revolution since the transition from silent to sound film. It would be unwise to invest in an expensive facility at a time of such change. Lots of small post-production companies in Scotland and elsewhere went to the wall and people lost their shirts in the last decade or so because of a series of changes in editing technology - especially its miniaturisation. If the Connery-Murray plan had been realised in the late 1990s, their sound stages might now be white elephants or need total refits.
Take a broader view of indigenous film-making and the case against a studio becomes a question of policy as much as practicalities. In the 1980s, when Bill Forsyth's films Gregory's Girl and Local Hero revived the confidence of the Scottish film world, it was often said that ours was a cottage movie industry. And it was. To many it seemed that the next stage would be to move to a "proper" industry, a Fordist stage, and build major studio facilities. Thanks to the worldwide success of Hollywood, film, for many people, equalled studio. But digital production is democratising film-making, opening it to more people, making equipment smaller and more transportable. The big studio Fordist system is giving way to post-Fordism. With the movies of Scottish directors such as Lynne Ramsay, Peter Mullan, and David Mackenzie, our industry has leap-frogged studio production. It has "travelled light" in the last decade, by not wedding itself to a studio.
Scotland's film agency Scottish Screen, and our politicians, could yet decide to build studios here but my strong belief is that we should train our limited resources on software rather than hardware, well-trained technicians and craftspeople and creative talent incubation. Intellectual property. This is what will drive our film culture. This is what will keep it nimble and responsive to inward investment needs and social and technological change. There is a new lightness in film production. It would be wrong to weigh ourselves down with the LA studio model.
Mark Cousins co-owns the production company 4Way Pictures with Robert Carlyle, Antonia Bird and Irvine Welsh
