slightly OT: Bill Forsyth & "Gregory's Two Girls"
Jason K.
Forsyth, you might like this. I'm posting two articles here: a Toronto
Film Festival review of Forsyth's new film "Gregory's Two Girls" (yes, a
sequel to "Gregory's Girl") and an interview with Forsyth.
Okay, so this is slightly off-topic. Then again, Brand and Falsey have
said numerous times that Forsyth's films (namely "Local Hero") were a
huge influence on NX, so perhaps it's not too far off topic. Also, I
know (based on private e-mail) that several NX fans are also "Local
Hero" and/or Forsyth fans. So, until the day I develop the ultimate
"Local Hero"/Bill Forsyth web page (!), I'll just have to post here.
Hope you enjoy this.
Jason K.
________________________________________________________________
TORONTO SUN REVIEW: Growing up with Mature "Gregory's Two Girls"
by Ray Pride
"Gregory's Two Girls" is mature work from a filmmaker whose films are
too few and far between. While Bill Forsyth has written other scripts,
this is his first film to make it to the screen since 1993's "Being
Human," a Robin Williams-starring omnibus that got scant U.S. release by
Warner Bros. His new 3.1 million pound film is a weave of stories rather
than a bravura work like his melancholy
masterpiece of mood and tone, 1987's "Housekeeping." Forsyth claims the
writing-finance-production cycle takes him four to four and a half years
each time, and that he's "only a little behind schedule" with this one.
"Gregory's Two Girls" is a sequel mostly in name. The gangly,
crush-prone schoolboy Gregory (John Gordon Sinclair) of "Gregory's
Girl," Forsyth's 1981 charmer, has grown up to be a teacher at the same
school -- "Mr. Underwood" is a name he hates. Greg remains a dreamer:
he's got a crush on one of his underage students, Frances (the winsome
Carly McKinnon) and one of his colleagues, Bel (Maria Doyle Kennedy) who
nourishes a years-long flame for him with stalkerish tendencies. ("I'm a
giving person, Greg! But you won't let me give!")
Sinclair's Greg is a tall, giddy goose, prone to fits of social
mortification, a typical, frightened modern male. He teaches his English
students with samples from journalism about social injustice more often
than the classics. In a marvelous, typical Forsyth touch, Gregory quotes
Nabokov to Frances, who, sitting beside him in plaid-skirted school
uniform on a park bench shortly muses, "He's the guy who wrote
'Lolita'?" and only a moment later corrects his Russian pronunciation of
the writer's name.
People talk sense in Forsyth's world. And confounding as it may be, the
romantic entanglements and self-defeating acts are those of people we
either know or would want to know. The playfully tossed-off talk
beguiles, at once ironic and affectionate: "Let's assume I know nothing
and start from there"; and after a first night in bed, a woman's cry
against sudden sentimentality, "Let's have a few good times before we
get all dewy-eyed"; and a corporado's cynical claim, "The week after the
wheel was invented, someone was tied to one-that's technology."
Forsyth claims that he writes what's on his mind when the blank page is
in front of him, and he's obviously had the time to do a lot of reading
and thinking since he last got a film made. The plot is complicated by
Greg's teaching his students they should become involved in political
action. But he's the sort who will quote Noam Chomsky, but is more
likely to watch the political theorist on video than act on any of his
urgent calls to action. Frances encourages Greg to turn "tartan
terrorist," and the plot takes the movie in a charmingly odd direction,
becoming a romantic farce about state secrets and corporate abuse of
smaller, poorer countries. What is the responsibility of each citizen,
of corporate capitalism and sovereign nations? And why can't I get that
student of mine with the big
ears and the gleaming blue eyes out of my head? An affectionate Scots
comedy about dialectics and desire: who would have thought it? And in
the U.S., who would finance such a film from an American director? The
romantically muzzy cinematography is by John de Borman and Michael
Gibbs' score is the sort of lightly jazzy embellishment that Forsyth
tends to favor.
"Gregory's Two Girls" is one of the creamy crop of tasty movies coming
from the U.K.'s FilmFour (the lovely, anecdotal "Sugar Town" and Tim
Roth's magnificently crafted "The War Zone" are other examples), and
while superb work, it's difficult to imagine contemporary acquisitions
people knowing what to make of it. Forsyth examines the world within
while his characters prate charmingly about the world outside, and his
unique charm and effortless cosmopolitanism is a too-rare quantity on
U.S.
screens.
_________________________________________________________________
"The Daily Telegraph" - 8/27/99
The Arts: Master of the Scottish reel Since Gregory's Girl and Local
Hero, Bill Forsyth has never quite hit the heights. As his new movie is
premiered, he talks exclusively to Andrew O'Hagan about Ho.
by Andrew O'Hagan
YOU should see the Lothian Road on a wet February Tuesday. At the heart
of Midlothian, under the castle, in the full glare of an ordinary
Edinburgh afternoon, the road seems to grumble with monotony. But not
today and not yesterday - the Film Festival is here, and the place is
suddenly differently alive (or differently dead) with a buzzing of
mobile phones, and voices speaking into them that are so high-pitched
that the Haymarket dogs clamp their paws to their ears.
Bill Forsyth sat in a room near the foot of the Lothian Road. He pushed
a cup of tea across the table. And when he spoke I had to listen
carefully: the tone of his voice is low; it's a kind of
breathing opposition to the Hollywood way of going on. His steady eyes
seem a million miles away from the hoopla up the hill.
"There's such a Scottish presence in this Festival now," he said, "but
when I was starting out they
used to pack all the Scottish stuff into a single Sunday afternoon."
"Were they able to fill it?"
"Just about," he said.
For a long time Forsyth carried the case - and carried the can - for
that mythical beast called The
Scottish Film Industry. The director of Gregory's Girl, Local Hero,
Comfort and Joy, as well as films he made abroad such as Housekeeping
and Breaking In, Forsyth cut his teeth making short promotional films
for the Scottish Development Agency.
"My first ever thing was called The Changing Face of Scotland," he
said."We went around shooting
motorways and things. I spent my first 10 years in the film industry
asking people to get out of the
way. I took it as a sign of maturity when I started actually putting
people in the shots. When I
eventually showed a film here - Waterloo, in 1970 - all but three of the
several hundred in the audience walked out. It was exhilarating to see
them all leave."
Forsyth is in Edinburgh for last night's premiere of Gregory's Two Girls
- which goes on general release early next year - a sequel to Gregory's
Girl, 20 years down the line. He decided to make the
film as a way of stopping a television company from doing a TV sequel.
Gregory (John Gordon Sinclair) is now Greg, a thirtysomething teacher at
his old school, and a wee bit in love with one of his pupils. They both
get wrapped up in some human rights concern, but really the thing is all
about growing up and learning where your heart is.
It is one of those movies with an intimacy that will draw audiences out
of themselves, especially
those with a memory of the earlier film.
Yet there's a seriousness about it, a streak of darkness, that makes you
wonder what has happened in Forsyth's world these past 20 years. When I
mentioned the "weatheredness" of his recent movies, he just smiled.
"It's a subconscious thing," he said. "I've come to see it now, the
thing about youth and experience.
Gordon [Sinclair] did some things as an actor which pointed it up to me.
When in the film he first sits down with the kids in the park, the kids
kind of sparkle. But there' s a weight on Greg, and it
showed me something that was in the film, some tiredness, some
weatheredness, that I hadn't planned for."
I wanted to press him on this. The success of the film depends on the
quality of its comedy and
observation, but the gaze is not a light one, as it used to be. Why was
this? "All the things I do come out of my experience," he said, "and I
suppose I wanted to deal with a character who has a discrepancy between
his idealism and his actions. That is where all the mess comes in. But
it's not
something that has tormented me."
But did he have that discrepancy, I asked. Had his experience as a
film-maker changed him?
"No," he says firmly. "In fact that's how some of the ideas for this
film came about. I think that
film-making is a fairly impotent undertaking. Not that I started out
trying to save the world, but I do think that film is a particularly
useless engagement at the moment. The way that cinema has developed has
made it become quite a superficial thing. Even intelligent people go to
the cinema and
they want to regress. They get their popcorn, they widen their eyes, and
before the film starts they're already a kid, and that's all the cinema
is now. Maybe my years of trying to challenge that has made me realise
it."
I asked him if all this had made him feel isolated. "What's funny, " he
said, "is that it's had the
opposite effect. I'm actually beginning to have an identity now. I
remember seeing a good producer
- Wim Wenders' s producer - and he offered me a project which I was
refusing. I started talking to
him about my career, and what I thought would be right for it. He said,
`What are you talking about? Career? You don't have a career. You're a
European film-maker. You don't want a career,' and that was a healthy
state of mind. I had been in Hollywood for about a week."
Many people imagine that Forsyth started out making happy films which
then got darker and darker. But in truth there always was something dark
about his humour, and something strange in the way he looked at people
and their situations.
"I think we're basically all odd," he said some years ago. "I think we
all have a tension between what we think we are and what other people
think we are."
The mistake people make is to try to make Forsyth too much of a moral
fable himself, and turn him
into a grand narrative - tempting, and a little true - about the
problems of early success, and about
the costs of individuality.
These are the problems of reputation. He knows about them. "I thought I
was handling it all quite
successfully," he said, "and coming and going, and raising my head a
little when I made a film. But
everyone said I was a recluse. I never lived in Hollywood. I never had a
house or an office there.
"With Being Human [the film he made with Robin Williams that didn' t do
well], I was just taken with the writing. I love the script stage, where
everything is speculative and possible. By the time you get to make the
film it's a bit of a chore really."
BUT WHERE does it all come from with Forsyth? He has a healthy
ambivalence about movies, the world and himself, and he has, in his
career - or his anti-career - played both good and bad cop to his own
better interests. "I have always been calculated about things," he said.
"At the time of Gregory's Girl, you had to make your own opportunities.
If I'd had perfect freedom I wouldn't have made a frothy film about a
16- year-old's romance.
"It was calculated in that I thought, `Football and love in Scotland,
it's bound to connect somewhere.' And I only made Local Hero because
some Americans told me they could get me the money for my next film if I
came up with a story with some Americans in it."
Forsyth has never fitted any of the stereotypes. He is hardly loquacious
but neither is he guarded; he gives the straightforward impression of
only having a certain amount to say.
He was not one of those kids who oozed grief and wonder at the local
cinema. "I didn't like the
cinema as a kid," he says. "You know, the jostling thing of the Saturday
Club. And from a very early
age I was aware of being manipulated by films.
"When I did get influenced by them it was just run-of-the-mill New Wave
- Godard, Louis Malle - with Trauffaut somewhere down the list."
I asked him why so far down? "Because he seemed to me to be more
sentimental, " he said.
And this is as fine a definition of his influences as Forsyth has ever
given. He had a sense of an
emerging modern Scotland and it was coupled with a strong antipathy to
the manipulations of nostalgia.
He made feature films that travelled under the most gracious and
good-humoured propulsion: they
moved so lightly, but at the same time they always contained moral
ballast, a sense of difficulty being absorbed or overcome.
HIS NEW film is a moral fable very much in his own style: it has the
easy laughs of Gregory's Girl,
but many of the darker concerns of Local Hero, focusing on personal
change and the potential hazards of big business.
Yet the strongest thing connecting the new film with the old one is
Forsyth's empathy, the generosity
of his vision in relation to his characters. "The instinct should always
be to be generous," he said.
Forsyth is only 54, but he has a spirit of elegy about him, a spirit
that hangs around the corners of his first movies and is now much closer
to the centre. "When I think of my life as a film-maker," he said, "I
feel that I've been incredibly indulged. My mother in her whole life
only left this country once, on a 10-day bus tour to Switzerland. My
father was a plumber in a shipyard. And now, on my way to the airport,
as I go into the Clyde Tunnel at Whiteinch, I think of our house, now
gone, which used to be right over where that tunnel is now. I remember
filming my grandfather reading the one book he had in the house. Soon as
he finished it he'd go right back to the beginning. We were an
undemonstrative family."
He has a pragmatic and sensible attitude about how films come to be what
they are. So much of it is
accident. I draw his attention to the hubbub of the Festival and the
flag flying over the castle outside.
"I don't want to be a citizen of anywhere and I don't feel a strong
cultural attachment to anything
Scottish. I enjoy being a parent."
Forsyth laughed a lot during our interview. He's the sort of person who
asks as many questions as
he answers, and it's clear from his manner that he's happy with his
film, and in a good frame of mind. "I don't feel any burden," he said.
"By my age you know what you want and you know how to spend your days."
His new film is a good one, and it shows some of the accretions of time
and experience, and an
evolution of humour, which has to do with Gregory, with Forsyth, and
with you and me, too, come to that.
In the end we just talked about a film that's on at Glasgow's Museum of
Transport about old trams.
"It is absolutely magic," he said, and the world of boyish enthusiasm
came rolling into his voice.
"Magic."
Terri & Mike Naughton
>
>
> Okay, so this is slightly off-topic. Then again, Brand and Falsey have
> said numerous times that Forsyth's films (namely "Local Hero") were a
> huge influence on NX, so perhaps it's not too far off topic. Also, I
> know (based on private e-mail) that several NX fans are also "Local
> Hero" and/or Forsyth fans. So, until the day I develop the ultimate
> "Local Hero"/Bill Forsyth web page (!), I'll just have to post here.
Thanks Jason - I'm anxiously waiting for that Local Hero Page...also
still looking for that book about the making of the film. Hopefully it
will pop up someday! Terri
"I'd make a good Gordon, Gordon"
Gordon Flemming
>Jason K. wrote:
>>
>
>>
>> Okay, so this is slightly off-topic. Then again, Brand and Falsey have
>> said numerous times that Forsyth's films (namely "Local Hero") were a
>> huge influence on NX, so perhaps it's not too far off topic. Also, I
>> know (based on private e-mail) that several NX fans are also "Local
>> Hero" and/or Forsyth fans. So, until the day I develop the ultimate
>> "Local Hero"/Bill Forsyth web page (!), I'll just have to post here.
>
>still looking for that book about the making of the film. Hopefully it
>will pop up someday! Terri
>
>"I'd make a good Gordon, Gordon"
Where did that signature come from?
Gordon
I AM a good Gordon!
-------------------------
http://home.earthlink.net/~wesgordon/ home page
http://home.earthlink.net/~wesgordon/noex.htm Northern Exposure
http://home.earthlink.net/~wesgordon/detect.htm metal detecting
http://home.earthlink.net/~wesgordon/ancients.htm Ancients of America
--------------------------
Terri & Mike Naughton
>
> >"I'd make a good Gordon, Gordon"
> Terri,
> Where did that signature come from?
> Gordon
> I AM a good Gordon!
>
quote comes from the film Local Hero, when the American developer (Mac)
drunkenly wishes to change places with his Scots host (Gordon Urquhart).
Gordons everywhere should see this film! Terri