Musician, writer, producer and now director, Richard Jobson brings a lot of heart into his début film, writes Michael Dwyer
Richard Jobson's circuitous route to making his own movies has been unplanned and spontaneous, yet seems entirely logical and organic. His semi-autobiographical first feature, 16 Years of Alcohol, is an honest and stylish picture of Scottish working-class life that takes him back to his roots as a streetfighting boy in Edinburgh. Now 44, Jobson was in his teens when he formed his first group, Tattoo, a David Bowie cover band, with bass player Bill Simpson. When Jobson was 17, he and Simpson formed the flamboyant post-punk five-piece, The Skids, whose line-up included the late Stuart Adamson before he fronted his own band, Big Country. Signed to Virgin, The Skids scored 10 chart singles and had their biggest hits with Into the Valley, Masquerade and Working for the Yankee Dollar.
Jobson married his first wife, Mariella Frostrup, now a newspaper columnist and TV presenter, when he was 19. After The Skids broke up in 1982, he formed The Armory Show, performed and recorded his poetry, worked as a model, wrote a novel, and carved out his niche as the host of several TV shows, most notably Movietalk and Face to Face on Sky. His first venture into feature films was as a producer on Just Another Day in London, directed by actor Sean Pertwee; Tube Tales, an anthology of nine short films shot in the London Underground; and as a producer and writer on Irish director Damien O'Donnell's Heartlands.
Is Richard Jobson a Renaissance Man? "Someone said to me that I've got more exes against my name than Liz Taylor," he said on one of our several encounters on the film festival circuit this year. He speaks with a rapid-fire delivery that oozes enthusiasm for the passions in life that have been, and are, his work.
Jobson first wrote 16 Years of Alcohol as a novel, published in 1987, before adapting it as a feature film. Loosely based on his formative experiences as the youngest of five brothers growing up in Edinburgh, the film is an honest and compelling picture of possible hope and redemption in an environment scarred by violence and drinking. Kevin McKidd is terrific as the complex central character, Frankie Mac, and there are engaging performances from Laura Fraser and Susan Lynch as the young women who hold out the prospects of alternative lifestyles in this strikingly textured movie.
"I knew I was really setting myself up for criticism by making my own movie, especially in the UK and most of all in Scotland," he says. "I've got a big target on my head. For me, 16 Years was an amalgamation of all the things I've done - the poetry, records and books I released, along with my true love of film. It all somehow made sense in this project. I have a meditative quality, which I feel comes through in the film, and I got that from the films that I love - by Terrence Malick and Wong Kar Wai, both of whom have been huge influences on me.
"Of course, there's also a very strong Irish influence on the film. I was born into an Irish-Catholic family in a fairly hardcore Presbyterian housing estate in Edinburgh, so I was already an outsider from day one. I'm married to an Italian woman now; a few years ago, when we were watching television coverage of those school children having to run the gauntlet to go to school in Belfast, she said she couldn't understand how that could happen in a civilised society today. I told her I went through that for 12 years in Edinburgh.
"It toughens you up. I was a tough, violent kid, because I had to be to protect myself and survive. It was a very strange upbringing, to grow up in a community where you're made to feel that you've got six fingers and three eyes and that you should go back to the hole you came from. It's a very weird way to begin your life and though it never made me particularly bitter, it fuelled a kind of violence, which, unfortunately, I prosecuted with great venom."
The film is dedicated to the oldest of Jobson's brothers, who died recently in what he describes as "suspicious circumstances", although he chooses not to elaborate on this.
"It was a cathartic experience because he was a profound influence on me as a kid. He introduced me to great music - Velvet Underground, Captain Beefheart and Frank Zappa - at a very young age when all my mates were listening to Mott the Hoople.
"I did run with a gang, a pretty hardcore gang, and I became the leader of the gang. It was weird for me to revisit all these things in the film. The character of Frankie Mac is definitely an amalgam of myself and my brother, even though some sequences in the film have nothing to do with what happened to either of us. But there are also moments of great clarity that are autobiographical - and still painful for me to watch."
Music, through forming and performing with The Skids, was a way of releasing some of Jobson's youthful aggression. "I found its raw power liberating and it also gave me an identity. I decided to treat the music in the film almost as if it were in a musical, like a Rodgers and Hammerstein score." The eclectic soundtrack, which mixes Jim Reeves, Kitty Wells, Velvet Underground, Roxy Music, Iggy Pop, The Blue Nile and The Skids, opens on Paddy Reilly's version of The Fields of Athenry.
"I think that sets up the whole environment of the film, and its romantic, mythic picture of the family even though there's a political subtext at work there. Strangely enough, Pete St John wrote the song around 1982, but it feels like it could have been written in the 1940s or '50s. I used it for a variety of reasons, to set up a community within a community."
The film was shot on High Definition "for very little money", around £400,000. "Instead of hiring some young maverick Chris Doyle clone to shoot it handheld and in a visual frenzy, we went for something much more stylised.
"I think the trick with High Definition is to work with someone who knows it's not a toy, that it's a tool. It's an acutely difficult process to get it right, so I chose a lighting cameraman who was older and wiser - John Rhodes. It's also very much an audio-visual film, so I paid particular attention to the sound mix because the audio can do so much work for you, especially with all the music I had chosen for the film, with every song having its own individual meaning in the context.
"The texture of the film would suggest British social realism, but it's certainly not that. And it's not all about alcohol either. The alcohol is there as a mechanism for Frankie Mac's violence. It's what propels him to commit appalling violence on people, as he does. Without it, I don't believe he would be as brutal and violent as he is. That's something that interests me about the male psyche and where that dynamic comes from.
As 16 Years of Alcohol goes on release here, his second film as writer and director, The Purifiers, will have its world première at the Edinburgh Film Festival. The Purifiers reunites him with Kevin McKidd. "Kevin plays the bad guy and he's wonderful in it - really scary. It's just 81 minutes and very much within the parameters of a genre film. It was influenced by some of my favourite US thrillers, John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13 and Walter Hill's The Warriors, and it has a lot of B-movie language and martial arts and it's a lot of fun. It was very exciting to do."
16 Years of Alcohol opens at UGC Cinemas and the IFI in Dublin on August 20th
