I thank the committee for letting me be here today. I am the classic wandering Scot who works in the film business day after day and has travelled the planet doing so.
We have not just missed the boat in this country; we have missed an entire fleet. There has been a cataclysmic failure at every level to deliver. It is a disgrace that the amount of production done in Scotland is catastrophically low compared to that in the UK. We have 8.5 per cent of the UK population and the spend is 3.5 or 4 per cent—I do not know the exact figures, but it is less than half of what it should be.
I have certain things that I would like to say. The film business is called a business for a reason. It is a hard-headed financial business—it always has been and it always will be. It is very fluid in that it goes wherever there are facilities and a crew. That is what draws films. We have great crew in Scotland, although there are not enough of them. From my experience, with every film that I have worked on around the world, there has been a little coterie of Scots working there. That has got slightly smaller in the past few years. There were always eight, nine or 12 Scots on the crew, but now there are four, five or seven. There are fewer skilled crew on the films that I work on.
I left a film studio last night to come here—I almost missed a plane getting here—and I go back tonight to a film studio to start work again tomorrow morning. There is a great misunderstanding, even in Creative Scotland and Scottish Enterprise, of what film making involves. It is a simple industrial process, with its own little factory and it needs that factory. You lovely MSPs come to work in this amazing building. I have got a job and I leave the house at 6 am; where do I go? I go to a film studio. It is not rocket science. We cannot spend every day in Glencoe doing scenery; we need a film studio. It is not rocket science; it is simple.
We do not have to build a Rolls-Royce Pinewood in Scotland. The studio could be small scale and simple, or there could be several facilities. Anything would help. The lack of a studio is crippling, as it was when I first ventured abroad 25 years ago and, despite being discussed endlessly, it is still crippling today. There is a good saying in drama that all character is action. It is not what someone says that matters in films or TV, it is what they do. All character is action, and the lack of action in our industry for many years is staggering.
The previous incumbents at Creative Scotland were rather scathing about studio needs. I remember the comment was made that we do not need a big shiny studio. When you make a film, it starts with three or four people: a location manager, a production designer, the director and a producer. They get in a room and start to discuss where they are going to be and how they are going to hire a crew. The crew gets hired where they are. It does not matter if somebody comes to Glasgow to film for three weeks or to do “Avengers” in Edinburgh, as happened last year; what matters is where the project is generated from, because that is where they hire the crew. They say, “Oh, we will hire him, him and him. He is a great prop guy and she is a great designer. We will get these people together.”
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When they come to Scotland for three weeks, they bring those people with them, because it is a no-brainer. They trust those people, have hired them and know what they can do. That is how it works—the crew are hired where the project is based. It is a critical misunderstanding to think that it is about having some big shiny studio with nice windows and desks; it is about where the human beings sit, meet and discuss matters like you folks do in the Parliament. Where they meet is where the work is generated from. I have a bugbear about the studio for starters.
I have worked on 54 feature films around the world, and 80 per cent of the work is done in a studio. That is how films are made because it rains sometimes or it is cloudy or too cold. A studio does not solve every problem. It does not create content. There are two strands. The content, about which my dear friends Kenny Glenaan and Chris Young spoke well, is important. Of course we have to generate local content. They are two disparate things, but they can run in tandem and one feeds the other. If there is infrastructure—guess what?—little groups of people get together and start creating content and companies can grow and develop. Developing content and developing the infrastructure are not mutually exclusive. They are slightly different areas, but they can feed into each other.
What has been done at Wardpark Studios tells the story. It is fantastic. We have missed the boat with “Game of Thrones”. Remember that the pilot was shot in Scotland. Some smarter folk than us in Northern Ireland were smart about what to offer studio-wise and facility-wise and got the biggest TV show in history to go to Northern Ireland for the past seven years, along with hundreds of millions of pounds. We will keep on missing the boat because there is a lack of ambition and drive. The people in the jobs at Creative Scotland and Scottish Enterprise are not from the hard end of production and do not really understand how or why films are made. We will continue to miss the boat until we have a film studio and we have film makers and practitioners at the top of the quangos.