Imaginox

It’s the stuff that dreams are made of. Your first feature film as director is an adaptation of a story by an award-winning novelist  - one whose work has both cult cache and the knack of hitting the best-seller list every time.

Your lead actress is recognised the world over. And when all is said and done, you’ve had a cool $5 million at your disposal to get it shot just right. Other would-be first feature directors should be seething in their skin. And likely are – until you confide that the project, more than ten years in the making, has suffered setbacks the like of which would make even the notoriously unlucky Terry Gilliam concede you’ve had nothing less than a nightmare.

Such is the scenario for Rob Heydon, the 31-year-old Canadian who’s helmed the adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s Ecstasy through a perfect storm of events that took so long to clear he might have imagined he’d be on his third or fourth feature by now. He’s glad he took the trip.

“The circumstances under which we financed it were perfect for this film,” Heydon insists. “Although I would have loved to have made the film right away, as a writer and director I have to admit that the film got better as it developed with time.”

Set for release in October this year, the film is an adaptation of The Undefeated, the third in a set of stories originally released in 1996.  The title of the collection, Ecstasy, is now borne by the movie. It’s a boy meets girl story, spiked with peculiarly Welshian elements to create a cocktail of dancing, drug and gangsters that’s likely to prove just as controversial as it sounds. And it’s been a long time coming.



Welsh has often referred to the first adaptation, a 1998 play by Keith Wyatt, as the best ever theatrical take on his work. After the massive box office success of the 1996 film Trainspotting - adapted from the Scot’s best-seller published in the previous year - a screen version of the well-received play seemed ripe for the rendering.

“I was approached by the playwright Keith to direct the film based on his play,” Heydon reveals, adding: “But the play didn’t work as a film so we had to go back and get the original rights in 2000 from Irvine and adapt the book. I became one of the producers and writers. Being a director I wanted to direct it myself. I became the producer because I couldn’t find a Canadian producer who would raise the money for it or make the film that I had in my mind, so I had to take over that role and do it myself.”
 

The script development and fundraising efforts continued for a number of years, the latter being beset by setbacks including a change in the UK tax laws for films. Through this, the film lost half its expected financing in one fell swoop. Heydon has said: “That was my first lesson in film production; the money is never real until it’s in the bank. And independent film financing is very hard to do, so it’s a miracle that any film ever gets made.”

After reviving the project and setting it up as a Canada/UK production in 2009, tragedy struck when Lisa Ray, then lead actress of the piece, revealed she had been diagnosed with cancer. Again financing fell away from the venture. The following August saw the film-makers attempt to establish a co-production, but the UK bond company held that not enough funds had been garnered there and chose to pass on the partnership. Eventually, Heydon and colleagues decided upon making the film a wholly Canadian production, opting to split shooting between his home country and Scotland, where the story itself is set.

The wait on the film, starring Kristin Kreuk (who plays Lana Lang in Smallville), Adam Sinclair (The Day of the Triffids), and Billy Boyd (The Lord of the Rings trilogy) has left legions of Irvine Welsh fans blue with bated breath, not least the more than 390,000 Facebook folk who’ve followed its progress. Heydon is unequivocal about the role, such a stretch of time has played in the forming of the piece. 

“It’s all about the script and the story you’re telling,” he insists, adding: “As 9/11 happened the world changed, and as the UK got involved in Afghanistan and the Iraq war, the politics changed and that played a big part in the story of the film and the characters."

“Someone once told me ‘politics is the way we live our life’, so the journey of making the film is as important as making the film itself. And the lessons I discovered as a producer really were invaluable. The fact that we financed it while still retaining the rights for the film in the UK and Canada without having to sell them to a distributor has a huge upside for film producers at the end of the day, so we’re always trying to be fiscally responsible to our investors and not rush things,” Heydon says.

“I feel that a lot of films get rushed into production – there isn’t enough time spent developing the script or waiting to try and get the right cast and so on. They’re rushed along by a number of different forces.”

Convinced that not forcing the film has made it the best it could be, Heydon has no concerns about the response of audiences who, as devotees of Welsh’s work, will encounter significant changes to the story and characters they feel they already know.

“I’ve had sleepless nights over the production.  I’ve had sleepless nights over the financing – especially after losing it so many times. I’ve had sleepless nights over losing cast and countless things; but never over the story we needed to tell. While trying to keep as true as we can to the book, we’re telling this story. Lloyd (the lead male character) is not just a party animal anymore but he’s actually a smuggler; we’ve added the gangster element. He’s bringing in drugs from Amsterdam and he owes money to gangsters, so when I was doing research in Scotland I met with gangsters and with guys who were smuggling and people who were in the industry. Our co-writer’s brother was a gangster.”

While the writer, director and producer feels such added aspects to the tale were truly necessary, he hints at the fact they may well have hindered the project’s fundraising, with Scottish Screen (a body since dismantled), who Heydon holds did less than they could have to support the plan for a co-production shot officially in Scotland.

“Maybe that’s a part of Scotland Scottish Screen didn’t want to portray in a film,” Heydon suggests. “But is it part of modern day Scotland? Is it trying to be realistic and tell a story about who really runs these nightclubs? How can you tell a story about kids having fun and not show the dark side?” he asks. “At the end of the day you’ve got to plant your roots in the darkest hell if you want to reach the highest heavens.”



Kristin Kreuk’s character, Heather, is no longer a native to Scotland but a Canadian, a move that nimbly sidesteps any accent issues that might have arose otherwise.

“When I was in Scotland I’d go to parties and meet people from Egypt or Hong Kong, Americans going to school there,” Heydon explains.

“Is it that far a stretch that someone from the Commonwealth would be living in Scotland, particularly Edinburgh, and be married to a Scot? Once Irvine Welsh gave us the thumbs up that he liked the story and where it was headed, he gave us the artistic freedom to do what we needed to do and to telll the story that we needed to tell. It’s different from the book, it’s different from Trainspotting, but we think we captured the essence of that.”

A film whose very title speaks directly of a culture many find controversial, Ecstasy might have proved too much of a hot rock for some first-time directors to grasp at – particular if they’d had a conventional career development in mind. Not so for Heydon.

“I revel in the controversy. As a director or as a producer of a film, you love the controversy because it’s going to create conversation, “ he insists. “As someone’s who’s creating art and who’s offering my two cents and making comment, you want people to talk about your art, you want people to discuss what’s going on in the world.”

The film’s status as an independent entity through Ecstasy Film Inc. likely affords it more freedom to speak its mind than a mega-studio would have allowed. And Heydon believes this manner of working has its economic, as well as philosophic, incentives.
 
“Ecstasy is absolutely an independent film – it’s independently financed, and there’s no studio or distributor attached,” he explains. “Once the film was finished we had Intandem films of London selling the film to different distributors around the world; Andrew Brown, Gary Smith and Billy Hurman are selling as the sales agents, but again, because we don’t have finance coming from a sales agent, it’s a much lower fee than if a sales agent’s investing or doing gap financing."

“Basically the producer is at the beck, moan and call of the studios,” Heydon claims. “So say you’ve got a $100 million Marvel movie budget: the producer will get a fee, the director will get a fee, and they’ll never see another dime in profit ever again. But on an independent film like Ecstasy or Trainspotting, you’re able to retain certain rights for certain territories that you know the film will play well in,” he explains, adding: “And you can sell those and see a return down the road.”

Despite the massive draw you’d expect a name such as Welsh’s to have on actors, Heydon reveals that casting - alongside financing - offered the biggest challenge for him as a first-time director.

“A couple of very experienced executive producers who worked with Spielberg in the past explained to me that agents are liars – and the bigger the agent, the better the liar. If they’re based in L.A., they’re really great liars. And if they’re in London, they have a lot of assistants doing their work for them, especially at the big agencies. Sometimes you’ll be waiting for answers from agents and they’ll lie through their teeth,” he reveals.

“So for first time directors, if at all possible, they should get some of the finances themselves or some soft money like tax credits, that helps in putting together the finance plan – but if they have personal relationships with the talent, that’s always the best option, instead of working with agents,” Heydon advises. “Or go through the manager, because usually the manager is a bit more motivated to get deals done than the agent,” he explains.

“I think agents are coming from the society of fear,” he suggests. “There’s this culture of fear in the agent’s business that their talent’s going to leave for whatever reason and they have to convince their talent that they’re the best game in town,” he explains.
 
“Secondly, when we’ve had big talent interested in our project, it was always the agent talking them out of it, rather than talking them into it,” he reveals. “So they say: ‘Look if you’re making $5 or $10 million a film now, you cannot go and make a film for $10 or $20 million because you’re not going to ever make that big money again,’ – so they’re trying to protect their assets and they coddle their talent, because they’re protecting their own interests sometimes more than the actor’s.

“If you can contact the actor directly, get them a script either on Facebook or Twitter or through a friend, or friends of friends. Get them a script and make sure they read it,” he urges, and adds: “Because many agents don’t even send scripts - even though they’re supposed to.”



Making sure the right people got to read the script was all the more important for the film given that previous adaptations of the author’s work might well have misled potential partners as to its content. Trainspotting casts an impressive, and dark, shadow: one that reaches far beyond the decade in which it was released to encroach upon people’s expectations of present projects.
 
“We’re not trying to tell the story of heroin,” Heydon insists. “We’re telling the story of ecstasy; it’s much lighter fare and it’s a love story.

“The film is about transforming and getting away from the drugs – it’s not a sustainable lifestyle. You get to certain point in your life where you kind of grow,” he says.

“It’s like the missing chapter from A Clockwork Orange that was later published. Alex the lead character wanted to grow up and get on with his life and get away from violence and drugs. It’s a transformational love story; from the love of ecstasy to the ecstasy of love.”

Another significant difference exists in the fact that while Trainspotting was very much of its time (the film following close on the heels of the success of the 1993 novel), Ecstasy will capitalise on a growing nostalgia for the Nineties that neatly fits into the so-called ‘twenty year rule’ of revivals. Happily for the film-makers, the idea holds that you don’t have to have been there first time round to form a fascination for an era’s carouseled culture.

“People remember growing up in the late 80s early 90s experiencing the Acid House scene coming from the UK, and in Toronto we were very close with Detroit and New York and the house scene and the rise of warehouse parties,” Heydon says. “It was a huge part of young people’s lives and now there’s a whole generation of people going to nightclubs who’ve heard about these warehouse parties, but now they’re all illegal in North America, so they didn’t really get to experience it in the same way.”

A soundtrack steeped in the era, with contributions from the likes of Paul Oakenfold, Aphex Twin and Primal Scream will combine with the director’s music video experience in the hope of offering up some of the best nights on the dancefloor audiences never had. 

Shooting such scenes were second nature to Heydon; maintaining a Caledonian illusion while filming in Canada, however, presented numerous challenges.

“The big one is continuity,” he admits. “Making sure it fits and then finding locations that could work. So we’re not shooting exteriors in Canada in the winter and trying to make it look like Scotland in summertime,” he explains. “We could find some modern looking buildings and some interesting architecture, then some old Victorian homes here in Canada that could pass as Scottish flats or Scottish town homes – so that’s how we found the visual continuity.”

As for Heydon’s advice on a first filmaker’s professional and personal continuity, it couldn’t be simpler.

“Put all the money on the screen,” he says, adding: “A big thing in the US is crowd-funding. With Kickstarter and IndieGoGo you can potentially raise a very small budget entirely from people you don’t know, and then use that same crowd to get the film out there.

“And don’t worry about getting paid from your first film,” he stresses. “After, you re-invest all the money and make a better film, and eventually your career will take off.”



Heydon’s next project finds him co-producing No Child of Mine - starring Helen Mirren - with Andy Harries, the producer behind The Queen (which enjoyed a Best Picture nomination at the 2006 Oscars where Mirren clinched her Best Actress award). With this borne in mind, one might venture a guess his advice to other first-feature makers should be duly noted…

http://www.ecstasymovie.com/

http://www.facebook.com/IrvineWelshsEcstacy