Local Hero

Local Hero: Why the iconic Scottish environmental film was decades ahead of its time

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Forty years ago, Bill Forsyth’s film Local Hero warned us to consider the consequences of putting short-term gain ahead of the environment, writes Anthony Frajman.

By Anthony Frajman | June 2023

Few films have been as enduring as Local Hero. Released 40 years ago, the landmark Scottish film starring Hollywood legend Burt Lancaster put Scottish cinema on the map, launched the career of a then-unknown Peter Capaldi and showcased the nation’s incredible landscapes to the world.

Yet, the film was also remarkably prophetic. Decades before climate change was a widely discussed issue, Local Hero was one of the first contemporary films to draw attention to our impact on our environment.

Set in the fictional village of Ferness, Local Hero follows US oil executive “Mac” MacIntyre (Peter Riegert), who is sent to Scotland by his eccentric billionaire boss Felix Happer (Burt Lancaster) to buy the entire town and its surrounding areas to build an oil refinery. As he spends more time with the locals, Mac slowly falls in love with his adopted surroundings, and begins to question his role, its ethics, and his entire worldview.

Eerily relevant in our era, the climate satire shows almost no citizen standing up to the oil conglomerate. There is no environmental protection agency that steps in, no law against the oil company’s intended destruction of the land.

Alamy During his 2000 campaign for the US presidency, Vice President Al Gore told Oprah Winfrey in an interview that Local Hero was his favourite film (Credit: Alamy)
During his 2000 campaign for the US presidency, Vice President Al Gore told Oprah Winfrey in an interview that Local Hero was his favourite film (Credit: Alamy)

The film began with Chariots of Fire and The Mission producer, David Puttnam, whose films have been nominated for 26 Oscars. Puttnam had read an article in The Observer about a Scottish man’s battle against an oil giant, and was determined to make a film that addressed the unethical behaviour of oil firms and their toxic impact on natural landscapes.

Puttnam, who had been an environmentalist since the 1970s, and was president of the Council of Protection of Rural England, saw the potential for a film that directly addressed environmental issues. “I was really interested in the idea that a local accountant could sue a major, major international oil company and win on environmental grounds. I thought that was great. It was really a David and Goliath story,” Puttnam tells BBC Culture.

Puttnam had seen the debut feature of then largely unknown Scottish director Bill Forsyth, That Sinking Feeling, produced for £5,000, which he helped Forsyth sell to the BBC, and wanted to work with him. Sparked by the article he’d read, Puttnam brought the story to Forsyth, along with a proposal for a film set in Scotland dealing with ecological issues. “We hired two journalists, one on the East Coast, one on the West Coast, to give us cuttings or any other stories they had about communities being affected by a major oil company or major conglomerate coming in. And we were able to collect quite a lot of bits and pieces, and Bill then built that collage into the screenplay,” Puttnam remembers.

A hard sell

While Puttnam had produced the debut films of celebrated British directors Ridley Scott and Alan Parker, and had an eminent reputation as a producer, he struggled for years to get this unlikely Scottish film into production. “I couldn’t get much interest in it. I just found it very, very difficult getting traction,” says Puttnam.

Although he had only been able to secure half the budget for the film, that changed almost immediately when Puttnam won the Oscar for best picture for Chariots of Fire in 1982, on top of the best picture Bafta, bringing home Britain’s first best picture Oscar since 1968, when Oliver! won.

“I won the Bafta for Chariots and extraordinarily, was presented the award by Burt Lancaster. I mean, how that happened, God. But he happened to be presenting the best picture award that year. I walked back to my table and a guy called James Lee stopped me. He said, ‘If you’re still looking for money for Local Hero, you’ve got it’. And we shook hands. I went back to the table with a Bafta and the other half of the money,” Puttnam recalls.

As it happened, Puttnam and Forsyth had their eye on Lancaster to star in the film from get-go. “The first thing that Bill had said to me when he delivered the screenplay was, ‘I’d like Burt Lancaster to play Happer,” says Puttnam. While securing Lancaster was crucial for the film’s international appeal, this proved extremely difficult as the star’s salary took up half of the film’s budget. It took a year of negotiating to get him on board.

Despite considering stars such as Michael Douglas and Henry Winkler for the role of Mac, Forsyth was set on casting Peter Riegert as the oilman who experiences an awakening and succumbs to the charms of the rugged Scottish landscapes. For the key part of Oldsen, the local guide who escorts Mac around Ferness, Forsyth chose Peter Capaldi, a then fresh-faced Scottish actor just out of art school.

Another integral element of the film is the score by Scottish-born Dire Straits frontman Mark Knopfler, who Puttnam suggested to Forsyth. While it is regarded as a key component of the film, underscoring shots of the Scottish coastline and the Northern Lights, it almost never came about.

“I heard his (Dire Straits) album Making Movies. So, I wrote to him, I got a letter from his manager who said, ‘Oh, that’s really, really interesting’. I got Mark and Bill to meet, Bill didn’t like Mark’s music, so it was a very tense meeting. But Bill liked one track, Telegraph Road. So, I managed to have a meeting where the only track we talked about was Telegraph Road. And, in the end, they got to like each other and they got to work together,” says Puttnam.

Ahead of its time

Released to immediate acclaim, the film was a major success in the UK and in the US, going on to be honoured as one of the top 10 films of the year by the National Board of Review in New York and launching the career of future Doctor Who star and multi-Bafta winner Peter Capaldi. Forsyth – who’d garnered praise for his 1981 sleeper hit Gregory’s Girl – won a Bafta for best direction. It was hailed as “a small film to treasure, a loving, funny, understated portrait of a small Scottish town” by leading US critic Roger Ebert for The Chicago Sun-Times, while Janet Maslin wrote in a glowing review in The New York Times, “Mr Forsyth has put Scottish comedy on the map”.

While Local Hero remains arguably the finest film to have come out of Scotland, perhaps its most enduring legacy lies in its prescient caution on the environment. Fully aware that going ahead with the oil plant will irrevocably damage their village, the locals of Ferness willingly agree to sell their land, rather than oppose the corporation – bar one holdout, a dogged old man.

Well before it was echoed in the incident of the Scottish farmer who refused to sell his land to Trump when he built his golf course, Forsyth’s film implored audiences to conserve the environment, to stand up and fight for it, and to contemplate how easily it can be destroyed.

In the willingness of the residents to sell their land, Forsyth urged viewers to consider the irreversible repercussions of environmental harm. Looking back on the seminal Scottish film 40 years later, Puttnam says he believes it was prescient and is his favourite of the films he has produced: “It was certainly a good 20 years ahead of its time.”

Source: Local Hero: Why the iconic Scottish environmental film was decades ahead of its time

Local Hero review – wistful 80s comedy snares your heart with charm and beauty

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By Peter Bradshaw

Bill Forsyth’s wonderfully wistful and charming comedy is rereleased after 40 years, and its happy-sad aroma is still as pungent as ever. It has a claim to be the last movie with the authentic spirit of the Ealing comedies; although with a longer perspective we can also see how it’s also indirectly influenced by producer David Puttnam in its high-minded spirit of Anglo-American amity.

The scene is a fictional fishing village in western Scotland, making its modest living from the lobster bound for the fancy restaurants of London and Paris, but which the locals can’t afford to eat. Peter Riegert plays Mac, a junior oil executive from Texas obsessed with work and material values, who has been tasked by his eccentric billionaire boss, Felix Happer, to travel to this village and persuade the entire community to sell up so that Happer can build a refinery there and capitalise on the new gush of North Sea oil. (There is a scene in which Happer appears to get a call from Margaret Thatcher in person.) Happer is played with unique brio and gusto by Burt Lancaster, whose legendary presence in itself confers something magical on the proceedings.

Slowly but surely, hard-hearted capitalist Mac is beguiled by the beauty of the place and the gentleness of the locals, including the local hotelier-slash-accountant Gordon Urquhart, played by Denis Lawson; and poor Mac falls unrequitedly in love with his wife, Stella (Jennifer Black). There is also the refinery’s researcher Danny Oldsen, played by a boyish Peter Capaldi; there is nothing here of the brutal political spin doctor he played on TV’s The Thick of It, but in the part’s wit and whimsy, you might see the ghost of Capaldi’s other great role: Doctor Who.

Danny has himself formed a tendresse for the company’s marine biologist Marina (played with dry wit by Jenny Seagrove), who swims with mermaid grace around the shore. Perhaps all too late, Mac confronts two dilemmas: he is falling in love with a landscape and a community that he is there to destroy, and he realises that his money-grubbing life in the big city is pretty pointless. In any case, the deal might not even go through: a hermit figure called Ben, who owns the beach, might not sell. He is played with terrific presence by Fulton Mackay – a lovely performance, and very different from his fierce prison warder in TV’s Porridge.

In the early 80s, the idea of building an oil refinery didn’t have the frisson of darkness that it might have now, although this movie certainly saw that drilling for oil meant despoiling nature, and also that the oil business had a high-handed attitude to local communities who didn’t speak English. (The script skates over the question of whether Happer would pay the locals as much money for building an observatory as he would for an oil refinery.) But Local Hero snares your heart because it takes on a fantasy element: something to do with Happer’s visionary obsession with the stars. When he arrives in Scotland by helicopter, it’s as if he’s comes down from another planet: America. It’s such a pleasure to see it again.

 Local Hero is released on 19 May in cinemas.

Source: Local Hero review – wistful 80s comedy snares your heart with charm and beauty

I Could Grow to Love This Place

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Fantasies and obstacles in Bill Forsyth’s Local Hero (1983)

By A.C. Webster

In the late 19th-century, a short-lived literary movement sprung up in Scotland known as the Kailyard School. Often told through the eyes of a stranger, these stories usually depicted rural life in Scotland as quaint and palatial, with something innate imparted not only by the local villagers, but also the geography of the country, its highlands and shores. Scottish filmmaker Bill Forsyth explored these sentiments in 1983’s Local Hero. The film contains many elements that define an outsider’s perspective of Scotland; however, it subverts these ideas without downplaying the ineffable qualities of the land itself.

“Mac” MacIntyre (Peter Riegert) works for Knox Oil and Gas in Houston, and is the archetypal young and ambitious American executive of the 1980s. From tailored suits to his Porsche 930, Mac has surrounded himself with enough objects to exude a sense of value. But he’s romantically inept, socially uninteresting, and uses materialism to shield himself from emotional fulfillment. Felix Happer (Burt Lancaster) is the inheritor of Knox Oil and Gas—by all accounts, a rich and successful businessman. However, Happer takes little interest in the company. He seeks fulfillment through the stars, particularly his desire to discover a comet that he can name after himself. Despite their respective financial success, Mac and Happer are similarly spiritually adrift. With Knox planning to purchase land in Scotland to build a massive oil refinery, Mac is selected to close the deal in-person due to his Scottish-sounding name (there’s not a drop of Scottish blood in MacIntyre; his immigrant parents chose it to sound more American). Happer’s additional assignment for Mac—watch the skies for anything unusual—is quietly brushed aside as he plans to get in, close the deal, and get out.

When Mac arrives in the town of Ferness, it’s cloaked in an evening fog so thick he’s forced to stop his car for the night. This mystical quality introduces the fantastical perception of rural Scotland often held by outsiders; for Mac, it’s a misty inconvenience. His first few days in town are spent at the inn attempting to negotiate the sale. As time passes and Mac becomes used to the town and its residents, he becomes emotionally enveloped by Ferness. The process unfolds beautifully throughout Local Hero, first through acclimation to the town’s minutiae—from Scottish pronunciations to local customs and spending time with the towns’ quirky residents. Ultimately, it’s the town and its surrounding areas that seals Mac’s infatuation. Forsyth and cinematographer Chris Menges often let the landscape speak for itself, starting with the sandy white beaches in the daytime. Figures become silhouettes against the pastel dusk. When Mac gazes into the midnight sky for the first time, he is struck by its beauty, a sheet of blue midnight filled with twinkling stars.

The land is still majestic, but modern life is so different from those Kailyardic days, and Forsyth’s juxtaposition heightens the film’s comedy and drama. The town’s residents are more than willing to sell off their land for a hefty payoff. Financial success informs the decisions made by Mac, Happer, and the residents of the town throughout Local Hero, yet it never leads to emotional fulfillment; we see that wealth is what hardened Mac and left Happer disinterested in anything beyond celestial recognition. Even when the sale of the town’s about to occur, one local expresses his regret: “I thought all this money would make me feel… different. All it’s done is make me feel depressed. I don’t feel any different!”

If the film had a more self-righteous approach, it might take the form of an antagonistic villager pleading against the sale of the town. The closest to this is Ben (Fulton Mackay), an eccentric hermit who owns the beach due to an archaic grant from the Lord of the Isles. Living in a shack made of beachcombing refuse, his unwillingness to sell isn’t from resentment, but rather a matter-of-fact sense of the true value of the land and the stars above. Mac tries to buy the beach for an enormous amount but Ben refuses, much to the town’s chagrin. As the conflict is about to come to a head, Happer suddenly arrives in Ferness and speaks with Ben alone. This conversation leads Happer to have a sudden change of heart, pivoting to building out Ferness as a research hub in order to preserve the local environment and further research the sky above.

With Happer satisfied, he sends Mac back to America to finalize the deal. Mac’s entire purpose in Ferness isn’t only upended, but at odds with his affection for the town. Back in Houston, all that remains of his trip are the seashell keepsakes and Polaroids—small tokens of memory instead of the peaceful life he once briefly imagined. As the Mark Knopfler score builds with overlapping synthesizer lines and guitar playing, Mac gazes out at the Houston skyline, a humming electric blue that surely feels like a cosmic taunt. Half a world away, the phone rings in the only phone box in Ferness—a long-distance plea for connection.

Fantasies, everyday desires, and personal obstacles permeate Bill Forsyth’s entire filmography. As he put it: “Thinking back on it, I think basically I’ve just made the same movie over and over again… in the sense that there’s a main character who sets out with a kind of story in mind and really nothing happens to the story. But a lot, maybe other things, happen to the characters.” Forsyth finds humanity in the mundanity and irony of everyday life.

Source: SpliceToday