Brian Welsh on his new film Beats

“I’ve had to sneak off most nights,” Welsh admits. “After 10 nights it’s a bit exhausting.”

Well, I say, you are getting on a bit, Brian. “I’m 38 this year,” he admits, laughing.

It’s the morning after the night before and Welsh is looking forward to some down time in Cornwall where he lives these days with his partner Georgia and his surfboard (“I’m crazy into my surfing.”)

Actually, to be precise, he divides his time between Cornwall and Aberdeen. And, in terms of work, between TV and cinema.

Welsh already has an episode of Black Mirror, a couple of TV series (Mayday and The Escape Artist), and a couple of TV movies (Glasgow Girls and The Rack Pack) to his name. But the reception of Beats since it closed this year’s Glasgow Film Festival suggests he’s about to take a step up.

Set around the introduction of the 1994 Criminal Justice Bill, Beats is a film about the 1990s, techno, being young and getting out of your head because it’s the only thing you have the power to do. In its own way it’s a political movie, although the most obvious takeaway is the excitement of its extended and formally inventive vision of an illegal rave – when the otherwise black and white movie flashes into colour and the imagery starts to layer and layer in unorthodox and inventive ways.

It also involved organising a proper old school rave, with 1500 mad-for-it dancers and a handful of Scottish techno acts.

It was the only thing to do, Welsh explains. “We’d studied a lot of party scenes in films and you realise that the majority of them are really bad, because the rules of film-making dictate that the music plays a little while people dance, the music stops, people continue to pretend-dance and then they record the dialogue and it just looks really fake.

“So, we had this inspired decision of saying the film crew aren’t the main event. The party is the main event. We need to work around it. In order to get that sense of intensity in the room it needs to be an actual night.”

Welsh can speak from experience when it comes to that intensity. He was a year or two younger than his film’s two main characters Johnno (played by Cristian Ortega) and Spanner (Lorn Macdonald) in his film. But the soundtrack to his youth was much the same.

“I was introduced to that scene of underground techno parties and it was a hugely transformative experience for me. I grew up in Aberdeen at a time when there was a lot of violence and hard drug use and I found my teenage years quite scary. But I was introduced to this world of … it all sounds a bit cheesy … but of love and communal joy and fun and friends. At the time I didn’t consider that that in itself could be considered an almost political experience but looking back on what it was.”

Seeing Kieran Hurley’s one-man play Beats at the Bush Theatre in London brought it all back to him. “It really felt like it was talking to me directly, articulating the experience of my own youth.”

Soon he was working with the writer at turning the play into a screenplay.

How hard is it to get a film made in the UK these days, Brian? “Very hard, to put it bluntly. You’re always up against it. You need some really strong champions behind you and, even then, the whole thing can collapse at the last minute.

“It’s difficult and you’ve got to be tenacious.”

What also helps, he says, are strong champions who have got your back. He had one in his producer Camilla Bray. Another in his executive producer, a certain Steven Soderbergh, director of Sex, Lies and Videotape, Ocean’s Eleven and its sequels, as well as Logan Lucky and Erin Brockovich.

Welsh says Soderbergh became “a bit of a Mr Miyagi-like mentor figure” for him. They bonded over snooker of all things. “He saw my Black Mirror episode and at the time we started chatting I was making The Rack Pack and weirdly he knew about Alex Higgins and Steve Davis. He’s got a vast spectrum of knowledge. He seems to know everything about everything.

“He supports all kinds of things and it comes from a genuine place of believing in what he does and the people he supports and that’s a very cool and a very generous thing to do in this day and age, I think.”

How did he get to the point where he was chatting to Hollywood film directors? Welsh’s life has been a peripatetic one. He was born in Falkirk (“still really home,” he says), moved to Aberdeen when he was around 10 and then later spent time in Japan, Middlesbrough, Glasgow and Brighton.

His own techno-loving teens, as we’ve already established, were spent in Aberdeen. Who was the teenage Welsh then? “I was a bit of a scoundrel. I was very into the party scene, very into techno music and making music.

“At a certain point I decided to sort myself out. I went back and resat my Highers and applied to various places where you could study filmmaking and I was lucky to get into Cleveland College of Art and Design. It was there that I really got into film editing and I think part of the reason for that was there was something intuitively connected to the techniques of creating dance music or hip hop, where you are smashing things together.”

Welsh then worked as a documentary editor in Glasgow for a while before heading off to the National Film School in London. In his last year there, he was given a grant and decided to branch out into directing with a micro-microbudget movie called Kin.

TV then came calling after his second microbudget movie In Our Name.

“I think TV was really good for me. It was a really good training ground to be honest. When I first found myself on set, I didn’t really know the difference between a crane and a dolly. I learnt these things really quickly because time is so much more of a pressure on TV. You don’t have the time. You have three scenes to shoot in an hour before the day’s up, so you have to be very adaptable. If you don’t get through your days, you don’t get what you need to tell the story.”

As well as something of a calling card for its two young male stars, Beats marks the start of what Welsh hopes is an ongoing relationship with its writer Kieran Hurley. “I am co-writing a couple of treatments with Kieran. I’m very keen to try and keep that relationship going. I want to do more good, strong films in Scotland.”

The challenge, though, is to make sure people see them. “What I’d really love for Beats is for people to go out to the cinema and watch it. So many British films – sometimes, really good ones – don’t make any money. We’re up against The Avengers or John Wick or whatever, so they disappear quickly and that makes it harder to build a case for people financing another one. So, we’re really keen that folk come out en masse to see it.”

Beats is in cinemas now