He is probably Scotland's most celebrated movie director, as well as one of our most elusive.

Bill Forsyth transformed Scotland's film world with his movies, Gregory's Girl and Local Hero, before going on to have a troubled career in Hollywood. He rarely speaks in public, admits he does not enjoy going to the cinema, and hasn't made a film since Gregory's Two Girls in 1999.

However, this week, at a special event at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, the Glaswegian spoke of his career and tried to dispel some of the assumptions about attempting to make movies in the US.

He also confirmed that he is in the process of making a new film, rumoured to be called Exile, which has "elements of the supernatural" about it and, as a genre piece, somewhat of a departure for the director.

Forsyth, 62, made three films in the US for Warner Bros - Housekeeping, Breaking In with Burt Reynolds, and Being Human with Robin Williams. The third was a particularly painful production that was heavily edited and not released for several years.

Forsyth said he had not been "torn to pieces" in Hollywood as many have since thought, but he accepted that it is a hard place to make movies, for any director.

"There is this myth about me going to Hollywood and being torn to pieces, but it is a myth, and what happened to me could have happened to anyone in that system," he told an audience at the festival.

"Eighty per cent of directors are happy to work in that system. They are happy to shoot four different endings so the studio can choose one later. It was only because I was seen as this outsider figure that my time there became controversial."

On Being Human, he added: "Once again what happened there was turned into this big event that it was not released but that is what usually happens in the big studios. They make more movies than they have money to promote."

Born in Glasgow on July 29, 1946 and educated at Knightswood School, at the age of 17 he answered an advertisement for a "lad required for film company" and spent the next eight years making short documentary films in and around Glasgow, a fertile training ground for his early realist films, he said.

Gregory's Girl, made in 1981, is still regarded as one of the best Scottish movies.

Forsyth was frank about his motivation: "I wanted to make a feature film, and figured that if I was going to make a cheap feature film in Scotland, I should include football, and work with young people because they would be cheap. I also had this idea that, well, there's five million people in Scotland, and if only half of them watch the film, that's two-and-a-half-million people and I would be on to a winner. So I was quite calculated in what I was doing."

He revealed that the iconic final shot of Local Hero - a public telephone box ringing in Pennan, the village where it was filmed - was insisted on by the studio which did not approve of his original, more downbeat ending.

"I still don't feel 100% comfortable about that ending," he said. "In a way it is bleaker, because all Mac the American oilman who tried to buy the village has left from his visit there is that telephone number. But Warner Bros wanted a happier ending, and that's all that mattered."

Forsyth said much of the humour in his films comes from his Glasgow upbringing. "I think it's part of the culture of Glasgow, the comedy of adversity," he said.

"It is a way of dealing with tough situations. Sometimes the darker things get, the funnier they are. I did not make it up, it came from the ground on which I stood. I always used to like the idea of telling the ultimate joke', which you would not actually be able to laugh at, because it was so close to reality," he said.

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