Glasgow’s Film Scene Buzzes with Activity
A crowd has gathered at the base of one of Glasgow's steepest streets, drawn by the sight of Spiderman navigating a transformed New York sidewalk. Meanwhile, Hollywood star Glen Powell is filming his latest thriller, The Ghost Writer, in another part of the city centre. Joel Coen and Frances McDormand are scouting locations for their Gothic mystery, Jack of Spades, exploring the back streets of Glasgow.
Amid these major productions, twin brothers Ben and Nathan McQuaid are creating their first feature film on a microbudget, receiving considerable support from fellow University of Stirling alumni, from which they graduated only weeks earlier.
Filmmaker Graham Hughes, who first noticed their work during a student competition, initiated the project by providing initial funding.
"It is unusual for graduates to take on a feature film straight away, but after watching their film I could tell they were hungry artists," he says.
"They reminded me of when I was their age and just desperate to make things."
The 22-year-old twins have demonstrated a strong aptitude for filmmaking.
Creating Welcome to G-Town
Their film, Welcome to G-Town, is a comedy horror about an alien invasion, inspired by a piece of vivid green graffiti they noticed from a train.
"A lot of the props were made with stuff we found lying about, like bits of cardboard painted red,"says Ben.
"The aliens have purple blood so we wanted it to have a kind of texture to it, so we just bought cans of prunes and used the prunes mixed with bits of purple food colouring. For anyone thinking of doing something similar, it does have an awful smell to it so I wouldn't recommend it."
"And children's bath slime which you dissolve in water,"adds Nathan.
"I'm not sure how responsible it is to bathe your children in it but it's very quick and easy if you need a lot of slime."
"And one pack of that slime will give five to 10 buckets-full,"Ben notes.
They enlisted help from many former Stirling University students, including Dylan Antscheri and Calum Cownie.
"I was a couple of years above them and, like a large chunk of the crew, I met them at the university filmmaking society,"says Calum.
"They immediately showed a passion and talent for filmmaking with the short films they made, and we've been working on films with them ever since."
The twins credit their experience with the demanding schedule of student filmmaking for their preparedness.
"We always had a year at university to make a film, but all of the filmmakers would always start about two weeks before the deadline,"Ben explains.
"It was always a mad rush in April or May when we were all making our films at the same time, so we'd go from set to set, helping each other out."
"Part of the pitch for us making the film was that even if everything goes wrong, we would still be learning,"Nathan adds.
"So even if we came out of the project with a terrible film or it collapsed halfway through, we would have learned lessons, like film school."
They planned their shoot carefully to take advantage of long summer daylight hours and to avoid issues such as noise complaints.
"On a previous horror film, we were using a private flat and hadn't warned the neighbours who complained about the noise,"Ben recalls.
"A policeman arrived at the door, only to find Nathan covered in fake blood. He looked him up and down and said 'I've seen a lot of real blood and this isn't it', which was a relief because he let us continue with the film."
Influences and Encounters with Hollywood
The brothers express admiration for filmmakers such as Peter Jackson, Bill Forsyth, and the Coen Brothers.
"We've always had an admiration for local filmmakers who don't necessarily have their sights set on Hollywood,"Ben says.
They were thrilled to meet Joel Coen on set in Glasgow, alongside his wife, Oscar-winning actress Frances McDormand.
"We realised they were filming in one of the alleyways where we'd filmed just days before,"Ben recounts.
"It was very cool because even though they have a hundred times our budget, it's still just a bunch of people in anoraks standing outside with a camera and a microphone,"Nathan adds.
"They asked whether we were filmmakers and we got to talk to them about making independent films and they wished us good luck for our film."
Premiere and Learning Beyond University
Welcome to G-Town will have its world premiere at the Glasgow Film Festival next weekend. Two screenings have already sold out, prompting the addition of a third to meet demand.
Executive producer Graham Hughes, who also composed the film’s music, notes the importance of learning skills beyond those taught at university.
"I've been making films for a while and the film industry is a very secretive and idiosyncratic world,"he explains.
"People are usually generous with their time, but when you're just starting out you don't want to try anyone's patience. It's hard to google reliable answers to questions like 'what percentage should a sales agent take' so a lot of my lessons were learned by making often embarrassing mistakes."
"I knew the team could make a good film, but that's only about half of what you need to know to make a film a success so that's the learning I wanted to pass on."
"We've been joking for a while that it would be pretty strange if a film called Welcome to G-Town had its première in Spain or Belgium or somewhere like that, so it was always been the goal to have it play in Glasgow,"Nathan says.
"We've learned so much from Graham and the rest of the team from making this film,"Ben adds.
"Things we didn't get taught at uni like festival strategies or trying to sell films to a distributor. So we now have a festival strategy that we're working on and hopefully we can get it to some other countries and other festivals in Europe and then, if people like it, get it out there to as many people as possible."
Welcome to G-Town will be screened at the Glasgow Film Festival on 28 February at 18:15, on 1 March at 19:30, and on 6 March at 22:45.
