Beating the Odds

ALLAN HUNTER catches up with Skye-born film-maker DOUGLAS MACKINNON ahead of the scheduled premiere of The Flying Scotsman as opening film at the Edinburgh International Film Festival.

DOUGLAS MACKINNON can remember the moment he decided to make directing a feature film one of his life’s ambitions. He was twenty-two and attended a screening of the Jenny Gilbertson film ‘The Rugged Island: A Shetland Lyric’.

“It must have been around 1983, and there was a screening of the film at the Mitchell Library in Glasgow,” he recalls. “I went along and the screening was attended by Jenny and one of the people from the film. It was made around 1931 in Shetland and it felt like there was some kind of immortality in what they had done. I’m from Skye, and also have a Shetland heritage, and it was a moment of discovering there were ways to tell stories about your own lives.”

Mackinnon has waited a long time to make his ambition a reality, but he has done so in spectacular style as the director of ‘The Flying Scotsman’, an inspirational true story of champion cyclist Graeme Obree and his revolutionary home-made bike, dubbed Old Faithful.
 It has its world premiere as the opening night of the 60th Edinburgh International Film Festival on 14 August. Jonny Lee Miller plays Obree, and a strong Scottish cast includes Brian Cox, Billy Boyd and Laura Fraser.

Regardless of what happens it is a moment of unbounded joy for me that I’ve finally achieved what I set out to do all these years ago

“I just knew what everyone else knew about Graeme Obree. I am a sports fan but not a cycling fan. I was starting from scratch and it instantly leapt out as a piece of Scottish cinema,” Mackinnon recalls. “It had the elements of films that have often worked in Scotland in the past – it is set in a small town, it has a guy who is a local hero, and so on.

“The most attractive aspect of the story was that these extraordinary things were done by somebody who is actually very ordinary. The values in his story are very Scottish values. Simply put, the film says that even though you are a world record holder you cannot get anywhere without people helping you.”

Mackinnon has spent a number of years working on ‘The Flying Scotsman’. Financing for the project collapsed on the eve of filming in 2003. Two years later and against all the odds, it rose from the ashes and finally went into production.

It has been a labour of love for everyone, with Jonny Lee Miller remaining committed to the film throughout its financial travails, and Graeme Obree himself investing his time and energy in its realisation. Obree even held the camera for some of the shots that required a cyclist of speed and skill to hurl themselves around a velodrome.

You may not be able to spot it, but in a few of the most demanding scenes Obree even acts as Jonny Lee Miller’s double and effectively plays himself.
 
The financial travails, however, continue. The company behind ‘The Flying Scotsman’ is now in administration, and everyone involved sees the Edinburgh premiere as a chance to secure a British distributor and ensure that everyone on the film is finally paid all the money they are still owed.

The whole long experience has been a baptism of fire, but Mackinnon is probably the most experienced ‘newcomer’ in Scotland, with a list of television credits that includes some of the best small screen drama in recent years.

His work includes riveting medical drama ‘Bodies’ with Max Beesley, adult police thriller ‘The Vice’ with Ken Stott, period romp ‘Gentleman’s Relish’ with Billy Connolly, and ‘The Bill’.

“The common ground in everything I’ve done is storytelling,” he says. “Telling stories to a mass audience is what interests me, and television gives you a fantastic training for that. I did an episode of ‘The Bill’ that was watched by 18.5 million viewers, and no feature film in this country is going to equal that. Somebody said to me once that television is a guest in the house, whereas cinema is the host. I’ve always been fond of that thought.

“In the cinema, people actively go along and sit in a big dark room with other people, and you’ve got time to tell a story in a slightly different way.”

Mackinnon first caught the attention with his student graduation film ‘Ashes’ (1989) and the short ‘Sealladh’ (1992) with Peter Mullan, before embarking on his prolific television career. He now lives in the Fife fishing village of Crail with his wife and two children, but spends most of his working life out of Scotland, something that he clearly regrets.

“People come to me with Scottish feature film projects because I am a Scottish director,” he explains, “whereas television is pretty much run from London and England, and I’m a director for hire and I need to work.

“I’ve never done any full-scale television drama in Scotland, and I would love to. ‘Ashes’, ‘Sealladh’ and ‘The Flying Scotsman’ are the three times I’ve worked in Scotland, and are all from the more cinematic end of my career. It’s not by design – I’m really a victim of what has come along.”

Mackinnon is currently directing three episodes of the BBC television series ‘Jekyll’, starring James Nesbitt. It offers a contemporary twist on the oft-told Robert Louis Stevenson tale that he describes as “a cross between ‘24’ and ‘The Fugitive’”. It will be screened in 2007, and is been touted by some BBC sources as the next ‘State Of Play’.

“No pressure there, then,” Mackinnon jokes. He also plans to continue his feature film career with a big screen adaptation of the Alan Spence novel ‘Way To Go’, a bleakly funny tale of mortality, spirituality and salvation set amongst a family of Glasgow undertakers.

“If the money falls into place I would like to shoot ‘Way To Go’ next year,” he reveals. “Realistically, I know that everything hangs on the reaction to ‘The Flying Scotsman’ at Edinburgh. Regardless of what happens it is a moment of unbounded joy for me that I’ve finally achieved what I set out to do all these years ago.”

© Allan Hunter, 2006

Link

• Edinburgh International Film Festival