I'm old enough to remember Bill Forsyth's first films Gregory's Girl and That Sinking Feeling resonating with me as a teenager when, in the early Eighties, I first watched them during half-term breaks in the North of Scotland. We thought they were great. The dark, understated comedies were familiar and strange at the same time - it seemed like some local kids had just strolled into the film, yet there was nothing else like these out there. Scottish feature films were few and far between back then.
The Scottish film industry was embryonic and undernourished. After producing Local Hero in 1983, the most widely known and one of the best films to come out of Scotland ever - he famously called it "Brigadoon meets Apocalypse Now" - Bill Forsyth and the "Scottish film industry" were practically the same thing.
Things have changed quite a bit. Bill Forsyth hasn't made a film since the less successful Gregory's Two Girls ("not a sequel") was released in 1999. The most recent film before that was Being Human, starring Robin Williams, in 1993. The third and most expensive of his Hollywood films, Being Human was heavily edited and held back by the studio for years.
What happened to Bill Forsyth?
Forsyth, 63 next month (virtually the same age as the festival, he quipped), rarely makes public appearances. So the EIFF In-Person event on Tuesday at Cineworld, a conversation between Forsyth and Dr Jonny Murray of Edinburgh College of Art, was a chance to find out.
Bill Forsyth comes across as a modest man. Softly spoken, self-deprecating, and in spite of the stories that he was broken and bitter about his brushes with Hollywood, he also comes across as a pragmatist.
Responding to the widely reported view that he had been "torn to pieces" by Hollywood, Forsyth dismissed this as a "myth", saying that his experience was just the way that business is done in Hollywood. Big studios make more films than they can market and therefore they have to decide which films they can promote. Being Human wasn't one of them.
Between short clips of his films - some looking very much of their time with their hairstyles and fashions - he explained how he was seen as the outsider in Hollywood.
At the same time, the Glasgow-born director always saw himself as a "nuts and bolts" filmmaker - he says he always pictured himself as the man in a tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows smoking a pipe. "It cheered me up to hear that I was 'fantastical'."
Although the "charming, whimsical" tag has stuck, Forsyth pointed out that his idea for Gregory's Girl came from the "very calculating" intention of exploiting his knowledge of Scotland, from years working as a documentary filmmaker here, and exploiting children who he thought would be cheap and easy to direct. He thought with the addition of a football angle he could get half of Scotland's 5 million people to watch the film and then he'd be onto a winner.
When he started working with the children in youth theatre though he ended up learning so much from the kids that it moulded his directorial style for all his later films ("it set the template"). He quickly realised the importance of actors not acting on film, but of "behaving... presenting a version of themselves" for authenticity.
Frustrated that he had to wait a year and a half for the funding for Gregory's Girl to come through he made the low budget That Sinking Feeling. "It was made in a huff," he said.
The format of the In Person event was not an altogether successful one, trying to cover all Forsyth's work in 90 minutes, when it would have been more rewarding to focus on a few of the films and allow for some time for a Q & A with the audience.
However, the broad brush approach offered nuggets of information on Forsyth's work.
He talked about how important it was that Gregory's Girl was set in a new town, Cumbernauld, with its "raw landscape," where the trees were the same age as the teenage characters.
He frequently referred to his own naivete on the job - surprising considering how prominent he became. With Comfort and Joy, based on the Glasgow ice cream wars, he confessed he didn't realise that the real ice cream wars were actually a turf war between rival drugs gangs using ice cream vans to distribute their wares. He suggested it wouldn't have improved the film if he had known that, all the same.
Not having been schooled in making film, he didn't always pick up on the jargon. When David Puttnam, producer on Local Hero, suggested that a draft of the script needed more conflict, Forsyth didn't know initially what he was talking about. He told him he doesn't make "those kind of films."
He added that the scene between the wizened beachcomber and the Burt Lancaster oil mogul was probably the conflict in the film - although he admitted that he's not sure to this day whether he had conflict.
With the US-made Breaking In, scripted by John Sayles, with Burt Reynolds in starring role, he acknowledged that he might have made a buddy movie, but he hadn't watched enough films to know the buddy genre.
Apparently relishing his role in the States as outsider, Forsyth takes issue with the traditional narrative model of film, he called it the "tramline of cinema," where characters must go through a process of change in the course of the story. He called it dishonest. "It's almost as if they are trying to give us a pill."
At the same time, character drives Forsyth's work and inspiration. It was the reason he first went to the US to make an adaptation of Marilynne Robinson's novel Housekeeping.
"I wanted to own more characters," he said. "I had read the novel. I wanted to own it."
Initially struggling with the script, Forsyth adapted the book by cutting it up and putting it back together in envelopes.
One of the most surprising admissions was that Forsyth was still not sure about the ending of Local Hero where a shot of the melancholy Mac, the oilman who wanted to buy the Scottish coastal village, has returned home to his affluent, high-rise Texas apartment. The film cuts to the telephone box ringing out in the sleepy village.
The famously ambivalent ending, with the ringing telephone (presumably it's Mac calling) was a compromise with the studio who wanted a happy ending with Mac staying in the village. Forsyth wanted to end in Texas with the swelling strains of the Dire Straits theme music leading us through to the final credits.
The event ended with Forsyth talking briefly of the future. He let on that he was working on a project with three guys trapped in space. Having watched the trajectory of his work over the last hour and a half, he said he suddenly realised that all his characters are marooned and his latest characters, too, are marooned. Hopefully, this director's career will not be marooned for long.
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