"Adam and Joe"
Time Out London May 2002
by Geoffrey Macnab

Alexander Trocchi may have been a 'f**** horrible man', but Ewan McGregor still fought tooth and nail to get funding for an adaptation of the Glaswegian beatnik's novel 'Young Adam'.

'THEY INITIALLY WANTED TO MAKE IT FOR A MILLION POUNDS WITH NOSTARS. I THOUGHT: WHAT IS THAT ABOUT?'

It's a mid-morning in Glasgow beside the canal. A small film crew is setting up its equipment aboard the Atlantic Eve, a handsome-looking old barge. Ewan McGregor is chatting volubly and cheerfully with his publicist. Mothers with prams walk by, seemingly unfazed by the film-makers in their midst. Producer Jeremy Thomas is talking intently into his mobile phone. The skies are overcast. All in all, the set of 'Young Adam' is about as far away from the world of 'Star Wars' as you can imagine. This is a lowish-budget adaptation of Alexander Trocchi's 1954 novel about a rootless young drifter, Joe (McGregor), working on a barge owned by curmudgeonly Leslie (Peter Mullan) and his strapping wife Ella (Tilda Swinton). They discover the corpse of a young woman in the water, a corpse with which Joe has some vaguely sinister connection.

The drama plays out against the backcloth of a dour, repressed post-war Scotland, a country characterised by dingy pubs, tattered fairgrounds and the oppressive pull of the Presbyterian Church. When he sits down for a chat, McGregor is keen to discuss the erotic possibilities of teapots. As he explains, Trocchi's 'Young Adam' was published in two versions: the literary one acclaimed by Irvine Welsh as 'a breath of fresh air after all those sickly celebrations of Scottishness'; and the porno edition which Trocchi wrote for the Olympia Press to make money. McGregor is yet to read the latter version, but has been promised a copy once shooting is complete. 'There's apparently some fantastic scenes in there,' he chuckles. 'Joe comes back and finds Ella masturbating with a teapot and stuff, which I look forward to reading. He's quite interesting, Trocchi…A lot of his writing I'm sure is for effect. Every now and again, he goes "I'll shock them", and so he throws in a sex scene with somebody with no legs. You can feel him putting his fingers up at people, which I quite like.'

Impressively, McGregor can even quote verbatim from a passage in Trocchi's later novel, 'Cain's Book' (about his drug addiction). 'I think that could make a very interesting film,' McGregor states. 'I'd like to make the amputee scene. There's a great line in it - "She slid her stump between my thighs and I felt the soft flesh of her belly against mine." That would be a great scene to play. I'd have to find the right one-legged actress, but I think it could be good fun.' As the morning progresses, it becomes apparent that nobody on set approves of Trocchi very much. A sort of Scottish beatnik, who wrote 'Young Adam' when he was only 24, the novelist had an extraordinary colorful life. After leaving Glasgow University in the early 1950s, he fled grim Scotland and decamped in Paris, where he edited the magazine Merlin, publishing the work of, among others, Samuel Beckett. Then he turned up in the U.S., where he became a heroin addict and befriended Burroghs and co.

Trocchi wasn't exactly the lovable type. He abandoned his children because they were getting in the way of his writing. He put his wife on the street to pay for his drug habit, reputedly gave heroin to kids, and once blinded and almost killed Leonard Cohen by feeding him some suspect opium out of…a teapot. 'I think he was a f***** horrible man, probably,' McGregor says bluntly. 'He seemed so self-satisfied in his drug use. The way he justifies it and talks about it being a life choice and blah blah blah when, in actual fact, he could just have been running from the unhappiness of being a miserable bastard…his baby wasn't eating and yet he was getting his wife to turn tricks on the street, just so he could afford fixes of heroin.' Given his disdain for Trocchi the man (if not the writer), it's perhaps a surprise that McGregor fought so hard to get the movie made. He says he lobbied tirelessly because he believed so much in the script by young writer-director David Mckenzie.

'I couldn't believe how hard it was to get any help.' Only after a very public campaign by the star - who even proselytised on behalf of the movie on 'Parkinson' - did the Film Council come on board.'They initially wanted to make it for a million pounds with no stars. I thought: What is that about? You give lots and lots of money to "Gosford Park" and then you don't give money to a really good script with a f**** great cast (…if I may be so bold…) to support a new, talented director. I felt like I was banging my head against the wall. It seems the British film industry is the last thing they want. They want big America names to come over and make big American-type movies in Britain and then they're happy.' This mini-rant over, McGregor expresses his relief and enthusiasm at being able to make a film as 'intense' and focused as this. No, he doesn't see it as a return to his 'Trainspotting' roots, but he admits that he found 'Phantom Menace' a bit flat. He's also irritated that 'people assume doing 'Star Wars' takes up all my life. It's four months, and then it's four months two years later, and then it's four months two years after that. That's all it is. I'm not loaned out by Lucas to make other movies, but that's what people assume. It's not the be-all-and-end-all for me.'

McGregor's character, Joe, is an ambivalent, curiously detached vagrant who seduces then abandons various women, and stands idly by when the wrong man is convicted of killing the girl whose corpse turned up in the canal. Depending on your point of view, he's either a bit of a bastard or the existential type who's always at one remove from his own life. 'I pitched it as a cross between "L'Atlante" and "The Last Tango in Glasgow",' the director David Mackenzie explains in a break between filming. The son of an admiral, he has made one digital feature with his younger brother (the star of BBC drama 'Monarch of the Glen') and various shorts. It's several years since he started trying to make 'Young Adam' into a movie. 'We've got one or two scenes which are very frank and - I hope - shocking, but I don't think it's particularly sensible to be courting sexual controversy at this point of film history… I wouldn't want the film to be sold as the steamiest thing, but it is frank about its sexuality, there's a lot of sex in it.'

After lunch, it's time to head a bit further down the canal. McGregor is a black donkey jacket, Tilda Swinton in a baggy blue dress and Peter Mullan, looking as grizzled as Captain Haddock, are all standing on deck. The light is gray. Steam is billowing from the barge. Waiting for them on the bank, are a couple of old men in cloth caps. For a moment, it's as if we really have been whisked back to an earlier era. The spell is spoiled abruptly as the barge thuds into the bank at an ungainly angle. Whoever is doing the steering is making a spectacular hash of it. The scene has to be repeated again and again and again. It's a painstaking, monotonous process, and the afternoon is soon eaten up. Not that anybody is complaining. As McGregor and the rest of the cast make clear, it's a relief to find an intelligent British film, which is neither a gangster pic, nor a romantic comedy, nor a film about football. There aren't many about these days.

The article was published by Time Out London - May 22-29, 2002 (Weekly Magazine of Art and Entertainment)