date: March 1996
place: The Groucho Club, London
under discussion: Small Faces
intro: Brothers Gillies and Billy MacKinnon are two of Scotland's finest filmmaking exports. Raised in Glasgow, they collaborated for the first time in 1986 on Gillies' National Film School graduation film, Passing Glory, with Billy acting as producer. Gillies has since gone on to work in Hollywood, directing Steve Martin in A Simple Twist of Fate, while Billy went to Australasia to work with Jane Campion, most notably on her award-winning The Piano. They joined forces again to co-write Small Faces, a colourful and sharply-observed tale of three teenage brothers growing up amid gang warfare in Glasgow in 1968. Now in their forties, the two brothers still exude a youthful exuberance, filling in each other's punchlines and laughing at their own jokes. Billy is the faster-talking, more tenacious of the two while Gillies is older, modest and softly-spoken...
What were you doing in 1968?
Gillies: I was at art school.
Billy: I was 15. I was at school. I went to art school later.
What were your influences?
G: Music -- I was in a rhythm and blues band.
B: I wasn't in a band
G: No, but he used to play sitar [laughs].
B: You can leave that out!
G: And seeing my first 'proper' movies which showed me that cinema wasn't just some place to go with a girl on a Saturday night. Filmmakers that spring to mind are Milos Forman, Bergman, Kurosawa, Visconti, Pasolini, Godard...
B: Kurosawa, Bergman, Truffaut. Godard bored me rather.
G: Even Pierrot le Fou?
B: Pierrot le Fou even.
G: [Animatedly]: And earlier films before all that of course - The Vikings [Richard Fleischer's epic] - I must have seen The Vikings so many times when I was a wee boy.
B: And Bambi was so terrifying for me. My parents could have sued I think. It was terrible.
What are your influences now?
G: Tarkovski is my favourite filmmaker. But influences don't mean that you see in the movie. I quite firmly believe that when you're influenced by somebody you shouldn't try to imitate them, it's just that there's something in the spirit of that filmmaker that you've taken and carry with you. In some ways my influences are the same as they were in the 60s, but that's because when you're young these impression make an indelible mark on you.
What would surprise people about Glasgow?
G: Many things. A journalist who saw Small Faces wondered who would believe that this working class boy would go to art school, and I thought that was so patronising. At art school almost everybody came from a working class background. There was real passion and interest there - you weren't labelled a sissy. If you worked on a building site, they wouldn't say [adopts broad accent] "hey - big jessy over there, you know he goes to art school", they'd say, "hey, can ye draw me then? Draw me against the wall wi' a bit of chalk?"
B: It's a different kind of working class culture in Glasgow. In some respects it's a very rough one, but it's also an intelligent culture and it quite cherishes things of the mind. 1968 was a very restless year. It was the same year as the Tet Offensive, Paris, the Prague Spring. You'd have these boys with sideburns, carrying razors, but they knew all about Ho Chi Minh.
G: We wanted to tell a story about working class Glasgow teenagers in 1968 showing some of the contradiction familiar to us - boys with a consuming passion for art growing up among the gangs; a gang leader whose hobby is stealing books and building up a massive personal library...
How much of Small Faces is autobiographical?
B: As a writer in any medium, you draw from your experience. So obviously it's drawn from our experiences in the 60s.
G: It's a fictional story. About a little character who goes out into the world and who commits a series of acts that lead to an atrocity for him. Which he has to comes to grips with. Hopefully at the end he finds his childhood again, he renews himself. It's very brutal thing to go through at that age. His age is important. Billy and I made the decision not to have a lot of adult characters and not to have a presence of police or the adult world, but to try and take the viewer into a child's world. At that age - and I think this is universally true and true of boys today - boys live in a world where they have certain threats that nobody else has. If you know teenage boys there are some roads that they won't go down because of the things that might happen to them, and we wanted create the world of these small faces. But I hope that the story is about more than just violence. I think it should be about the passage of a child. Who literally crosses into hell -
B: On a complete whim.
G: But this is not a film about social victims. We didn't want to make that kind of a movie. The violence is exciting to them, we had to show that, but we also had to show the moral consequences of violence.
How does being brothers affect your working relationship?
B: For me Small Faces was particularly nerve racking because this is the first time I'd ever written anything. Gillies was in London and I was in Sydney for the first draft of Small Faces [which the brothers faxed back and forth to each other], then Gillies was in Atlanta, Georgia, and I was in Italy for the second draft. But was a very good experience for the most part -- we worked together at a great distance. Gillies would dash off lots of ideas and then I'd dash off lots of ideas and we'd go back and forth. We didn't ever sit down and brainstorm the script did we? Sit down and find a problem solve it?
G: Well we did at times...
B: We did twice. Once in your garden and once in the park.
G: And once in the cafe.
B: And once in the pub, that's four times isn't it?[Both laugh].
How do you view the current state of filmmaking in Britain? Is it
undergoing a renaissance?
B: As far as I know people are talking about the crisis in British cinema. I think independent filmmaking is permanently in crisis, that's its nature. Things boom a little for a while and recede a little for a while - it's no different from any other economic activity.
How do you feel about Trainspotting and the inevitable comparisons that will be drawn between the two films?
G: Trainspotting is a very different kind of film to ours. I mean, to some extent it's a rock and roll film...
B: Both films are about their own times. Small Faces is set in an optimistic period, and Trainspotting is about Britain after Thatcher and things that would happen thirty years after our film took place. I think it's great that there are two Scottish films out back to back with working class Scottish casts.
Do you feel an association with Scotland, and the current high profile that Scottish culture is receiving in the media?
G: I don't associate with it or even think about it. I've lived in London for a long time now so I'm almost that kind of strange Londoner thing which is not even English. I mean I don't think London's England, I think London's something in itself. The last film Billy was involved in was The Piano, and before that he produced Sweetie, with Jane Campion. My last film was an Irish film [Trojan Eddie] and now we're going to do one set in Morocco, Hideous Kinky [based on the Esther Freud novel].
B: And my last film before Small Faces was shot in Latvia.
G: So that's Scottish filmmaking for you! [Both
laugh]
