Ingo Kramarek from Pixabay
Strolling through Glasgow city centre in recent days, you could be forgiven for thinking you’d tumbled into a worm hole and ended up in New York in 1969.
A Hollywood crew have annexed a fair old chunk of Dear Green Place to their production of Indiana Jones 5 and have festooned every building in sight with oversized American flags, great sweeps of bunting and enough balloons for the city to follow Richard Branson into space. Which would be apt, since the Indy crew are recreating the famous Big Apple parade for the returning Apollo 11 astronauts following their giant leap for mankind on the moon.
Lord knows what the local SNP council makes of seeing its fiefdom awash in red, white and blue. When they said Glasgow would be better off with Indy, I don’t think this is what they had in mind.
You might think having an extensive crew taking over to shoot scenes for the new Harrison Ford blockbuster would be a nuisance for residents and commuters but everyone I know who lives or works there says it’s a treat to stop and take a peek as cameras barrel along dolly tracks and swoop down on overhead cranes. After a year and a half of lockdown misery it’s a welcome spot of excitement and intrigue.
Not only is this the right attitude, we should be positively ambitious for Scotland as a film and television location. There is a lot of mithering about how we encourage more homegrown production — and with good reason — but there is also value in attracting projects from outwith the country by selling Scotland as an affordable, versatile, safe, clean and welcoming location to shoot your big-budget action flick or gritty Netflix police drama. Belfast has done just that in the last decade, attracting productions such as Line of Duty, which uses the Northern Ireland city as the location for its anonymous English conurbation.
If this sounds a little far-fetched — what, after all, does Scotland have to offer Hollywood? — know that our country is well-placed because of its location, size, geographical spread and emerging industries to make a strong pitch for the big studios’ business. As well as lower production costs, Scotland can provide pristinely kept cities and rolling hills within an hour of one another. Glasgow, Edinburgh and Dundee can be adorned to look like almost anywhere and the stunning vistas of the Highlands and Islands would be irresistible to the producer of an historical epic or a windswept rural drama.
Could we really add film production to whisky, tourism and food as one of our vital industries? Around 4,000 people are currently employed by the industry in Scotland and the monetary value is just shy of £100 million, helped in part by series like Outlander. But this is only a brief frame of what we could achieve from a much longer reel of economic possibility.
The model to emulate is Vancouver. The largest city in British Columbia, it is also the third-biggest film production hub in North America. It doesn’t hurt that the metropolis lies only three flight hours from Los Angeles, but the city and its province realised their potential and invested early to make themselves more attractive to location shoots.
Even if you’ve never been to Vancouver, you will be more familiar with its streets and skyline than you might think. Over the years it has played host to hit TV series including 21 Jump Street, Smallville, Riverdale and The Killing, all set in the United States but filmed in Vancouver to cut down on production costs. Perhaps the most famous example is The X-Files, for the first five seasons of which Mulder and Scully tracked aliens, mutants and that guy who could squeeze through air vents from one archetypal American town to another — all without ever leaving Vancouver.
The result? In 2019, the last year before Covid shut everything down, film production was worth £2.4 billion to the British Columbia economy, much of it spent in Vancouver itself. Across the seven preceding years, film, television and visual effects brought in £13 billion in investment and £7 billion in wages for the estimated 70,000 jobs created or supported by the sector.
British Columbia has a comparable population to Scotland and the climate isn’t all that different. (Not for nothing do locals refer to their province as ‘the Wet Coast’.) True, Scotland does not enjoy the same proximity to Hollywood but it boasts handsome city centres that, with a little set decoration, can pass for US cities that would otherwise be prohibitively costly on a modest production budget.
There is every reason to believe Scotland could capture the Vancouver magic — because it already has. With the help of some good production design and slick CGI, 2013’s World War Z turned Glasgow into a zombie-infested Philadelphia. The flick, starring Brad Pitt, drummed up £390 million in ticket sales globally. This year’s Fast & Furious 9 included scenes of Vin Diesel flooring it through the streets of Edinburgh, making Auld Reekie part of an action franchise that has taken in £4.7 billion at the worldwide box office to date.
How do we build Scotland’s name recognition as a reliable place to film? By attracting many more productions of all budgets and sizes to show just how dynamic we can be. Invest in improved infrastructure, such as the three new studios, and use the business rates system to encourage more small, independent audio and video mixing suites and related companies.
Fiscal policy has its part to play, too. Productions wishing to shoot in Scotland can already take advantage of UK tax support, such as Film Tax Relief, which can be claimed for theatrical projects that spend at least one-tenth of their production budget in Britain, or the High-End Television Tax Relief, which offers a 25 per cent rebate for TV shows that spend £1 million or more for every broadcast hour. A Scotland-specific tax rebate on top of this would give us a competitive advantage. Scottish ministers should include this on their next list of demands from Whitehall.
It would be thrilling to see Scottish-originated projects experience a renaissance for the boost it would give the creative arts, but until this moment comes, we should focus on creating as many production jobs and opportunities from other countries’ films as possible. These would generate much-needed investment and serve as training grounds for up-and-coming Scottish filmmakers to learn their craft and make their mark. Best of all, it would call ‘lights, camera, action’ on a busy and valuable new sector for Scotland’s post-Covid economy.
Tomorrow Ruth Davidson will take up her seat in the House of Lords under the new title of Baroness Davidson of Lundin Links. I think this means we all have to curtsey when we open her page in the Scottish Mail on Sunday.
Lundin Links was chosen as the styling after the village in Fife where the former Scottish Tory leader grew up. Given her role in keeping the UK together, 'London Links' might be more appropriate — and would have the added benefit of driving the cybernats absolutely potty.
In fact, the noble baroness wants to go on being known by her Christian name. Whatever your view on the unelected upper chamber, if we're going to have one, it may as well be populated by the best politics has to offer. In almost a decade at the helm of her party, Davidson showed a kind of talent Scottish politics has far too little of. We can only hope her abilities get to shine from the red benches — and that she never forgets she's still plain old 'Ruth' to us.
'GB News drafts in Nigel Farage to halt ratings freefall' reads the headline in front of me. The anti-woke news station hopes recruiting Farage will bring in viewers but I'm not so sure. The thought of the gobby pub bore mouthing off in primetime every night makes me want to send something else into freefall: my TV, out the window.
Originally published in the Scottish Daily Mail on July 19, 2021.
Dumb (Boris freedom day but he isolating!) and Dumber (Sturgeon level 0 - Scotland but restrictions abound)!
She tweeted graph showing delta peak maybe over in Scotland, but not England....
Odd she never showed any such graphs in over 150+ live covid briefings!
Clown Boris shows 4 graphs and 2 maps every day......
Not everyone has broadband , laptop and can find Scottish hidden graphs...