OUTLAW King director David Mackenzie has revealed the seeds of his success were a small grant from an innovative scheme set up to help aspiring film-makers – as well as all the film noirs he could find at his local video store.
Actor and director Peter Mullan’s career was also launched with a tiny grant towards his first film Close – one of the 130 films produced as a result of First Reels.
For Mackenzie, First Reels, which awarded grants ranging from £50 to £3000 to help aspiring film-makers make their breakthrough, was the launch pad for a career that has included Young Adam starring Ewan MacGregor and last year’s Robert the Bruce epic Outlaw King.
“It gave me the chance to make my first proper film – and sent me down a path that I am still trudging down,” he said.
After winning the grant he went on to immerse himself in “all the film noirs I could pick up at the local video stores and occasionally the Filmhouse”.
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He said the initial application for the grant had been “relatively simple” to fill out and added there was “much to be said for small, widely accessible, creative grants to allow a good number of people to get on the ladder without complicated application procedures”.
“To me the great thing about First Reels was that it was open to a wide number of applicants and the hoops you had to jump through weren’t crazy. In future years schemes like Tartan Shorts were the opposite because there were only three films made a year and everyone was trying to be one of those three.”
He said that after winning the prize for best First Reels film for The Last Great Wilderness it took him six years of “constantly applying” to get a Tartan Short grant.
“In this context it’s easy to see the appeal of a scheme like First Reels where each year 20 to 30 aspiring film-makers were given a chance to make something,” he said.
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“I think its major strength was that it spread the grant money widely and entrusted the creatives to do their best in a way which limited bureaucracy and felt inclusive to anyone who wanted to try to make something.”
Most of the grants were small and film-makers, including Mackenzie, had to beg, steal or borrow to make their visions a reality.
“Camera, lighting equipment, film stock and processing were things that had to be paid for although everything was massively discounted – everything else was some kind of favour.”
Gregory Girl’s star Clare Grogan worked with Hannah Robinson who made Relax and Sheila, which won Best Director at Rome’s Donne in Corto Film Festival.
“She [Grogan] must have thought we were such small fry, but she didn’t show it,” said Robinson.
She added: “First Reels was amazing in that it was so hands off – we didn’t have to do any script development. I guess the only negative was that First Reels didn’t prepare me for how involved executives and funders would be once you got into a more structured set up.”
Bafta nominated Kevin Cameron also believes First Reels set him on his career path and bemoans the fact there is no equivalent now. “It opened up another space between what was viewed as commercially viable and fine art practice as there was no middle space,” he said.
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“It was not huge amounts of money but there was real trust in film-makers and the culture around that was really fertile. There were lots of people working on each others’ films and it was very sociable.”
A graduate of Bristol and Glasgow universities, Cameron was only picking up bits and pieces of work until First Reels came along.
“I was the same as a lot of people who were trying to make some headway in their career but it all seemed a bit kind of desperate,” he said.
Introduced by the Scottish Film Council, which became Scottish Screen, First Reels was a partnership with Scottish Television which went on to showcase the work to a wide public.
Mandy McIntosh who made Donkey Skin and Eagle Eye for First Reels, and whose statue of May Donoghue was unveiled in Paisley last year, said the scheme had been “life-changing” for her.
“It allowed me to work in moving image, which is something I still do, and it allowed me to be an experimental artist in a hands-on and supportive way,” she said.
At the time she was at Glasgow School of Art (GSA) making “making sculptural blankets” out of bread. “I stitched a slice of bread to my application, which was handwritten because I had no computer,” McIntosh remembered. “I stumbled into a screening of First Reels shorts and was transfixed.
“It was such a mixed bag of approaches, and people took their work really seriously and invested a lot of time and effort without much money.
For Suzanne Morrow, who made Bust in 1993 with an all-female crew, it was a “great learning experience”.
“It was a pretty open scheme and it didn’t matter if you had made lots of short films or none at all,” she said. “They gave people a chance if the idea was strong enough. My all-female crew was very supportive of my lack of experience.”
Dan MacRae, who was the First Reels co-ordinator, believes the project created a “fresh community”.
“When it comes to exploring the cultural output of a nation I think that in a handful of years First Reels gave a platform to a very wide range of voices, though admittedly from an almost exclusively white perspective,” he said. “There was such a diversity of approach, aesthetic and narrative.”
“But the benefit of a scheme like First Reels is that it acts as a catalyst, a call to arms, providing a focus and creating deadlines for getting things done,” he said. “I think a fresh community was created amongst mostly young and ambitious people who often ended up supporting one another in pushing things through.”
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