One of Scotland’s most successful filmmakers has urged new writers, directors and producers to be as outward-looking as possible with their projects if they want to survive in the industry.
Iain Smith, who has been involved in the industry for more than 40 years, said Scotland’s filmmakers of the future should be seeking the widest audiences for their work.
Mr Smith, the chair of the British Film Commission, said he was more than optimistic than ever about Scottish filmmaking due the growing number of major productions that were choosing to film in Scotland and the impact that was having on the skills and talent-development.
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However Mr Smith, who worked with the celebrated director Bill Forsyth earlier in this career, said he was resistant to the idea of a separate “Scottish film industry".
And he suggested Scottish filmmaking was being held back by an anti-London “mentality” and a reluctant to leave Scotland to make work.
Mr Smith, who was born in Glasgow, was an associate producer on Local Hero, Bill Forsyth’s follow-up to his BAFTA-winning breakthrough hit Gregory’s Girl, after the pair had met in the early 1970s and made documentary films together around Scotland.
By 1981, Smith was a location manager on the Oscar-winning feature Chariots of Fire, which was filmed extensively in Scotland and produced by David Puttnam.
Mr Smith reunited with the producer on both Local Hero and The Killing Fields, and then went on to work on the films The Mission, Mary Reilly, Children of Men, Planet of the Apes, Entrapment, Cold Mountain, Seven Years in Tibet and The Fifth Element, as well as the TV series The Sandman.
In an exclusive interview with The Herald, Mr Smith recalled how Local Hero was made in the early 1980s thanks to a “confluence of opportunities”.
He said: “After Chariots of Fire, David Puttnam wanted to make a kind of Whisky Galore film set against the background of the oil business.
“Bill Forsyth wasn’t inclined to follow that path. But he and I had made a lot of documentaries, which had taken us all over Scotland. We encountered all sorts of wonderful people and situations.
“That’s what we were more interested in and what we more or less sold to David Puttnam. We got a small amount of money to make the film, got Burt Lancaster on board and everything else happened.
“You can say that Local Hero is a very Scottish subject, but it is a film about everything.
“Bill’s interests went way, way beyond the obvious. That makes for a much more interesting film no matter what the subject is.
“There are so many themes within Local Hero, including the environment we choose to live in and the way we choose to live. But it doesn’t shove those themes down anyone’s throats. It is one of those films, like all good films, that you can delve into and film stuff.
“It’s a pretty good example of what you might call a Scottish film, but that film got made with money that did not come from Scotland. That’s fair enough. You get your money where we can.”
Mr Smith previously served on the board of the long-running national agency Scottish Screen, but he resigned before it was controversially merged with the Scottish Arts Council to create a new organisation, Creative Scotland, in 2010. It would take another eight for a dedicated new body, Screen Scotland to be set up.
He said: “I found sitting on that board very frustrating. There seemed to be a self-limiting tendency.
“If you look at any of these organisations in Europe, they are a great point of contact for other sources of finance. They have entrepreneurial skills.
“When you can spread the risk and spread it no-one really feels the pain when it doesn’t work.
“There is a lot that could be done better with Screen Scotland. There is always a tension between London and Scotland.
“I keep trying to explain to anyone who cares to listen to me that there’s not a load of people sitting around thinking: ‘How are we going to f*** up the Scots?’ It is just misleading to think that is what happens.
“There is a mentality with the Scottish film industry not to have anything to do with London.
“You have to put yourself about. You can’t just sit in your castle keep and expect the world to come knocking on your door. You have to go out there and meet the Germans and the French.
My own solution was to leave Glasgow and leave Scotland.
“When I talk to film students and young filmmakers they are really torn over this.
“They have to realise that if they want to be in this business in some way or other they will have to consider the idea of learning by experiencing other places.
"We have to understand we are in the leisure business. We are successful if we can get people to carve out a couple of hours from their leisure time to attend or watch a film that we have made, get them to hopefully recommend it and perhaps even see it again themselves."
Mr Smith, who was appointed chair of the British Film Commission in 2011, said he had argued “long and hard” that securing inward investment was key to the future of screen production in Scotland.
Huge film sets and crews have become a regular sight on the streets of Glasgow in recent years for locations filming on large-scale productions, including Indiana Jones, Batman and Spider-Man films.
Eight series of Outlander have been made in Scotland to date at Wardpark Studios in Cumbernauld, while FirstStage Studios in Leith has played host to shows like The Rig and Dept Q.
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Mr Smith told The Herald: “Part of the commission’s job is to basically sell the idea of shooting films in the UK, including Scotland. We have pursued the Hollywood studios and the streaming companies.
“I think we have been remarkably successful with that and I think it is fair to say that a considerable amount of that success has been directed towards Scotland, and particularly Glasgow.
“I argued long and hard over many years that we needed to boost inward investment in Scotland, as it would it would provide money and give people the opportunity with experience of working on bigger productions.
“Scotland is now in the process of being considerably successful when it comes to the inward investment.
“The talent and crews in Scotland are maturing beautifully. They are gaining a reputation in their own right and carrying considerable responsibilities, which saving having to bring people here from London and Los Angeles. In that sense, I think Scotland will be successful.
"We felt we started the so-called Scottish film industry sitting in the Halt Bar on Woodlands Road in Glasgow, bemoaning the fact that the whole world was against us. We started to establish a community of like-minded people.
"I think there is justification for optimism in Scotland at the moment. But it needs continuing patience.
"Nowadays there is a lot of that happening and there are a lot more young people in the business. But we shouldn’t be too isolationist in Scotland. The world is now much more connected than it has ever been before."
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