From Greyfriars to the big screen: Peter Mullan leads Edinburgh director Sean Dunn’s darkly comic debut
Like many Edinburgh stories, it began in Greyfriars Kirkyard. Not with ghosts on this occasion, but a man wearing a cape and some tourists gathered around the grave of Thomas Riddle, the eighteenth-century soldier whose name would later become immortalised by Harry Potter. Standing there with his wife, who was visiting the city for the first time, Sean Robert Dunn found himself wondering about the real man behind the mythology and who is remembered in our culture.
It became The Fall of Sir Douglas Weatherford, a darkly comic tale of grief, obsession and national identity centred around the wonderfully named Douglas Weatherford and the increasingly troubled Kenneth, played with bruised humanity by Peter Mullan.
For the Edinburgh-born filmmaker, whose debut feature arrives after years of shorts and time spent studying in New York, the story grew from Scotland’s complicated relationship with its own past. “We’re brought up to be proud of the Enlightenment,” says Dunn. “David Hume and Adam Smith and all these figures. Weatherford became an amalgamation of those characters we learn about growing up.” The result is a film that manages to be both humorous and quietly unsettling. Kenneth begins as an underdog, a grieving man clinging desperately to something he believes in, before his loss gradually hardens into something sinister.
That balancing act raised questions during development.”People wondered how audiences would get on board with him,” Dunn admits. “He’s not necessarily likeable, and he’s quite closed off, but audiences respond to somebody who believes in something and fights for it.” Few actors understand those contradictions and balance better than Peter Mullan. Dunn laughs when asked whether the acclaimed actor challenged aspects of the script. “Every day was a challenge, but in a good way. He’d say, ‘No, he wouldn’t do that.’ Looking back, the film’s better for it.” One scene originally had Kenneth punching another character. Mullan disagreed. “He said, ‘No, he wouldn’t punch him.’ Instead, he elbowed him. Peter thought that if it was the first time Kenneth had become violent, he’d be full of adrenaline. He had those ideas constantly.”
In this and Dunn’s earlier work, including the short film British By The Grace of God, recurring themes become apparent: identity, belonging, and the damage caused when people become trapped by tribalism and self-mythologising. “People close themselves off,” he reflects. “Kenneth’s formed an identity around where he’s from, and he wants to take ownership of that. Identity and tribalism are themes I seem to gravitate towards.”
Raised around Leith and Craigentinny and educated at Leith Academy, Dunn has no shortage of inspiration close to home. “It can’t help but feed into your work,” he says. “It’s just where you’re from.” Although his debut feature is set in a fictional village in Scotland, there are echoes of Dunn’s Edinburgh, but it’s not the shortbread and tartan version sold to visitors. Instead, he is fascinated by who gets celebrated and who gets forgotten.
One of the film’s biggest laughs comes when Kenneth talks proudly of Weatherford while standing beside some gruesome illustrations depicting the exploits of his ancestor. Yet beneath the absurdity lies a serious point. “Those eighteenth-century surgeons would have been hacking people to bits,” Dunn says. “Who knows what they were up to? We celebrate these figures, but we don’t always know everything about them.” That idea of history being selective resonates today, in a city still wrestling with questions of nationalism, class and identity. Dunn acknowledges that those wider debates have been impossible to ignore. “We’ve been contending with nationalism for years, Scottish nationalism, Brexit and everything else. Those ideas have been around us for a long time.”
Stylistically, the film takes unexpected turns. What begins almost as a social comedy develops into something closer to a psychological thriller. Dunn cites Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy and even Taxi Driver among the influences. “I wanted to blend some genres together, horror and a little bit of thriller, a little bit of suspense in there,” he explains. “That was my attempt at sort of elevating it a little bit and hopefully making it, for an audience, a bit of a ride for them.” Even the sardonic voiceover, delivered by Jonathan Hyde, arrived unexpectedly during the lengthy editing process with Dunn’s wife, who eventually stepped in to cut the picture.
After studying in Dundee, Sean headed to New York, eventually teaching at Columbia while building a career through short films and collaborations. With his first child on the way, he knows success has been hard-earned. “It takes so long to get things made,” he says. “It’s been a struggle, but I’m getting there.”
It feels appropriate that Gary McCormack, as Weatherford, should occupy such an important place in Dunn’s cinematic world. In British By The Grace of God, opposite Kate Dickie, he portrayed a man imprisoned by his own beliefs. In the new film, the Leith punk, Hibs die-hard and cult actor once again embodies the myths and histories that fascinate the director.
Perhaps that is what makes Dunn’s work feel so unmistakably Scottish; not the postcard version, but something stranger and more interesting. A place of forgotten histories and fierce loyalties, where humour and melancholy sit side by side. For all its laughs, the film asks serious questions about identity and who gets written into our history.
Questions that first surfaced in Greyfriars Kirkyard have now found their way onto the big screen through one of Scotland’s most distinctive new voices.
The Fall of Sir Douglas Weatherford opens in cinemas on Friday, June 12
