Inbetweeners producer to put Scots classic on film
By STEPHEN MCGINTY
Published on Sunday 2 December 2012
The Silver Darlings – the Neil M Gunn book about Scottish herring fisherfolk – is set for the silver screen. And it is the producer of bawdy smash-hit comedy
The Inbetweeners, which made
£45 million at the British
box office, who is turning his attention from English teenagers to invest in a movie adaptation of the classic Scottish novel.
Christopher
Young, the Skye-based producer, whose company Young Films made millions
last year from the movie based on the Channel 4 television sitcom, has
bought the screen rights to the 1941 novel, which is set in the
19th-century fishing industry.
He hopes to turn Gunn’s novel into
a multi-million film starring actors such as
Kelly Macdonald, Daniel
Day-Lewis and
James McAvoy.
Young
said: “I have recently acquired the rights to the book and I suppose
for me things have changed considerably since The Inbetweeners movie. It
has allowed me to think again about dream projects and we are looking
at screenwriters at the moment. The context of the adaptation of
The
Silver Darlings is to make it a very successful, popular mainstream
film. The book is a masterpiece, not known outside Scotland but known
and loved in Scotland.”
The 600-page book is regarded as a
masterpiece of Scottish literature. Published in 1941, it tells the
story of Gaelic crofters who, having been driven off their land during
the Clearances, seek their fortune at sea fishing for herring, or
“Silver Darlings”.
The story centres around Catrine, a woman who
loses her husband in a fishing accident and is determined that her son,
Finn, will not suffer the same fate. However, when she falls in love
with Robbie, captain of the most successful fishing boat in the harbour,
Finn becomes dangerously drawn to the sea.
For many years
playwright John McGrath, who wrote
The Cheviot, The Stag And The Black,
Black Oil, owned the film rights; he hoped to make a movie starring
Michelle Pfeiffer
as Catrine. In 1989, after making his first film,
Venus Peter, Young
had hoped to work with McGrath on the film adaptation of
The Silver
Darlings but it did not work out. However, the huge success of
The
Inbetweeners has allowed Young to secure the film rights and he hopes
to attract top Scots and Irish actors in the lead roles with a budget
under £10 million.
“I
would make a point of developing the epic scale,” he said. “I think of
it like a Western. In a way it could be similar to
There Will Be Blood,
which was very strong in evoking another world where there is human
greed and where life is cheap.”
While fans of the juvenile
adventures of Will, Simon, Jay and Neil in
The Inbetweeners, may scratch
their head at what would attract the producer to such an old-fashioned
tale, the news has been greeted warmly by fans of the novel.
Willy
Maley, professor of literature at Glasgow University, said: “That’s
brilliant news, especially in the run-up to the independence
referendum, as we need to celebrate the extraordinary and unique
literary art that Scotland has produced, especially in a time of cuts
and closures.
The Silver Darlings is a beautiful and moving book, a
modern Scottish classic.
“This magnificent novel remains one of
the most memorable evocations of the lasting importance of community,
the inexorable pull of the sea, and the healing power of love. There are
richly rendered scenes of immense tenderness in it that still make me
cry.”
John Archer, who runs Hopscotch Films and is a former
Scottish Screen chief executive, said: “It’s great to see someone who
has had huge popular success go back to doing something much more risky.
There has been a film of Silver Darlings before, in 1947, with
notoriously dodgy Scottish accents – one of the
actors just gives up part way through. I look forward to seeing the new one.”
Source:
Scotsman
