Camera shy

A sensitivity to public opinion is quite something for a former film critic to confess. Prior to her festival appointment, McGill had made her name while working on The Herald as one of the UK's best, most deliciously enjoyable, and occasionally bitchy, reviewers. She could rave about a film, but she could also dissect it with just the right note of controlled poison. Now, however, she feels she has had a "tiny, tiny taste" of what it must be like to be a celebrity and a sitting target. There is something karmic, she feels, about the way she is now herself subjected to this occasional bile. "It's healthy to be on the other side. I think I probably was quite mean in my day. But when you're writing those columns you're trying to be entertaining week on week and it's very hard. Bitchiness is more entertaining. It's not like you can write a column saying, She's got lovely hair.' I think it's easier to be poisonous. Easier and more fun."

It is three days after McGill's return from Cannes International Film Festival. Just weeks before her own film festival is set to launch, she crafts a roll-up cigarette on a hotel bar table. Smoking was a habit she had given up, but with the shift of the EIFF to June this year - it had previously run in August alongside Edinburgh's other summer festivals - and the pressure of trying to plan its programme in only 10 months, she is feeling "somewhat burnt out" and is back on the nicotine. This, she says, is a slight lull before the storm, before the wheels finally kick into motion. Shifting the festival was not her idea: it had been talked about for many years, and, for all she believes in it, there are nerves "because, from a completely selfish point of view, everyone is going to blame me if it goes wrong".

Primarily intended to pull the festival away from the August holiday period when many film-makers and industry people are on vacation and unwilling to attend events, the time shift has had a beneficial side-effect. Cannes no longer represents a panic point in the Edinburgh programmer's calendar. At this time last year, McGill would have been locked into fevered negotiations over films she had seen in Cannes, with just a few weeks to lock her programme down. This year, Cannes was about little more than schmoozing, and didn't have that same frenzied intensity she recalls from previous times. "A while back I worked out why Cannes is so overwhelming," she says, referring to the films. "It's because you see all these people dying and falling in love and having sex and having babies. That combined with the fact that you're not sleeping very much or eating properly."

The film festival director's life is a semi-nomadic one, editable into a series of jump-cuts from aeroplane to screening room to hotel room to party, air-kissing across the globe then back to the office for telephone negotiations. In many ways, McGill seems a seasoned migrant, well-suited to the job. The first three years of her life were spent on Shetland, the next three in Germany, the following 12 in Lincolnshire, followed by Glasgow and a stint in London. For all she mostly grew up in Lincolnshire, she says she was aware, even then, that there was something temporary about this home: her parents, both Scottish, were constantly craving Scotland. The place she now feels most attached to is Glasgow, where she spent her university years. At 31, she seems even now to be only just flirting with settling. Home still seems an elusive concept. She and her boyfriend, Al Seed, have yet to unpack the boxes in a rented Edinburgh flat, having moved there from a smaller and even more temporary rented apartment.

Currently this existence seems to suit McGill. She and Seed, an actor and performer of physical theatre, dated at university before splitting up for nine years, only to get together again just over a year ago. They recently celebrated the 10th anniversary of their first date. Their lifestyles appear to meld well, except perhaps last August, when he was performing at the Fringe and she had her festival to run. "Al has to travel a lot as well," she explains. "To a degree we're in the same boat. Being separated is difficult sometimes, but I was single for a long time, so I'm quite used to being in my own headspace."

Most of McGill's closest friends are members of the crowd of critics that leapfrogs around the festivals, meeting each other in far-flung places and darkened screening rooms. Whenever she arrives, she will text: "Anyone here?" For her there is an intensity to relationships formed in these strange circumstances: "At Sundance you're at the other side of the world, 7000 feet above sea level, and you can't hear properly because of the altitude. You bond very closely." For all the travel, though, little of the world beyond screening room walls is seen. The issue of her carbon footprint does concern her. "You can't live in this world and not think about it. This industry is changing. The degree to which you need to travel around to see films is lessening. But then there's the whole thing of actually physically meeting people and interacting, which is enormously important."

In some way, the job requires someone who enjoys the peripatetic life, and doesn't feel too strongly the tug of home. When I mention that her appointment was greeted with much talk about her youth ("unfeasibly young", she herself joked in one interview) she points out that it is, by its nature, a job for the young and not terribly committed. "God knows it wouldn't combine with having kids. And anyway, I always thought my youth was overstated. Mark Cousins was younger than me when he did the job. But I think there's a culture at the moment of people saying, I can't believe you've done this and you're only 40!' It's because a lot of people haven't done what they want to and it's very threatening to them. But if you've been out of university 10 years, you should be doing something."

She does, however, show flickers of broodiness. "It's difficult. I think for any woman with a career, it's hard to build in time when you might have children. For a long time I was solidly single and it wasn't a big deal, but now it is. Ginnie Atkinson, the festival's managing director, won't let me go near babies. When people bring them in to the office she says, Keep that away from her!'"

It wasn't always obvious that McGill would become the director of a film festival, though in some ways her five years helping with programming for her predecessor Shane Danielsen could be seen as grooming for the job. Rather than being the result of a plan, however, she says the path to the job "unfolded". A promising journalistic star even from her student days, her one real ambition has always been to be a writer. Up until her festival appointment, it seemed as if her career might go one of two ways. Either she would have vaulted up the critics' ladder, landing a job on one of the London broadsheets, or she would have made her breakthrough as a writer of fiction. Already her short stories were well regarded. Did she sacrifice being a bright young author in order to be a bright young festival director?

The desire to write is still there. As she travels the world, moving from airline seat to movie theatre seat, she thinks of herself as a writer. She keeps a diary, takes notes, regards her experiences as material. "I still think of writing as what I do, even though my output is absurdly small. I still assume that I'll get back to it. But I was always terrible for creating diversionary activities to stop me from doing it, and, in a way, this is a massive diversionary activity." There are, she says, many sprawling, unfinished novels in her life.

This is perhaps no surprise, given that both her parents are writers. Her father, John McGill, is the author of an anthology of short stories and two novels, including The Most Glorified Strip Of Bunting, published last year. Her mother writes short stories under the name Morag McInnes. Though neither made a living from what they wrote - her father taught English and her mother was a community arts officer - they identified themselves primarily as writers. Whenever things seemed to be going wrong in McGill's childhood, her mother would always tell her: "It's all material."

"The only thing," McGill says now, "that would really impress them is if I published a novel. What I do now is very distant from them. Of course they're living on a farm in Orkney. It couldn't be more different."

It was her father who first brought her to film. An obsessive video taper from the television, he would file movies with the director's name and date, creating an extensive library of VCR cassettes. "Watching them with him," she recalls, "was my bonding with my dad thing. We watched classic Hollywood. Being a gentleman of his generation from Glasgow he was very into cowboy movies." Later, as a teenager, she would work at a Lincoln cinema, serving ice-cream and falling for "the romance of cinema and popcorn and usherettes". The "ballast" of her cinema knowledge, the exposure to the likes of Soviet and Italian neo-realist film-making, came at university, where she studied English literature and film.

Nevertheless, she doesn't feel like "a true cinephile or film buff". Danielsen, is someone she admires for having that exhaustive ballast. Yet McGill has something that Danielsen, with his confrontational style and filmic knowledge, lacked: a light, seductive, charisma. Her charm is that she views Edinburgh as much as a people's festival as a film festival. She shows delight at the event's starriness: at her opening night party she stood watching Franz Ferdinand and leaning her head on Tilda Swinton's shoulder, and feeling that this was a moment to remember forever. Yet, at the same time, she takes very seriously the small players. A whole strand of cultish, very alternative films in the festival titled Under The Radar was generated from a chance meeting with a volunteer at a bus stop during the Sundance Film Festival in the US. He told her about his film, Blood Car, a tale of a vegan who inadvertently invents a carnivorous vehicle, and she decided she had to see it.

What makes a good critic - and probably also a good festival director - is an ability to go inside the screening room again and again, and yet never become deadened to film. Danielsen calculated that he watched around 600 films a year. McGill does some rough calculations in her head and then gives up. "My best friend always takes the piss out of me because he says, If Hannah's really, really busy and been at a festival, she'll say, Oh, I'm knackered, let's get some DVDs. I never get sick of watching films. And that's weird because when I was a TV critic I got absolutely sick of watching telly."

That enduring love of cinema is clear when she swoons over "lovely Jeanne Moreau", the actress to whom she has committed a retrospective this year, or talks of the festival's opening night movie, The Edge Of Love, as "an incredible, operatic thing".

McGill also understands the glitz of film and is enchanted by its "slightly camp element". It's a sensibility that seems to be reflected even in her personal style, a film-noirish, retro glamour. For the opening night party of her first festival she was almost more glam than the stars, wearing white Alexander McQueen with red heels: a Marilyn Monroe meets Dorothy from The Wizard Of Oz festival bride. This year the style pressure has been cranked up. "I was in Harvey Nichols yesterday trying on dresses for this year and the assistant said to me, Is it for a special occasion?' I said, Look, I've got to stand between Keira Knightley and Sienna Miller.'" She admits that this aspect of the job is tremendous fun. "I think anybody doing a job like this enjoys it. You have to be a bit of an attention-seeker to do it."

Strangely, given this, McGill talks of herself as a shy person, and it's true that there appears to be some trace of shyness in her manner. It's part of her charm, this weft of diffidence that runs through her warp of biting humour and intellectual bravura. Working on the festival these last two years has forced her to push her personality a little more out there. "I'm probably a bit more resilient. I think, ironically, that critics are frightened of criticism. So I think this toughens you up."

For all the talk of glamour, however, this year's film programme is not overly burdened with what she calls "big, shiny films". Perhaps the closest is The Edge Of Love, a Keira Knightley biopic about Dylan Thomas, which McGill describes as "reminiscent of Gone With The Wind". In her programme, she describes Knightley as "never better nor more beautiful". "I think the way that people like her get treated is so obnoxious. Doing this job, I've experienced a microcosm of what it is to be properly famous. You do have a degree of sympathy for these people who can't move without being criticised. We live in a culture that is so bitchy."

Professional criticism is not something she thinks she will return to. Rather she imagines life after the film festival as more likely to feature fiction-writing or a PhD. "Doing this job, you see the angst people have to go through when making a film. You become a lot more forgiving and you realise that critics' opinions have a very short life. That judging of people - I don't think it's a good thing to do forever."