Scottish author Irvine Welsh has a fiery reputation. Dubbed “Scotland’s most controversial writer,” he is famous for subversive and scabrously funny novels like Trainspotting, Crime and Filth, featuring heroin addicts, “skag boys,” and corrupt Edinburgh cops. He has long argued that artists need the right to offend – and his own work has often had a barbed and confrontational edge.
However, Paul Sng’s new feature, Reality Is Not Enough (which closed the Edinburgh International Film Festival last month and is distributed by Kaleidoscope Entertainment) shows Welsh in a light that may take viewers by surprise. The arch provocateur comes across as a measured, benign and philosophical figure, not as someone consumed by rage, trauma or guilt.
“When you read Irvine’s work, it’s very dark. The darkness in him, Irvine would contend, he puts it on the page,” Sng says. “In a way, that’s cathartic for him…”
“I quite like my demons. I see them as drivers,” the author says at one stage in the film, as if he still welcomes a little inner torment these days, to shake him out of feeling too smug about himself.
Sng (whose previous credits include Tish and Poly Styrene: I Am A Cliché) grew up in London. He is bi-racial British-Chinese, and is a West Ham fan but has lived in Edinburgh for several years. He first met Welsh backstage after a gig, shared a bottle of wine with him, and describes him as a friend. They even now follow the same Edinburgh football team.
“We just clicked actually…and I ended up buying a season ticket for Easter Road and going through the joy and misery of watching Hibs.”
The director has a novel way of persuading his subject to open up – namely by feeding him mind-altering drugs. Under close supervision, the novelist takes a dose of DMT, a strong psychedelic.
“We really wanted to get under the skin of Irvine,” says executive producer Sarah Drummond, managing-director of Edinburgh-based production outfit LS Films, which produced and co-financed the film.
The filmmakers were in Toronto where Welsh was attending a book festival when Sng talked with a producer who was making a film about hallucinogenic drugs (which are legal in some Canadian states if they’re taken in controlled circumstances).
“I thought, I know someone who likes hallucinogenic drugs,” Sng remembers. “I asked Irvine if he would be willing to take DMT and have us film him. I didn’t have to ask twice!”
The DMT session provided the perfect framing device for the film – a way of prising out the author’s innermost memories and secrets.
Sng and his team also filmed Welsh in a post-industrial warehouse where archival imagery of his life and films adapted from his work was projected on the walls. Archive researcher Amanda Rogers tracked down local material including footage from the council scheme where Welsh grew up.
“It was having Irvine walk through his memories…Irvine has appeared in a lot of adaptations of his work but I think he gives his best performance in this one,” says Sng.
Welsh’s story is told in thematic fashion. “Morality, creativity, hedonism, authority,” Sng ticks off key subjects that he covers. Literature, we discover, is just one part of Welsh’s life. He is obsessed with sport and music too. We see him boxing in a gym in Miami, playing football with childhood friends in Edinburgh, and DJ’ing.
There are no talking head interviews with his friends and family. Instead, various high-profile figures including Liam Neeson, Maxine Peake, Ruth Negga and Nick Cave read extracts from his writing.
“I re-read probably 10 Irvine Welsh books to find those quotes and then thought of people who would be suitable,” Sng says. “It was a case of finding people who had a good sense of what the work was about. There are quite a few working-class voices in there. We’ve also got a couple emerging actors, Mark Hannah who’s from Leith, and Olivia Caw who is from Cumbernauld. I think it is important you have a range of people, not just those who are well known.”
The author may have been his friend but that didn’t mean the documentary was a hagiography. At times, it asks harsh questions.
Occasionally, Welsh took the filmmakers by surprise. “He’s a big Evelyn Waugh fan. That is not something I would have expected,” Sng says of the Brideshead Revisited and Decline and Fall author, famous for his portrayals of the English upper-classes.
Exec producer Drummond grew up in Muirhouse, the same part of Edinburgh as Welsh, and has a close rapport with him.
“He is such a passionate, kind, loyal friend,” Drummond says. “He’s a wee bit older than me but my parents were community activists. They were connected to Irvine. My mum was a drug and HIV counsellor through the AIDs epidemic and he was always around. He is 15 or 16 years older than me…but there’s the heritage of where we come from, being connected family wise, through football, socially, and a film education charity.”
Despite Welsh’s international following, this wasn’t an easy film to finance. “It’s a really bleak time out there. There’s a real hesitation among commissioners and funders to fund anything outside a trinity of films about famous people, true crime or what they deem to be weird and whacky.”
“It was challenging,” Drummond agrees. “But we had passion, drive and an increasing determination just to make this story.”
Public funder Scottish Screen was a strong supporter, from the outset “They believed in the project, the vision, and us as Scottish company, female-founded, female-led, looking to tell global stories from our Scottish roots.”
Having closed the Edinburgh Film Festival, Reality Is Not Enough will travel to various other festivals. Kaleidoscope is releasing the documentary in UK cinemas on 26 September. As well as being writer/director, Sng was also a producer on the film that was made in association with his production company, Velvet Joy Productions.
