Feature by Northings
Don Coutts on ‘American Cousins': Feel good film in Highland Premiere
‘American Cousins’ is a new feature film made in Scotland, which will premiere at the Highland Festival. Film director DON COUTTS reflects on the making of the movie.
Don Coutts
AMERICAN COUSINS started out as script by Sergio Casci, who is a former BBC journalist turned freelance scriptwriter that I have worked with several times, including our film for the the Tartan Shorts series, Dead Sea Scrolls, with the late Ian Bannen.
Sergios script was originally called Strawberry Whistler, which came from a story about a guy working in an ice cream shop who had to whistle while he was preparing the sundaes, so that the owner knew he wasnt eating the fruit. Of course, he just stuck them in his pocket for later!
Anyway, we had the script schlepping around for about 3 years, and eventually linked up with Margaret Matheson, who is a film producer. Margaret is a Borders Scot based in London, and she is that rare thing in the film business, someone you feel you can trust!
Nothing much was happening, and eventually I rang Margaret and said let’s just forget about this, and she was very apologetic about not being able to place it for us. She rang back literally about two hours later, and said you’re not going to believe this, but I just had a call from a company who make tax break movies.
They had been doing a film with John Hannah that had fallen apart, and wanted to do American Cousins. We had to sign over the rights and come in basically as hired hands. That was November 2001, and I was already working with Clarissa Dixon-Wright on Clarissa and The Countryman for the BBC. We are an unlikely mixture of vegetarian socialist (thats me) and carnivorous libertarian!
I can’t say I was really desperate to make a feature film, but I wasn’t going to pass up on the chance, either. We decamped to my mother in law’s at Bridge of Allan, and started shooting on 14 January in Govan, where it rained every day! We got two really good American actors, Darren Hedaya and Danny Nucci, who was the very handsome guy who won the ticket in Titanic, but didn’t get the girl.
American Cousins
The film is about a Mafia hit in the Ukraine which goes wrong, and the two guys get off the plane in Glasgow because they think they are going to get hammered. They ring the office in New York and discover they have family in Glasgow, but of course, family has rather different connotations for them!
It turns out to be a fish and chip shop owner, and the film is really about the exploits of the Mafia guys in Glasgow. Shirley Henderson is the female lead, and it’s really a kind of comedy romance. It was the first big role for Gerard Lepkowski, who is from Govan originally, but spent some time in Australia, and we had guest cameos from Vincent Pastore (from The Sopranos), Russell Hunter as the granddad, and artist and playwright John Byrne, who is brilliant as a customs officer.
I directed the fim, and my partner Lindy Cameron edited it here at Move On Ups studio in Cromarty. RACE (Ross and Cromarty Enterprise) very kindly gave us some funding to upgrade our editing suite. They are very supportive in that way. We had to do the dubbing in Dublin, because you can’t do that in Scotland – we don’t have a Dolby suite here, and if you don’t do it in Dolby then you won’t get a Dolby licence, and you can forget about a cinema release. We did the colouring effects in Copenhagen.
Donald Shaw of Capercaillie wrote a lovely music score for us, and we are having an afternoon event at Eden Court on the day of the premiere (8 June) in which Ill be talking about music in film with Donald, Phil Cunningham and Stewart Svaasand. We finished it in August last year, and its definitely a smile movie. It’s not going to change the world, but I think it’s a good wee movie.
American Cousins
We have world distribution through a company called Icon, which I think belongs to Mel Gibson, but they didn’t pick up British rights, because they already had too many independent films here. Margaret Matheson, the producer, has decided to distribute it herself, which is slightly unusual, so we’re hoping to have a limited Scottish release around September. We dont have the huge marketing budgets of Hollywood movies, so we are racking our brains for a promotional gimmick – free fish and chips, maybe!
The Highland Festival screening will be the UK premiere, other than a screening for cast and crew in Glasgow. The only other screening was at Tartan Day in New York, and the film went down really well there.
I have this bee in my bonnet that unless we start to make popular narrative films in Scotland, our industry is not going to survive. Films like Morven Caller are very important, but I can’t imagine they make much money, and if they don’t do that, we have an industry that is not going to attract investment.
We turn out lots of good short films, which are fine in themselves and for providing training and experience, but we need to invest in storytelling on a popular level.
Although we have the company (Move On Up), a lot of our work is done as freelancers at the moment. Its a difficult time for small production companies. Being based in Cromarty can also make life complicated at times, but it’s all worth it. We are both from the Highlands originally, and we wanted to move back here when we had the kids, which is ten years ago now.
Don Coutts is a film director. He runs Move On Up from Cromarty with his partner, Lindy Cameron. Don Coutts spoke to Kenny Mathieson.
