A TOWN in Scotland’s north-east is the setting for a film starring Game Of Thrones actor Mark Stanley as a thirty-something father who tries to recapture the excitement of his youth as a boy racer.

Stanley, best known as Jon Snow’s companion Grenn in the HBO fantasy series, did much of his character’s daredevil driving in Run, which premieres at the Glasgow Film Festival on March 1.

Shot mainly in Fraserburgh, the sleek drama sees Stanley play Finnie, a fish factory worker who thinks history might be about to repeat itself when teenage son Kid (Anders Mason) gets girlfriend Kelly (Marli Siu) pregnant.

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He borrows Kid’s flash Honda to career through the narrow streets of the fishing port, just as he and wife Katie (Amy Manson) did when they were courting.

“Though we had a stunt driver for a lot of the scenes, Mark did a lot of his own driving – he raced the sea wall and did that handbrake turn in the film,” says writer-director Scott Graham, who grew up a few miles outside of Fraserburgh.

Run completes Graham’s trilogy of interfamilial dramas following his Bafta-nominated 2011 feature debut Shell and 2016’s Iona, which starred Ruth Negga of hit US TV series Preacher. His new feature grew from Born To Run, a short film he wrote and directed in 2005, also shot in Fraserburgh, known locally as the Broch.

The Bruce Springsteen influence remains in the new film, which begins with a quote from the Boss’s 1975 anthem Born to Run: “Baby, this town rips the bones from your back/It’s a death trap, it’s a suicide rap/We gotta get out while we’re young”.

Scotched dreams hang heavy over Finnie. When youngest son Stevie (Scott Murray), desperate for the correct karate gear, tells his dad: “You don’t know what it’s like to feel real shame.” You bet he does. Finnie seems ashamed of his job, ashamed of his beaten-up Ford Escort, ashamed of having “done nothing” with his life.

Graham discovered the depth he needed to portray such complexity in Stanley’s performance opposite Ruth Wilson in Clio Barnard’s 2017 drama Dark River.

“Mark really understood the character of Finnie,” Graham says. “He understood that idea I had about quite stoic men who listen to someone like Springsteen, someone who can express all of these emotions they have but they don’t talk about. I can relate to that, I saw it growing up.”

Stanley spent a couple of weeks getting to know Finnie’s job, learning the town’s layout and working on the tricky-to-nail dialect. A local woman helped the Yorkshireman and Londoner Hayward find the groove of Doric as it’s spoken in The Broch, while Manson and Murray are themselves from the town.

“They were all committed to making it authentic,” says Graham. “They worked hard and had that ability, as good actors do. I never once worried about the accent with them.”

Though he wasn’t the scourge of speed cameras and the local police in his youth, Graham, now 45 and based in Glasgow, remembers young people racing around Fraserburgh. They still do.

“Though the music they mostly listen to know is hiphop, it’s interesting that it’s still American music they listen to,” he says. “A lot them don’t even race, they ‘drive the flaggy’, which essentially is a circle around the town using this flagpole that’s no longer there as a marker.”

Graham continues: “Driving home to Fraserburgh from Glasgow, you’d hear more Springsteen the closer you got there. One night I made the connection between these Springsteen songs about growing up in small towns and following in your parents’ footsteps, that circle of life repeating itself and how fast these kids are going around in circles, and I knew there was a story there.”

March 1, 8.45pm and March 2, 3.30pm, Glasgow Film Theatre, £11.50, £9.30 concs. Tel: 0141 332 6535. www.glasgowfilm.org/festival

Run is released in UK cinemas on March 13