Bill Forsyth

[Jax]

New to this forum, so apologies if this has already been asked hundreds of times !



Does anyone know what Bill Forsyth is doing these days ?

I love his films and it's a shame he doesn't seem to be doing anything.

[julian_craster]

From The Times

February 6, 2008



View trailer at:



Bill Forsyth: the reluctant father of Gregory's Girl - Times Online





Bill Forsyth: the reluctant father of Gregory's Girl

Gregory’s Girl, free with The Times on Saturday, is a much-loved cult film, but its director says that he hated his job



by Tim Teeman



It is his best-known and best-loved work but Bill Forsyth, the writer and director of Gregory's Girl, doesn't own a copy, and doesn't want to. “I've always said, as far as I'm concerned once you've made a movie, it's the kid that's left home,” he says plainly. “I used to say, if I saw one of my movies walking down the street, I wouldn't cross the road to say hello.”

The genesis and legacy of Gregory's Girl is far removed from the sweetness we associate with it, even if that sweetness flowed directly from Forsyth himself. It did lead to great things for him, and then it all went wrong. Or seemed to. What happened to his once blazing star? Why does he seem so happy to see it extinguished?

Gregory's Girl was a calculated movie on Forsyth's part. He knew which buttons to press: “young love and football”, as he puts it. But those lovely touches, I suggest: the boy in the penguin suit, Clare Grogan looking cute in a beret (or “berry” as the gangly John Gordon Sinclair calls it)... Forsyth says he wanted it to be a calling card, a ticket to bigger films with bigger budgets. “Sorry if it bursts your bubble,” says the director, now 61 and attractively rumpled.



Related Links

Gregory's Girl: The Times review





It is a teenage love story stripped of sentiment, in which the boy gets the girl but not the girl he thought, and we thought, he wanted. It is a low-budget curio set in a bare-looking new town, Cumbernauld. It is chippy. It has strange little scenes: a garden full of crying babies, and Gregory and his eventual “girl” lying on the grass as the Earth magically tilts.

“The truth,” Forsyth adds forcefully, “is that when I was directing I always felt like I was killing the script, never bringing it alive.”

But Gregory's Girl fizzes with life, I say. “Sure,” Forsyth says dismissively, before talking about “the compromises” any director makes, as with the rain that changed the colour of the football pitch at inopportune moments during the filming of Gregory's Girl. He had been making promotional films about Scottish industry. “We thought they were masterpieces and some Hollywood studio would see them and say: ‘You are the guys for our next picture'. I put my heart and soul into them. Gregory's Girl was an act of desperation. I was in my early thirties. It was a last roll of the dice. I had never worked with actors before.”

Indeed, Forsyth is pretty people-phobic, although he rejects being called a recluse. As a boy, growing up around Glasgow's docks where his father once worked before becoming a grocer, he recalls hiding in his room from the “Sunday visits” of aunties and relations. He was quiet and happiest in his own company. “There was nothing tormented or unhappy about it,” he insists. He read a lot, guided to Henry James and Camus by his best friend Stu. He hated teenage Saturday clubs, “where you'd be herded in to watch films, there was so much noise - I wasn't hooked on movie-going at all.” He and his pals would enact books such as Just William.

He wanted to be a journalist. “I wasn't sure what it meant. But we were part of that first generation to envisage breaking away from where we'd been bought up.” At 17 he saw an advertisement for a lad required for a film company. He had no great love of film, but “it felt glamorous and cool and interesting. I had this image of crewcuts, baggy trousers, cameras and jazz music”.

In his early twenties he and Stu - who had applied for the same job and hadn't got it, “which I still feel guilty about” - started going to arthouse films. “He took me to my first Godard, Pierrot le Fou, which blew me out of the water. It was another language, a real language. Watching it moved me in every meaning of that word. After it finished, Stu and I were walking down the street smoking our Gauloises” - he cackles - “and I was waiting for him to say something 'cos I looked up to him. We turned the corner next to the bus stop, he blew out the smoke from his nostrils, and said: ‘F***ing great, wasn't it?'”

In 1977, Forsyth started sitting in on workshops at the Glasgow Youth Theatre. The children began getting suspicious of the quiet bloke at the back who never said anything. So Forsyth summoned up the courage to speak to them, “a breakthrough for me”.

Their first collaboration was the cheap-as-chips feature That Sinking Feeling. “The reason I worked with teenagers is that they were cheaper to work with. I thought it would be easier, too, rather than having grown-up professionals [only Dee Hepburn, Dorothy, had real acting experience in Gregory's Girl]. They didn't know anything, I didn't know anything. But I discussed their parts with them in the same way as I came to discussing adult parts with adults and they demanded exactly the same as adult actors. It was a big lesson.”

Maybe the film's uniqueness is down to those self-possessed kids. “I don't know how to make a conventional film,” Forsyth says. “There are no surfaces to Gregory's Girl. Maybe that's why it disarms people. I don't buy into that kind of audience-driven cinema.”

The story “wrote itself”, he says. He had originally planned to make it on 16mm film for £29,000 but ended up with £200,000 and shooting on 35mm. “There were five million people living in Scotland who had rarely seen their lives on the cinema screen, and I figured if only half of them saw it, and paid two quid a ticket, that was still £5 million.” The new-town setting was deliberate. “I wanted a backdrop where nothing was touched or old.”

Forsyth immediately hated directing: it was “time-consuming” and, of course, it involved people. “I couldn't deal with more than three people in a scene at any one time,” he says. The boy in the penguin suit came from watching someone at Abronhill High school, where the film was shot, carrying a papier-mâché head down a corridor “and no one batting an eyelid; a school is a place where anything can happen.” It was nothing special, “I was just recording their acting. I didn't have any cinematic ambition. It was an attempt to make a film I thought people might want to see, and quite divorced from the films I imagined myself making.”

Forsyth's next two films, Local Hero and Comfort and Joy, were critically hailed successes. “Bigger budgets were nice but I didn't want to disappear to Hollywood,” he says. The wheels came off with Being Human, a Warners-backed effort starring Robin Williams that never received a theatrical release. Today he says “that was me trying to work Hollywood” and that we shouldn't perceive it as a failure.

“I was most interested in writing scripts. That film would have been ten times better had someone else directed it,” he says. “Of all the films that's the one I thought I was killing most when filming.” Why? “The idea of sitting in a dark room with 200 strangers and somehow being moved or transported by what happens on a screen...to me it's like someone trying to get one over on me. I never wanted to impose that on anyone else.”

He was a director, then, that hated directing. Some said he was hard to work with, prone to paranoia. His onetime producer Lord Puttnam said he felt “desperately let down” by him. “I don't remember being hard on crews or actors,” is all Forsyth will say. In 1999 came the sequel to Forsyth's famous calling card, Gregory's Two Girls. John Gordon Sinclair's character was now a teacher. Critical reaction was decidedly mixed.

Silence has reigned for the last eight years. No films. No word of Forsyth. “I just write, live, have a nice life,” he says. He and his partner Moira have been together for five years and live in the Western Scottish countryside. They first went out in their early twenties before his marriage to Adrienne Atkinson with whom he has two children. He has written for HBO and is developing a British-based comedy with the American sitcom queen Caryn Mandabach. The public impression is things went very wrong for you, I say. “That's strange. I don't see that shape,” Forsyth says. “I don't remember tripping up along the way. I just kept going. I have to put my hand on my heart and say I'm ten times happier not making films than making films.” he says. I did it 'cos they let me. It's not something you decline.”

What if he was offered one to direct now? “No, absolutely not,” he says as if I've just offered him a vial of poison. His lowest point was “making films and not having the wherewithal to tell myself to quit.” His two children, Sam and Doone, are in their twenties. They are “infinitely more sociable” than their father and Doone may work in film.

The difference between a good movie and a bad one is “infinitesimal”, he claims. “I can't stand the cinema. We did go once three or four years ago just to experience it. We went to a mall outside Glasgow and had a pretty horrendous experience.” What did he see? “I'm blushing,” he says, and he is, and he is laughing too. “Wedding Crashers,” he says. “We just wanted a night out. But the experience of being with the audience, the stench of popcorn. I objected to the way they were being manipulated, infantilised...The difference between an arthouse film and Wedding Crashers is minute. Then after the movie you're herded out, a rat in a maze. Suddenly you're in the car park.”

Two weeks after we meet, Forsyth sends me a lovely, funny, heartfelt letter from his sickbed. “A hot and sticky stupor does wonders for the memories,” he writes.

His love of cinema was once physical, he says - when he made his first films, Waterloo (1968) and Language (1969). “I was in love with film itself, the tangible stuff, the celluloid (the smell of it even), the magic it wrought through a projector, the images it could carry; and I loved the tactile experience of manipulating these images in the cutting room.”

The movies were artsy-sounding affairs about “time, distance and memory”. The screening of Waterloo led to a mass walkout, Forsyth recalls: “One person in the middle of a row would stand to leave and rather than adjust in their seats to let him exit, the whole row would file out before him. It was utterly thrilling. Terrifying too, but I loved it...We had literally moved an audience. I haven't done so in such a thrilling way since.”

This was a “crossroads”, he says. “Either I would...spend the following decades tenaciously developing what was finally manifest as the gallery video-installation genre, or I'd make that slow backwards retreat into conventional cinema. We know what happened. To think that I might now have been the grand old man of international video art (probably with a pad in Berlin). Seriously, I don't think I'd have relished that any more than my present perch as the retiring ploughman poet of Scottish cinema (living up a hill with some trout as neighbours), and with the one residing ambition of wanting to make people laugh.

“So, no regrets. At least I didn't ever jump headlong into the commercial pool but studiously and cussedly patrolled just the margins. And thankfully I never did stop feeling like an outsider...

“You'll appreciate that you have only yourself to blame for this letter. You prodded me awake in my cage, and being simply human, my first and only demand is to be understood.

Best wishes, Bill Forsyth.”

[MIAPUSS]

Any comment on his 1987 film Housekeeping heard good reviews but have not seen.

Miapuss

[pod1969]

Interesting interview - and letter. I'd never read an interview with Forsyth before, that I recall. Would anyone recommend Comfort and Joy (1984)? I've never seen it. I think Bill Paterson's great, so I trust he's worth seeing in this.

[Mr Sloane]

Interesting interview - and letter. I'd never read an interview with Forsyth before, that I recall. Would anyone recommend Comfort and Joy (1984)? I've never seen it. I think Bill Paterson's great, so I trust he's worth seeing in this.

I would whole heartedly recommend That Sinking Feeling I remember the first time I saw this with parents and brother one of the few times we were all laughing out loud at the samething. A great feel good film.

[pod1969]

I would whole heartedly recommend That Sinking Feeling I remember the first time I saw this with parents and brother one of the few times we were all laughing out loud at the samething. A great feel good film.

Would you believe it? I've just found an unwatched copy of That Sinking Feeling, recorded from TV, in a box of old videos I've been rooting through. Hurrah for spring cleaning!

[wearysloth]

Any comment on his 1987 film Housekeeping heard good reviews but have not seen.

Miapuss

Housekeeping is a lovely movie.

[pod1969]

A reminder that cracking films can be banged out on a shoestring budget.

I love the scene where the prospective art collector - offering to buy an 'art installation' called 'sink' from Billy 'Wal' Greenlees - is preparing to write out a cheque for £200:

"Sorry, what's your name?"



"Cash"



"Sorry?"



"M. Cash"



"How appropriate"

[DB7]

Hero of cinema Bill Forsyth ends exile

Gillian Harris



Bill Forsyth doesn’t normally wallow in nostalgia, but a recent appearance at the Edinburgh International Film Festival forced him to sit down at his home near Loch Lomond to watch clips from his eight films for the first time in almost 30 years.



“It’s the only time I have looked at most of the films since I worked on them,” he says. “As far as I am concerned, once a film is finished, it’s finished. But it’s nice, at this time of my life, to sit back and assess them properly, with a cold objectivity.”



Forsyth, the man credited with reviving the moribund Scottish film industry in the 1980s with cult classics such as Gregory’s Girl and Local Hero, claims to feel “no strong attachment” to his work. He prefers to let the films speak for themselves. However, at the age of 62, he is beginning to open up.



“After spending a lot of time saying no to invitations to attend film festivals and workshops around the world, I’ve begun to accept some,” he says. “I’ve just been to Ibiza. I’m doing an interview in Edinburgh and later in the year I’m going to the US. Maybe I’m just at a point in my life when it’s nice to do these things.”



For the past 10 years Forsyth has been elusive, giving just a handful of interviews and steering clear of the film business. His last feature film, Gregory’s Two Girls, made in 1999, failed to generate the same excitement as the Bafta-winning original, and a television pilot he worked on for two years was dropped because it was no longer topical.



He is about to begin work on a new film, Exile, a historic epic set in Scotland and America. The film will be produced by his friend Iain Smith, whose credits include The Killing Fields and Cold Mountain. “We’ve been talking about it for a year or two and now I’ve got to go away and write it,” he says. “It should take the next six months or so, but there’s no pressure.



“It’s tough to talk about it at the moment, because it’s still in the early stages, but for me it’s quite a different thing. It is very much a story and not my usual thing of taking a situation and playing around with the character. It will probably be my most conventional film to date — a nice, straightforward film.”



During his self-imposed exile, Forsyth didn’t watch many films. He hates the cinema and only watches DVDs seven or eight years after their release. “The cinema is such an unpleasant experience,” he says. “There is the smell of stale popcorn, then you are herded along corridors and assaulted by the film on screen. And when it’s over you’re herded out again. It’s horrible.”



He blames childhood trips to the Saturday cinema club in Glasgow for his aversion. “I didn’t enjoy it. We were always being told what to do — get your feet off the chairs and so on. I didn’t grow up with cinema and always imagined myself with a writing career. My little party piece when I was young and my aunts came to visit was my mother asking what I wanted to be. I’d say ‘a journalist’ and they would have a wee laugh. I’m not sure why.”



When he does watch a DVD, he has no interest in blockbusters, which he describes as “mall fodder”, choosing to revisit old art house favourites by European directors. “When I became interested in film and started to watch seriously, I watched French, German and Spanish films from the 1960s. That’s how my taste was formed and I’ve never really got beyond that,” he says.



On balance, he prefers books. He has a stack by his bedside and is currently reading The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Vladimir Nabokov’s first novel in English. “I do not have a favourite writer, but I think Nabokov is a magician with words and images. There is a visual quality to this writing,” he says.



Later this year on a visit to a film festival in Ithaca, New York, Forsyth plans to visit places were Nabokov lived. “I am doing a wee anorak trawl of all his old houses, including the one where he wrote Lolita,” he says.







Forsyth finds inspiration in books. “They are so full of ideas and I am very alert to ideas when I’m reading. It is not direct stealing, more the sense of an idea that I can develop and use in my work.”



The director has lived all his life in Scotland, except for a brief stint in London and several forays across the Atlantic to work in Hollywood. “I never lived there though,” he says. He does not, however, see himself as a Scottish film-maker, rather a film-maker who happens to work in Scotland. “I do not know what would be in a film to make it uniquely Scottish. Would it be the history and culture? But how much does the history and culture of Scotland impact on an individual living here and the films they might make?”



He doesn’t believe there is a need for an indigenous Scottish film industry. “I have never thought a country like Scotland needed to have an indigenous film industry — it is so much part of a British identity,” he says.



However, the films Forsyth made outside Scotland — Housekeeping and Breaking In, both released during his time in Hollywood, were not nearly as successful as his Scottish work. “You either want to be part of the Hollywood system or you don't. I didn’t,” he says. “I prefer the kind of films that are unclassifiable and do not conform to formula. I’m not being precious, but it is such a hard job making a film that the idea of doing it without any sense of commitment wouldn’t work for me.”



Forsyth went to Hollywood as part of David Puttnam’s stable of British talent in the mid-1990s. It was claimed the two did not work well together, with Puttnam reportedly saying that he felt “desperately let down” by Forsyth. Is there a chance they will meet up? “No,” says Forsyth. “We haven’t spoken for many years.”



At home he lives quietly with his wife, Moira. He is not political and does not read newspapers. “I watch the news on television and I read the Times Literary Supplement every week,” he says. “I find that’s all I need.” He enjoys browsing in book shops and, now, he even enjoys film festivals. "They’re great for meeting up with old friends,” he says.



“I’m just back from Ibiza where I saw Terry Gilliam and about six months ago I was in Toronto where I met Pat O’Connor.”



Last year, to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Local Hero, Forsyth returned to Pennan, the village in Aberdeenshire where most of it was filmed. “I’d always promised I would go back,” he says. “But it had changed from what I remember. It was a little bit dowdy and quite a number of the homes are now holiday homes. I suppose that’s to be expected though. Places don’t stay the same.”