Tommy Gormley, assistant director on Star Trek, The Force Awakens and Mission: Impossible among other major films, addressed MSPs on the Parliament’s Culture Committee about the state of the Scottish screen sector, and his prognosis wasn’t good.
“We haven’t just missed the boat in this country, we’ve missed an entire fleet.
There is a cataclysmic failure at every level to deliver.
The fact that production in Scotland is catastrophically low compared to the UK, it’s a disgrace.
There’s a great misunderstanding, even in Creative Scotland and Scottish Enterprise, about what film-making involves. It’s a very simple industrial process. It has its own little factory, it needs the factory.
You lovely MSPs have this amazing building, you come to work in the morning to this building. I’ve got a job, I leave the house at 6am, where do I go – I go to a film studio. It’s not rocket science.
We can’t spend every day filming up in Glencoe doing scenery, you need a film studio, it’s not rocket science, it’s very simple.
We don’t have to build a Rolls Royce Pinewood in Scotland, it could be very small scale and simple, it could be several facilities. Anything would help. The lack of a studio is crippling, I think.”