AS TENS of thousands of people working in the Scottish tourism industry can testify, this has been the year of Brave.
The hoopla of hype surrounding Disney and Pixar’s fantasy adventure set in the Scottish Highland had cranked into gear long before the turn of the year – and shows no sign of abating.
I have to confess that by the time the film showed up in Edinburgh for the Film Festival in June – after a flurry of premieres at other overseas events, I was slightly weary of the whole affair.
Major film premieres are few and far between in Scotland these days – mainly down to the ridiculous lack of a major cinema complex in which to show them.
There was definitely a sense of occasion and – mercifully, considering the amount of public money piggy-backed on the film – Brave actually turned out much better than many had expected. Even this grizzled old cynic had to concede as much.
But I just couldn’t shake the feeling of being pummelled by the marketing machine assembled behind Brave, much of it funded from the public purse.
Merida, the flame-haired free spirit at the heart of the film, seemed omnipresent during my annual jaunt to the Hebrides this summer, thanks to the plethora of posters and pop-up stands. I’ve lost count of the number of “Brave promotions” I’ve seen or heard about over the last few months, a result of a concerted effort by VisitScotland to secure nationwide “buy-in” to the film.
But questions have to be asked about whether the Brave “machine” has been more about helping to promote a film which already has huge marketing behind it, rather than actually encouraging tourism – or even nurturing a film industry which has struggled to make an impact over the last decade.
No-one is arguing that Brave has been bad for Scottish tourism. The film has been a huge gift at a time when many parts of the industry are struggling, as some of the figures to emerge in recent months have shown. It certainly hasn’t done any harm this year, when many parts of the country – but not all – have been regularly battered by dreadful weather. Yet I wonder if the £7 million from the Scottish Government and VisitScotland for marketing initiatives on the back of the film could have been better spent, when it is just one of a plethora of movies to put Scotland on the cinematic map.
I was astonished when I read that the dramatic climax to the new James Bond film is set in the Highlands. Who knew that key scenes in Christopher Nolan’s final Batman epic were shot in the Cairngorms before the film came out? Was anyone aware that Ridley Scott shot – and set – part of the opening sequence of his Alien “prequel” on Skye until they recognised the Old Man of Storr on screen?
The first I knew of Ken Loach’s whisky caper The Angel’s Share – shot in various Scottish distilleries – was when its screening at Cannes was confirmed. Many more Scots-linked films are on the horizon, including Under the Skin, in which Scarlett Johannson preys on hitch-hikers in the Highlands, and Irvine Welsh’s adaptation of Filth.
These are not just matters for VisitScotland, which seems to think just one film – The Eagle – has been shot in Scotland since The Da Vinci Code was released in 2006. The section of Creative Scotland’s own website dedicated to filming around the country is illustrated with a clip from Gary: Tank Commander. With 2012 supposed to be the “Year of Creative Scotland”, I would have assumed someone, somewhere could have grasped the significance of all that has been going on.
Skyfall is the most glaring case of a missed opportunity, particularly when you read of the campaign VisitBritain has mounted on the back of the film and consider that Bond himself has a whole host of tartan credentials stretching back to the earliest novels.
VisitScotland insists it has long been on the case and has booked advertising space in cinemas before screenings of Skyfall. But other than helping out with a solitary press trip it has no part in VisitBritain’s drive to promote UK Bond locations – a truly bizarre situation for the nation’s biggest film tourism campaign.
Perhaps Britain’s best-known spy does not tick enough of the right boxes for the likes of VisitScotland and Creative Scotland. When Skyfall hits cinema screens later this week maybe the penny – or pennies – will finally begin to drop.