I make things up for a living. I don't get out much and I haven't allowed a newspaper in the house for thirty years, so I truly live in a world of fiction. I've got by with Louis B Mayer's definition of a documentary being a film without girls in it, while a semi documentary has one girl. Recently however, I've been obliged to confront reality head-on in the form of the film You've Been Trumped.
It turns out that an old piece of fiction of mine, Local Hero, bears unavoidable comparison with real life events in Aberdeenshire where the property developer Donald Trump is building his "world class" golf resort, captured in Anthony Baxter's compelling work of factual observation. I watched the film recently at the Shetland Film Festival. So here's my report from the front, the border between fiction and fact.
Page one of the writer's handbook tells you that it's characters that make a story and not the other way about. This is certainly true of the local heroines and heroes in You've Been Trumped. Although they share a truly awful predicament, it's the special nature of each individual's developing reactions, revealed in measured intimate sequences, that delivers the true human dimension to the events.In a manifestly bleak scenario these human qualities start to show through. This isn't feel-good Hollywood stuff though; we're watching real lives and livelihoods mercilessly put to hazard by a malign concoction of egotistical bullying, corporate muscle flexing, craven averting of gaze by national politicians right to the very top and crass misreading of events by local authorities including police.
With the rest of the audience that day I came out into the daylight dazed and shocked, with a numb feeling of individual impotence. Our usually unchallenged feeling of smug security as citizens of a mature democracy had been rocked. (...)
This takes me to my very own villain, Happer, in my film Local Hero. Even 30 years ago as a young tyro writer (I wasn't even drawing arcs in those days) I had the nous to flesh out my baddie, to endow with him with enough personal facets to keep an audience interested, and to create for them at least the facsimile of a human being with which to engage.
For a start, there was his name; Felix Happer, Mister Happy Happy. In reality he was the man with everything but happiness. But I gave him interests and foibles; a fascination with astronomy, a love of the night sky, that, granted, became sadly a clinical obsession.
But crucially he had some personal insight. His instincts told him that his untrammelled ego needed a measure of outside control. So he had regular sessions with an expensive abuse therapist who on demand verbally assaulted him, but who by the end of the film was happily quoting for more physical sessions at an enhanced hourly rate.
by Bill Forsyth, The Guardian | Read more:
Photograph: David Moir/Reuters
