The movie Cameron Crowe called the “holy grail of personal filmmaking”
Cameron Crowe knows better than most directors about personal filmmaking as from the very beginning of his movie career, he has thrown himself into his work, in more ways than one.
First, there was the 1982 classic, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, which he based on his book of the same name about a year in the lives of a high school class, to write the screenplay of which he went undercover as a high school student, showing a level of commitment that puts method acting to shame.
His 2000 film, Almost Famous, was equally personal but in a very different way, based on his own trajectory as a teenage writer for Rolling Stone. Far from being self-aggrandising and navel-gazing, it showed a refreshing amount of empathy for all its larger-than-life characters, including the rock stars and groupies whom the main character idealises.
While Crowe’s career has been noticeably sparse in the past two decades, which points to just how carefully he chooses and executes his projects, it’s no surprise that he values that sort of spirit in other directors, too. In 2016, he listed his five favourite movies for Rotten Tomatoes, and one of the films he heaped praise upon was the 1983 Bill Forsyth comedy, Local Hero.
“Bill Forsyth, come back!” Crowe opined, calling the film “the holy grail of personal filmmaking”.
Set in Northeast Scotland, Local Hero follows an ambitious oil company employee from Houston who is sent to a tiny Scottish town to convince the locals to sell their land so his bosses can build an oil refinery; however, as Mac, played by Peter Riegert, gets to know the villagers, he becomes increasingly drawn into their daily lives and eccentricities.
It’s the sort of story that has been told countless times, usually in predictable, cringe-inducingly saccharine ways, but as Crowe pointed out, Forsyth’s trademark as a director is dropping random moments into the mix that have nothing to do with the plot but end up being the most memorable touches. There is an overarching plot to Local Hero, but it’s secondary to the small interactions between the characters that don’t necessarily lead to anything transformative, but stick with you nonetheless.
Mac falls in love with a marine biologist who might be a mermaid, for example, and becomes friendly with a fisherman from the Soviet Union who pops over to the town to check in with his accountant. Additionally, there are a lot of scenes involving people in cable-knit jumpers walking on the beach, picking up shells and looking at the ocean, all of which sounds romantic and contemplative, but it’s actually more riveting than anything else.
Forsyth, who was Scottish, admitted that he never wrote movies around plots, but instead built them around characters and “incidents”, spending most of the production of Local Hero doing rewrites on location while the cast and crew lived their own real-life version of the film, which no doubt added to the sense of authenticity and immediacy of the final product. Perhaps the reason that Local Hero has remained so beloved is that, like a good sitcom, it makes you feel like you’re hanging out with the characters, and when it’s over, you want to dive right back in.
