“Why don’t we cycle to the Euros,” a friend casually floated the idea to filmmaker Martyn Robertson after the Scotland men’s football team qualified for last year’s tournament in Germany. They could make the ride in tribute to a pal who ran a bar in Glasgow but had recently passed away. He had been a “mad cyclist and a big Scotland fan” and this could have been a fitting tribute to him.
Robertson, though, had his doubts about cycling all the way from Glasgow to Munich. “I’m quite a busy person and I am also not an athlete…”
Fast forward a few months. Robertson was on a plane with another friend, professor Gordon Mackay, a world-renowned orthopaedic surgeon, for whom he had done filmmaking work. Mackay’s ’internal brace’ invention has been revolutionising sports science. (To put it crudely, the brace protects ligaments during their healing period and thereby vastly accelerates the recovery period from many types of long-term injuries). Mackay isn’t just a healer. He’s an accomplished footballer himself who played briefly in Rangers reserves during the Graeme Souness era and who still turns out for the Scotland Over 50 team.
Mid-flight, Mackay mentioned to Robertson a case he had just dealt with. “We were sitting on a transatlantic flight together and he was rabbiting on about another boy he had fixed up.”
Robertson was only half listening but the boy in question was Ethan Walker, a promising footballer from Aberdeenshire. Walker had been on a sports scholarship in the US but had suffered a horrific accident. Smashed into by a car, he had broken multiple bones, fracturing his skull, shoulder, knee and assorted other parts of his anatomy.
Using his Merlin-like skills, Mackay had somehow got Walker up and running again only three months after this near-death calamity.
“At that point, I started listening a bit more closely…”
The idea of the epic cycle journey to the Euros was revived…but this time with Ethan Walker as the focus and main rider. He had been entrusted by the Scottish Football Association with the pennant that the Scottish team were going to present to their German counterparts before kick-off of the opening match at the Euros. His task was to get it safely to Munich.
Surgeon Mackay was part of the trip, cycling side by side with Walker and keeping an eye on his medical situation. Robertson and his friend Stephen Collie were also in the saddle. Although they hadn’t yet secured funding, Robertson was already making a documentary about the journey.
The rousing, feel-good film that resulted, Make it to Munich, is closing the Glasgow Film Festival with a sold out screening this weekend. It will be released in Scottish cinemas by Cosmic Cat in May.
Robertson acknowledges that being part of the peloton – while also trying to direct the film – was a challenge.
“I had four cameras on bikes, a camera in my hand at times, and I’ve also got things to prep all that at the beginning of every day and capture all that footage at the end of every day,” the director explains his multi-tasking. “It was probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”
There were moments when the trip became slog. The riders endured their share of punctures, late nights and roadside mishaps. The tone of the film, though, taking its cue from Walker himself, remains relentlessly cheerful throughout. The eighteen-year-old aspiring footballer from Huntly had been through life-changing trauma only months before but you’ll look in vain for any hint of self-pity from him.
“That was the thing that struck me when I first met Ethan and his family…I expected to meet a guy who was really quite low, at one of the lowest points of his life, but he was so optimistic about recovery, about the future, I thought, wow – how could you go through this hell, come back and be such a positive young person.”
At times, the director confides, Ethan’s constant cheeriness became almost a drawback, at least in storytelling terms. As a filmmaker, he half wanted some darker, more introspective moments.
“But Ethan is so eternally positive that I realised very quickly that we were making a film that had great heart, was upbeat and was just a positive story – and we don’t see enough of that in filmmaking today. With everything going in the world, this was a positive, inspirational story about a young person who has been to hell and back, and continues to make a brilliant recovery.”
As a surgeon, Mackay has operated on hundreds of other badly injured athletes. Why was this one so special to him? In the course of the journey, viewers will begin to understand his motivation. During his own career as a footballer, he had witnessed many other players’ careers, including his own, blighted by injury. Often, childhood dreams were abruptly shattered as a result. Walker was therefore much more than just another patient.
The director drew on his experiences making his 2021 Ride the Wave (2021), another sport-themed story, about an aspiring young surfer. Make it to Munich, though, was made on a smaller canvas and in a far more freewheeling way. Robertson enthuses about the “harum scarum” way it was put together. From start to finish, the entire project, produced through Blackhouse Films, took less than a year. By leaping into the project, self-financing it when necessary and improvising whenever confronted with problems, the filmmakers avoided the often tortuously slow development period that so many other movies go through.
“It felt like a project we could turn around quite quickly. It needed to be turned round because of the nature of it. I think as a filmmaker, it is really important to be making [work]; to be on your feet, not to be sitting and waiting on the next tranche of money to come in.”
There is an element of bathos about the way the journey to Munich ends. After all that heroic effort made by Ethan and the others to get to Germany in time with the pennant, the Scottish team endured a torrid time in the opening match of the Euros. They were trounced 5-1 by Germany.
Robertson has watched Scotland lose often enough to take such a defeat in his stride.
“Listen, I’ve been a Scotland fan for 30 years and that was probably one of the most disappointing results I’ve ever seen in my life. But the biggest result of the Euros was Ethan’s achievement. It really was…I’ll never forget the experience of cycling, passing through those villages and towns, meeting people and telling them about the pennant we were carrying for the match,” the director remembers. “The football was rotten, the biggest waste of money I’ve ever spent on a football ticket! But what an atmosphere arriving in Munich. That will stay with me for the rest of my life…listen, this was never meant to be a feature doc in the beginning. This was meant to be an extravagant holiday video – and it turned into something else.!”
