Euphoria #45: Call me
We are assembling a shimmering pyramid composed of delightful movie scenes that shine out from your memories and illuminate my foggy Edinburgh nights.
A couple people* have been requesting a scene from Bill Forsyth’s LOCAL HERO. Since I, like Forsyth himself (!) don’t own a copy of it, I’m a slave to what’s already on YeTube. Fortunately, though NONE of the requested scenes are available, this one is.
Spoiler alert: it’s the end of the damn movie.
My old mate Lawrie remembered Forsyth in his very early days, making no particular impression on him, which was unfortunate since Lawrie was more or less running the Scottish film industry at the time.
The Times Online has an intriguing piece that does much to illuminate Foryth’s more curmudgeonly aspect. He’s known to be somewhat difficult — volunteering to teach at Edinburgh College of Art, then gruffly denying all knowledge of this — and had a bruising run-in with Scottish Screen, over issues of transparency. I think Forsyth was basically in the right on that one: there was probably no corruption, but it mattered very much that Scottish Screen didn’t seem to care whether people thought there was. The head of that organisation, Eddie Dick, complained to me, rather hurt by the whole thing: ”people think Bill is like his films, but there’s a very dark side to Bill.”
Forsyth always found directing agony, and his love of both Bresson and “experimental film” may have pulled him away from his natural talent for comedy. I have a recording of a moving TV masterclass Forsyth gave on Bresson’s AU HASARD, BALTHASAR where he talks with great emotion about the power of the film’s first few minutes, and you get a sense of B.F.’s frustration at not being able to reach the same exalted level: “You know these dreams you sometimes have when you can fly or you can flat down the street three feet off the ground? I remember having a dream about making a film. And it was the perfect film. It’s the kind of dream, when you wake up, you want to remember it, and remember how to do it… and you can’t. In this dream, I had made this film which was perfect, and fluid, and wonderful. I was reminded of it when I watched this film recently because that four minutes is kind of the way I saw the movie in my dream.”
The Timespiece ends with a postcard Forsyth sent the interviewer, where he discusses the crossroads he faced back in the Lawrie Knight days:
“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.”
Like the scene above, and like much of Forsyth’s work, there’s a happy-sad feeling to this communique: melancholia euphoria?
*Vince Randaldi and Mike Reed.
February 12, 2008 at 1:32 am
Not at all surprised that Forsyth is so idiosyncratic.
My fave is Housekeeping
February 12, 2008 at 1:34 am
Local Hero is the consequence of a night of illict passion between I Know Where I’m Going and Whiskey Galore
February 12, 2008 at 8:30 am
Lovely lovely lovely.
Can I confess that, after the Chic Murray “Go away, small boy” moment in Gregory’s Girl my favourite Bill Forsyth line is from That Sinking Feeling:
“Did you see anything?”
“Aye. Tits, bum, fanny. The lot.”
I still snigger as I write it. There is no hope for me.
February 12, 2008 at 8:53 am
But that’s from Gregory’s Girl, scene 1!
I don’t think they could afford nudes in TSF, plus the cast was a youth theatre!
I wonder if That Sinking Feeling is seen much elsewhere?
Housekeeping is wonderful, I think it’s the one where he comes closest to his cinematic dream, anyway.
February 12, 2008 at 9:22 am
DEh — David Puttnam tells a story about phoning Forsyth and asking how the script is coming for Local Hero. BF replied “I’m not sure, I can’t get in touch with the writer.”
Of course, BF WAS the writer. But I know what he means, sometimes.
February 12, 2008 at 2:19 pm
Housekeeping is right on the edge of Rivette. I talked about it with Christine Lahti recently at the Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards dinner where she was presently Sidney Lumet with out Career Achievement award. She’s justly proud of Housekeeping and says it’s one of her very favorite roles.
February 12, 2008 at 2:36 pm
Part of Forsyth’s perversity was a reluctance to engage with the star system, so somebody less famous like Lahti got to show what she could do. Actually, I think Diane Keaton had the part, but Forsyth failed to woo her enough so she bailed.
On Breaking In he was happy to have Burt Reynolds (and was able to persuade him to look his age) but absolutely refused to look at Brat Pack type actors for the kid. Which strikes me as faulty thinking, since he could have had John Cusack or somebody, and it would have helped the film get seen.
Of course he gets a very fine performance from the kid he cast, as we’d expect of him.