Hollywood or bust

Millar had come to the meeting armed with a statistic. When asked to speak about Scottish cinema, he mentioned the fact that, for 15 years, Scotland had come bottom of the league table when it came to people paying to see films made in their own country. For a decade-and-a-half there were fewer Scots going to see Scottish movies than Koreans going to see Korean movies or English people going to see English movies. And yet, he pointed out, cinema remains hugely popular in Scotland. "We are a massive nation of cinema fans but we don't like what we're putting out, so I was just thinking why is that? Why do I not like Scottish films? Gregory's Girl was maybe the last time I paid to see a Scottish film."

The reason, he told the meeting, was Scotland's "socialist cinema". "I'm a left-winger. It's an odd thing for me to say. But in this country and Europe as well you have a kind of soviet approach to film-making. It's Government-funded and if the Government is using taxpayers' money to help make movies then people feel it has to be something award-winning. You're unlikely to have a zombie or a robot or an alien invasion movie – all the sort of stuff that people generally go and see." He told the meeting it was time for Scotland to follow the Hollywood model.

Understandably, a lot of people didn't want to hear what he had to say. He could see Loach giving him a look that day. But the Scottish Government was listening. More than that, they seemed genuinely interested in his ideas. And so last Monday night, under the auspices of the Glasgow Film Festival, around 200 people came together in a room with Millar, Salmond and the Culture Secretary, Fiona Hyslop, to see if they could encourage investment in a new form of Scottish cinema – one geared to tapping into the undiminished appetite for movies. Financial advisers to hedge fund managers and venture capitalists mingled with the First Minister and heard how cinema – for all its risky reputation – is a potentially hugely rewarding investment opportunity.

"The rewards are enormous," says Millar. "If you do the right stuff you make an absolute fortune. I've got friends who are disgracefully rich through film because they've got commercial instincts. They know what they're doing."

He cites the example of his friend, Kick-Ass director Matthew Vaughn. "Private investors funded his first four movies and everyone made a great return. In 2008, he raised £27 million to make Kick-Ass and the movie made £96m on theatrical and another £140m on DVD and Blu-ray so the investors had an enormous return and that was over the 2008 crash."

Millar is a natural provocateur with fanboy tastes who probably doesn't spend his evenings watching Rainer Werner Fassbinder box sets. But it's easy to see why his ideas might appeal at a time of austerity. To put it in Millarspeak, why should the Government – through Creative Scotland – invest in movies that no-one wants to see when it could facilitate meetings between creatives and potential investors. "I've always noticed that all my friends in the arts never know rich guys," points out Millar, "and all my rich friends never know guys in the arts. The two worlds don't meet; the golf club and the art school do not cross. That's a great function of government: you can put both of these groups together."

It's a timely message. As former Edinburgh Film Festival director Hannah McGill points out: "The reality is that public funding isn't going to allow people to make films even if we thought that was the best system. It's going to go away. There is a much more entrepreneurial model that is followed by independent film-makers in the States where you raise the money to do it and then you do it. That is the way forward. We're going to have to see that as the way people get films made in the future."

Whether it's possible, never mind preferable, for Scotland to reinvent itself on a Hollywood model she's not so sure. "I'm not convinced that's the way forward for any small industry. To try to go up against Hollywood is not a realistic aspiration for a film industry of the scale that we could ever possibly have and, if anything, embracing the smallness of your industry might be a little more healthy."

Still, the Government is investing its time in Millar's idea. In the wake of Monday's meeting, Salmond hymed the potential for Scotland to be "a production powerhouse".

Monday night's event, he said, brought "potential film investors together with talented Scottish film-makers .... [it] is another signal of our commitment to supporting the home-grown film industry and to putting Scotland on the big screen".

Hyslop told the Sunday Herald: "The film investors' night was an SNP manifesto commitment to encourage Scottish film-making talent and there is still more to do to take this forward. The evening was the start of a conversation between the two sectors and we will be working in the coming months on the ways in which we can best build on that momentum."

But Millar's ideas go further than a meet and greet. "I said to Alex, 'what about doing it like Dragons' Den, as crass as this sounds?'. What I suggested was guys maybe shoot two minutes of their movie or a trailer and put together a presentation package. Once a year at the Edinburgh or Glasgow film festivals you'll have an investors' night where the 10 most promising films needing funding come forward, have a bunch of rich guys in the room and they can look at what's being presented and they can decide what they're going to fund."

The Government likes the idea. "We are very attracted to something along the lines of Mark Millar's idea and are discussing how to take this forward," says Hyslop.

"I really trust the judgment of people who don't work in the film industry," says Millar. "I'm very suspicious of committees because people don't throw money at things for the right reason. It's the crass commercialisation, I guess, of the film industry. But I think within a year or two you could actually change the face of film-making in Scotland because all the guys who are making these socially conscious movies are desperately wanting to be shooting westerns or sci-fi."

That's never going to happen with the current funding model, he  says. Turn up looking for a publicly-funded committee to fund your western or sci-fi and it will never happen, because the people listening to your pitch can't give money to such projects whether they want to or not. They're going to feel bad if they go back to the boss and say 'you know what? I threw all the money into that robot movie'."

THERE'S a touch of devilry about such a statement. And as Creative Scotland's director of creative development Caroline Parkinson points out, it's describing a process that has already passed into history. "There is no investment committee process for decision making. If a film project has attracted significant investment along with sales and distribution, indicating there is an audience and market for it, then it stands a strong chance of securing investment from Creative Scotland.

"There has been a diverse range of films supported in this way, including Outpost: Black Sun, the second in a series of films from Glasgow-based Black Camel pictures and the modern urban horror Citadel from Sigma Films."

Creative Scotland is also supporting the Mackendrick Fund, which aims to attract private funding and which was also represented on Monday night.

Hyslop sees the investors' night as the first step in an ongoing process.

"The Scottish Government wants to support the wide interest in film and to encourage a strong and vibrant film industry because the creative industries are a key sector for our economic growth," she said.

"There is a real opportunity for a step change in the range and scale of what we do, but we want to support a spectrum of initiatives. Scotland is a fantastic location for movie-makers, and Scottish people are creative and innovative. Film-making here enables us to promote Scottish creativity and innovation, as well as our unique heritage and distinctive culture on a world stage, and this will open up further opportunities for investment."

If the Government can continue to get creative types together with potential investors, Millar doesn't see why Scotland can't find its own equivalent of New Zealand's Peter Jackson, director of the Lord Of The Rings trilogy – "one of the most enormous franchises of all time" and filmed in Jackson's own backyard.

It's an attractive idea. Then again, it's just as possible the result could be a stream of Guy McRitchie movies. But that's not an argument Millar recognises. "Movies are populist. That doesn't necessarily mean stupid. Inception made $800m and it was a really smart film. So it's not a dumbing down of cinema. It's just making cinema for everybody."

But will popular cinema be particularly Scottish? The new director of the Edinburgh Film Festival isn't so sure. "Films project the character and aspirations of a nation," said Chris Fujiwara. "I hope as someone who's just landed here I'll be forgiven for saying this, but I think if the films Scotland makes and exports answer only to commercial imperatives, then Scottish cinema will express only a small part, and not the most attractive and distinctive part, of what Scotland is as a nation."

Millar has just finished Kick-Ass 2 and is working with Vaughn on their spin on a James Bond-style idea. He's following his mainstream tastes. He'd say that's how you make films people want to see. Perhaps. But as the screenwriter William Goldman once said, the golden rule of cinema is "Nobody knows anything".

After all, suggests Hannah McGill, who'd have thought The Artist would be so successful. "If you'd taken that to Dragons' Den they would probably have laughed you out of the room."