Director Danny Boyle heads up festival’s star-studded line-up
● Creator of Trainspotting films and Shallow Grave to return to the capital
Oscar-winning director Danny Boyle is to launch his new Beatles movie Yesterday and discuss his career at the Edinburgh International Film Festival next month.
The director of the two Train spotting movies and Shallow Grave will be back in Edinburgh, where they were all filmed, to discuss his career in an special event.
Boy le, who is about to join forces with Irvine Welsh again on a mo vie about Scottish music industry mogul Alan Mcgee, the founder of Creation Records, has joined forces with writer Richard Curtis for their first film together to tell the story of a struggling songwriter who wakes up from a freak accident and discovers that the Beatles never existed.
Organisers hope another Oscar-winner, Richard Dreyfuss, star of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, will also be able to attend the event for the world premiere of his new film, Astronaut, about a lonely widower trying to win a trip to space.
The festival will be staging “in person” events with the Leith-based actor Jack Lowden, who has shot to fame in recent years in Mar y Queen of Scots, Dunkirk, Calibre and Tommy’s Honour, and S cottish horror star Polly anna Mcintosh, who is best known for her role in the hit series The Walking Dead.
Other highlights of the festival line-up include The Souvenir, the first film Scots actress Tilda Swinton has made with her daughter Honor, which is set in 1980s London, as well as the Oscar winner’ s new zombie comedy The Dead Don’t Die, and Olivia Colman’s new America-set film, Them That Follow, about a pastor’s daughter whose secret threatens to tear a community apart.
Other Scots stars in the lineup include Kate Dickie, Freya Mavor and Shauna Macdonald, who star in Balance, not Symmetry, a new Glasgowset drama set to a soundtrack by Ayrshire rock icons B iffy Cl yro,andBr ian Cox, who stars in new American thriller Strange But True, and Angus Macfadyen, who will reprise his role as Robert the Bruce in Braveheart for a sequel to Mel Gibson’s Oscar-winning epic.
Schemers, which is billed as the first full-lenth feature film set and shot in Dundee, will recall the city’s youth culture the late 1970s. Actor-director Peter Mullan and composer Craig Armstrong discuss their work together on films like Orphans, The Magdadele Sisters and Neds, while a marathon screening of new TV drama Good Omens, which has been adapted from Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchell’s comedy-fantasy, could see Michael She en and David Ten n ant head down the red carpet. Mark Adams Mark Adams highlighted the strong representation of female filmmakers, who make up 42 per cent of directors of feature films and shorts, including British film makers Emily Harris, Joanna Hogg, Ruth Platt and Greta Bellamacina.
But he admitted there was a shortage of Scottish films available for this festival, which has lost out in Rob Roy director Michael Caton-jones’ long-awaited adaption of Alan Warner’ s best-selling novel The Sopranos, which was made in Edinburgh last year.
He said: “We have had a lot of big films like Outlaw King and Mary Queen of Scots filmed here recently, but there has definitely not been as many new Scottish feature films around this year. We do have films like Balance, Not Symmetry and Schemers in the programme, but The Sopranos wasn’t ready to be shown and in the market-place yet.”
Boyzint he Wood, anew Scottish comedy starring Eddie Izzard as a deranged Highland shunts man,wil open the event officially on 19 June, while Vanessa Redgrave and Timothy Spall star in the closing gala, Mrs Lo wry& Son, which explores the relationship between the artist LS Lowry and his mother.
However the event will effectively open three days earlier than normal for previews of the new Toy Story 4 blockbuster and new American superhero horror film Brightburn, while 16th century Lauriston Castle will be hosting a special “upstairs downstairs” costume-themed screening of murder mystery Gosford Park the previous night.
The EIFF’S free screenings will be returning to St Andrew Square the weekend before the official curtain raiser, with Mar y Poppins Returns, The Greatest Showman and Bohemian Rhapsody among the movies being shown.
Adams said :“We’ve been running outdoor screenings in St Andrew Square the weekend before the festival for several years, which have been amazingly popular when we have had good weather.
“We’ ve got a really good relationship with Disney and Pixar, but it didn’t work out to screen Toy Story 4 during our official dates of the festival due to its release date. However they asked us if there was something we could try to do and we asked whether the Festival Theatre was available.
“We’re actually showing it the same day as the UK pre - mi ere in London. Since we managed to get the venue we thought we’d try to do something else in the evening and managed to get Brightburn.
“We’re not formally extending the dates of the festival, but we will have a weekend full of films before the festival properly starts. There definitely isn’t a grand masterplan to extend the festival.”
“We’re not formally extending the dates of the festival, but we will have a weekend full of films before the festival properly starts”
MARK ADAMS