Russell Leadbetter

IT has been described as one of the "quiet must-see little masterpieces of British cinema" but Bill Forsyth's 1983 film, Local Hero, also seems to have been ahead of its time.

It has now been claimed that the film shed light on environmental concerns that have since become part of the mainstream discussion.

The film saw Burt Lancaster as a Texan oil magnate seeking to buy a small Scottish west-coast fishing village of as a location for an oil refinery. The locals look forward to a huge payday but in the end, after meeting a recluse who owns the local beach, Lancaster's star-gazing executive switches his plans for the picturesque village from oil to an observatory.

Speaking on a Radio 4 series about the history of Britain's oil industry, presented by James Naughtie, Mr Forsyth said: "At one stage in the 90s I did get to know some instigators of the Greenpeace movement, some of the key players in it.

"And they said, 'But that was what we needed at that time - we didn't need a film that stated the whole case of things, we needed a film that just started to describe the language of environmentalism.

"'That was the stage we were at - it was the ABC of environmentalism and just raised the idea that there maybe should be a conversation about it.'"

Speaking about the film's genesis, Mr Forsyth added: "I was just writing from where I was, and from things that I knew about, and my experience of Scotland and the oil debate.

"All of the characters in Local Hero are more or less based on people that I knew - I don't mean as individuals but as types.

"I knew hoteliers who were scratching a living, determined to stay where they were and make it work."

He added: "The one thing I had to do was write a four- or five-page treatment to persuade the financiers and the producers that there was a script in the idea.

"One of the key things that I invoked in that little document was The Beverly Hillbillies, a TV series in the seventies about a farmer out in America, and suddenly they discover oil. On his patch of ground the oil is just leaking out of the earth.

"It's a kind of fish-out-of-water thing and it was quite a clever series. That was the one idea that the Local Hero story struck in me initially, was the idea if just what would happen to a small community if this humongous amount of money just descended on it ... What it would do to people, what would it do to their values, what would it do to their sense of where they came from."

The film, which was shot in such places as Pennan, also starred Peter Riegert, Denis Lawson, Fulton Mackay, Peter Capaldi and Jenny Seagrove.

Al Gore, former Vice-President of the United States, once said that Local Hero was his favourite film.