BARNEY THOMSON: Making THE cut
Actor Robert Carlyle’s directorial debut gets Vancouver assist
Scottish actor Robert Carlyle remembers his worst haircut quite well.
“I got a perm when I was maybe 17 — it was all the rage at the time,” Carlyle said with a hearty laugh. “I thought I’d grown my hair long enough and I thought I’d have this long, wavy perm. But of course as soon as you perm your hair, it goes up like a meatball. I looked like a pensioner. It was the worst hair I’ve ever had in my life.”
While that probably would be enough to warrant maiming his hairdresser, Carlyle is revisiting the barber shop environment in his latest film The Legend of Barney Thomson, which opens today in theatres in Vancouver and Toronto.
The film stars Carlyle in the title role, playing a down-onhis-luck barber who accidentally murders his boss. With the help of his maleficent mother (played with devilish glee by Oscar winner Emma Thompson, unrecognizable as the crabby Cemolina), Thomson gets sucked into a comically grotesque serial killer intrigue that’s a cross between the Coen brothers’ Fargo and classic killer barber tale Sweeney Todd. Things get really hairy when tough-as-nails Detective Hold-all (played by Ray Winstone) starts following Thomson’s bloody trail, which leads to a surprising revelation about who the true serial killer really is.
The film, shot entirely on location in Carlyle’s hometown of Glasgow, was co-produced by Vancouver’s Pacific Northwest Pictures with the assistance of Telefilm Canada and involves a number of Vancouver-based artists, including production designer Ross Dempster.
In a phone interview with The Sun, Carlyle explained the story of Barney Thomson, based on a book entitled The Long Midnight of Barney Thomson by author Douglas Lindsay, was one that had dogged him for years.
“I’ve been offered a dozen or so films over the past 20 years or so to direct,” Carlyle said. “Nothing really appealed to me. Barney Thomson is an interesting choice because it was offered to me as an actor to play Barney five times over a seven- or eightyear period. The script just kept on coming through the post. Though I thought it was interesting and there was humour in it and it was set in Glasgow, my hometown, it just wasn’t a Glasgow I recognized.
“Anyway, I found myself over here in Vancouver and (producer) John Lenic and I were chatting one day and he said, ‘I’ve got this Scottish script you might be interested in.’ And there it was: Barney Thomson again. ‘I cannot get away from this story!’ So I said, ‘It’s not a Glasgow I recognize,’ and it’s because it was by Richard Cowan, who is based (in Vancouver). I didn’t know that but it made sense, you know?”
As Lenic and Carlyle discussed making the film, Carlyle was asked what he would recommend they do with the script.
Carlyle immediately thought of friend and screenwriter Colin McLaren, who was asked to “Glasgow-ify” the script a little bit more.
“Colin did exactly that — it became a little more the Glasgow that I knew and I recognized,” Carlyle said. “It wasn’t my idea that I be the director — ‘ What have I done? I’m so far in this I can’t get out!’ ”
In a way Carlyle, who now lives most of the year in West Vancouver as he works on the TV series Once Upon A Time (which recently celebrated its 100th episodes), found himself in a Barney Thomson-esque position: trapped in a series of events that were quickly spinning out of control.
The film is not set in any particular era or time frame. Dempster’s production design combines fashion and sets that feel plucked from different landscapes: The old timey barbershop, the ’70s costumes and locations, the ’ 80s vehicles. The film has a strangely warped sense of time and place, but to Carlyle it’s the Glasgow he knows.
“That’s what I wanted it to be,” Carlyle said. “The more we worked on the script, the more I thought there was a timeless quality to this. It could be anywhere, really: It could be the ’70s, ’80s, or even the ’90s. There are no mobile phones. Certain cars are a little bit more modern. But it all comes from my memories of the barbershops and getting my hair cut in such places. There’s sports things all over the walls — we chose boxers and boxing photographs. The barbers’ chairs and the clippers that we used — these guys have been using these things for 20 or 30 years. Nothing really changes in the barber’s world. That was the key.”
Carlyle explained he was spoiled to be able to direct a talent of the calibre of Emma Thompson, who took on the role in a heartbeat and made it her own.
“What do you say to someone like Emma Thompson? Nothing, really,” Carlyle said with a laugh. “You talk to great directors like Danny Boyle (who directed Carlyle in Trainspotting, turning 20 this year and set for a sequel to be released later this year) or Alan Parker, and they cast the film so they don’t have to do that. They can concentrate on how the film works and the pace of the film. They know the people they cast are going to bring their A-game.
“Talk about a lack of vanity,” he added. “Few actors would take that chance and make themselves as ugly as that. She accepted the part of Cemolina one day after she was sent the script. She understood what she was in: A small budget film in Glasgow and my first-time movie (directing). She was such a great, great help.”
Barney Thomson (Robert Carlyle) is barber who has nothing to show for his life but a dimly lit seat at the back of a rundown barber shop. Possessed of no particular imagination or ambition, he’s just unsettled enough to take his frustrations out on his customers. He basically has two modes with them: sad annoyance and foul-mouthed annoyance.
Foul-mouthed annoyance sums up the tone of this movie — an attitude of nastiness, expressed relentlessly until you leave.
British Isles saltiness is played for dark comedy in Carlyle’s directorial debut, but it doesn’t always find the line between sharply dismissive and annoyingly bitter. As often as not, Barney Thomson is just a movie that’s brutal for its own sake.
The more inspired bits of darkness come between Carlyle and his harridan of a mother, a crass and crotchety Emma Thompson. She’s never exactly proud of her son, but they develop an odd bond when he accidentally starts killing his co-workers, stabbing them in the heart and crushing their windpipes as he desperately begs them to let him keep his job, or not tell anyone about the other guy he killed.
Mom seems to take it as a bit of welcome gumption on Barney’s part, and anyway is kind enough to help him dispose of the bodies — cutting them up for her freezer, properly labelled (“I label everything!” she insists).
But while those two spin up decades of disappointment and dismemberment into good family fun, the police begin sniffing around. It seems there’s been a serial killer around town, and Barney’s suddenly suspicious behaviour has him in the sights of otherwise incompetent detective Holdall (Ray Winstone).
Holdall has his own harridan to deal with, a bellowing up-and-comer eager to steal his cases (Ashley Jensen). But their relationship doesn’t have near the weird wavelength of Barney and his mother’s: Here, dark humour mostly amounts to insulting each other in increasingly loud or crude terms, which is more grating than morally uncomfortable or, you know, funny.
Fortunately, most of our time is spent watching Barney try to figure out what it’s like to have a purpose in life, capped off by some reasonably sharp left turns en route to the final showdown. As the man says, Barney Thomson is nasty, brutish and short, but not quite funny enough to always get away with it.
“The more inspired bits of darkness come between Carlyle and his harridan of a mother, a crass and crotchety Emma Thompson.