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The tar-black comedy that changed Scottish movie history
It was a miracle that Shallow Grave was ever made
The Cannes Film Festival of 1994 was dominated by one man and one film – Quentin Tarantino, whose post-modern crime drama Pulp Fiction would go on to win the Palme d’Or and cement his reputation as both the enfant terrible of American cinema and, perversely, its saviour.
But on May 16, 1994 – 30 years ago this month – another film premiered at Cannes which was no less influential in its own country of origin and no less crucial to its future well-being.
Like Pulp Fiction and the work of the Coen Brothers, whose new film The Hudsucker Proxy closed the festival, this work had more than a whiff of neo-Noir about it.
Unlike those films it was shot on a shoestring in 30 days, was produced, scripted and directed by a trio of firsttimers, and featured a cast who weren’t exactly household names – though one of them had recently played Pepi the Poisoner in ill-starred 1992 comedy Carry On Colombus.
That was Keith Allen, who was joined on a hastily-built set in Glasgow by Kerry Fox, Christopher Eccleston and one Ewan McGregor.
The film, of course, was Shallow Grave, Danny Boyle’s big screen directorial debut and produced by fasttalking newbie Andrew Macdonald from a script which recently qualified doctor John Hodge had written three years earlier. Longhand and, quite literally, on the back of envelopes.
“I had this idea about three people in a flat and a stranger and a bag of money and that seemed to me like a film,” Hodge would later recall.
Boyle he would describe winningly as a man “with a thuggish streak and a certain low animal cunning”, while in his first meeting with Macdonald he was set to learn that his would-be producer had worked in Hollywood and knew Bridget Fonda – and that yes, she would certainly star in the film alongside Bill Murray and Ray Liotta, Hodge’s choice of leads. “Need I say this was all one big lie?”
In fact when he visited Macdonald at work it was on the set of Taggart, where the Scot’s jobs included replenishing the loo roll in the toilet used by the extras and keeping the lead actress’s cat supplied with tinned tuna. Given all that, Shallow Grave shouldn’t really have worked. In fact it probably shouldn’t even have been made. But it did work, and it was made.
And though it didn’t screen in competition at Cannes or find itself included in the prestigious Director’s Fortnight strand (this despite backers Film 4 entering it for both), it did win something: a glowing review from industry bible Variety.
“Blighty’s new wave of knock-’emdead filmers has a banner to march under with Shallow Grave,” it wrote, describing the film as “a tar-black comedy that zings along on a wave of visual and scripting inventiveness.”
‘Bring the zing’ wasn’t Boyle’s mission statement when he shot the film, though the speeded-up, technowreathed birl through Edinburgh’s New Town which opens it still feels pretty thrilling. But zing is exactly what he gave the Scottish film industry when Shallow Grave finally hit the cinemas. Also confidence and, increasingly, a platform on which to project Scottish voices and Scottish stories into the wider cinematic world.
Scottish cinema wasn’t exactly moribund at the time. Not quite anyway. It had ticked over in the 1970s and 1980s, and had even produced one or two directors who achieved international recognition.
Bill Forsyth was one, of course, his namesake Bill Douglas another, though only belatedly. There was also Edinburgh-born John Mackenzie, who had made a splash examining Glasgow’s criminal underbelly in his adaptation of Jimmy Boyle’s gang and prison memoir A Sense Of Freedom, and would go on to direct The Long Good Friday.
But most of the rest of Mackenzie’s Scottish-based work was made for television. And, although the great innovator and avant gardeist Margaret Tait did finally release a feature length film in 1992, the first made by a Scottish woman, would you believe? Good luck seeing it or even finding it on DVD prior to the BFI’s 2019 re-issue.
There are a few more Scottish films which deserve honourable mentions, such as 1989’s Venus Peter or Restless Natives, from 1985. But otherwise it’s
slim pickings, unless you count those glimpses and fragments of Scotland’s history, culture and landscape which can be assembled from watching Chariots Of Fire, Highlander or The Big Man (a word of warning on that one though: Joanne Walley’s Scottish accent was once voted the third worst ever committed to celluloid). After Shallow Grave, everything changed. It would be over-stating things to call it a deluge, but in the decade or so which followed, Scottish film-makers, script writers and actors found themselves regularly having their work viewed, discussed and celebrated at cinema’s top tables.
In 1996, Scottish screenwriter Paul
Laverty began the first of his fruitful collaborations with Ken Loach when Carla’s Song was released.
It starred Robert Carlyle as a Glasgow bus driver. Two years later came another Laverty-Loach production, My Name Is Joe, this one starring Peter Mullan. For his performance, Mullan won Best Actor at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival, and in the same year his directorial debut, Orphans, won big at the Venice Film Festival. In 1999 Lynne Ramsay’s Glasgow-set Ratcatcher also wowed the critics assembled on the French Riviera and in 2002 it was turn of Sweet Sixteen and this time Scotland was in competition for the prestigious Palme d’Or.
A year later David Mackenzie’s Young Adam took Mullan, Tilda Swinton and Shallow Grave star McGregor back to the Croisette – and let’s not forget how Boyle, Hodge and Macdonald followed their “tar-black comedy”.
In February 1994, a few months after shooting had finished, producer visited writer again and asked him if he’d like to work on another screenplay, this time an adaptation of a book. And he handed him Trainspotting.
Three decades on from Shallow Grave, Scottish cinema has a lot to thank it for.
It was shot on a shoestring in 30 days, was produced, scripted and directed by a trio of first-timers, and featured a cast who weren’t exactly household names
A 30th anniversary 4K restoration of Shallow Grave, supervised by original director of photography Brian Tufano, is in cinemas now, in addition to a 4K restoration of Trainspotting.