Back at the Scene of Their Prime

After the North American premiere of “Gregory’s Two Girls” here last month, Bill Forsyth, the film’s director, looked both relieved and concerned. The audience laughed in all the right places, but was that enough to satisfy distributors? In an interview several days after that screening, the film’s future remained uncertain in the U.S., but Forsyth seemed to feel a whole lot better.

“I get a sense that the film can find an audience in North America,” Forsyth said in his fairly penetrable Scottish accent. “I was very unsure . . . because of the anti-American thing inside the plot, although that’s resolved. I just didn’t know how much that would get in the way of people seeing the film here.”

Forsyth’s anxiety is understandable; after a promising start, his career has foundered in recent years. He seemed to have lost his way in Hollywood so, not surprisingly, he returned to his Scottish roots for a sequel of sorts to his first success.

“Gregory’s Girl,” which Forsyth made 20 years ago, was a light, touching comedy about a Scottish teenager (John Gordon-Sinclair, known then as Gordon John Sinclair) and his awkwardness with women and life. It charmed audiences worldwide and helped launch Forsyth’s career. He followed it with another comic gem, “Local Hero,” starring Burt Lancaster and Peter Riegert, about a Scottish village that magically thwarts an American corporation threatening to swallow it up. Then he went on to bigger, although not necessarily better, things: “Comfort and Joy,” “Housekeeping,” “Breaking In” and “Being Human,” a critical and box-office disaster.

Now, to some people’s way of thinking, he’s back to square one. Forsyth is not unaware of how this film is being perceived, especially in his own backyard.

“Maybe it’s a Scottish thing, but there were a lot of people who were quite negative about the fact that we were doing a reprise,” he said. “They were saying, not in so many words, that it was a sad state of affairs when we had to go back and re-create something, as if we were living on past glories. We knew we weren’t doing that. We knew the film would justify itself when it came out, but we were slightly living under a cloud. There was a little insecurity along the way while we were doing it.”

The “we” is Forsyth, 53, and Gordon-Sinclair, 37, who in some ways has as much at stake as the director. Nothing he has done since ‘Gregory’s Girl” has had quite the same impact, though he’s had a steady career as a British film and television actor. Ironically, if the film does well, both of these men will be in the odd position of being trapped by their own success. But that’s a problem they’d love to have.

Though Forsyth used the appeal of the first film to raise money for the second, he is careful to distance himself from the original, insisting that “Gregory’s Two Girls” is not a sequel. Gregory is now an English teacher at the same school he attended as a student in the original movie. He’s infatuated with one of his students, Francis (Carly McKinnon), while fending off one of his colleagues, Bel (Maria Doyle Kennedy). Then Francis discovers that one of Gregory’s high school chums is making and exporting instruments of torture to Third World countries. She wants Gregory, who’s an armchair liberal, to do something about it.

In some ways, it’s easy to believe Forsyth when he says he kept away from the first film (he claims he hasn’t watched “Gregory’s Girl” in 15 years). “Gregory’s Two Girls” is completely of the moment. Like a lot of people nowadays, Gregory thinks he knows about the outside world because of all the media outlets at his disposal. But he has little firsthand experience.

“That was the whole idea, really,” Gordon-Sinclair said. “He’s preaching all of these easily held opinions that he’s got from books and television, but he’s never done anything about it.” (In the film, his character thinks Americans are rubes and goes on an anti-American tear at one point.)

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Aside from these issues, there is another reason why Forsyth, who wrote the script, chose not to lean on the first film.

“As Bill says, can you remember what you were like when you were 18?” asked Gordon-Sinclair, who was 17 when he acted in “Gregory’s Girl.” “Sort of you can, but there’s nothing that you can go back and watch and go, ‘Oh, right, I did that and I did that.’ So it was better to start afresh.”

“If we slavishly tried to re-create this character of what he was, it would have been artificial,” Forsyth noted. “This is more like getting a clean slate. It’s a very simple idea. OK, he’s 36, he’s at his old school, he hasn’t quite matured, and his whole world is quite restricted. That was enough.”

It had to have been odd for Forsyth and Gordon-Sinclair to have worked with each other again after so many years, especially on a character that had been so successful for both of them. In the intervening time, Gordon-Sinclair lived in London, while Forsyth remained in Scotland. So while they communicated, this project was the first time they’d actually spent any length of time together. However, they say that after a couple of days on the set they started to give and receive direction telegraphically.

“Show him how we worked,” Forsyth said to Gordon-Sinclair. Gordon-Sinclair grunted. Forsyth grunted back.

“I wasn’t as aware of the connection that we have when we did the first film,” Gordon-Sinclair said. “It just kind of happened. Then to go away and do other things and then come back to it and find this connection really sparking and flying along, to have a little knowledge of what it could have been and what it can be and how bad it can be, I really loved it.”

The “how bad it can be” part is an indication that both men know the ups and downs of the movie business, Forsyth most dramatically, or at least publicly. He’s philosophical about it. He calls them “interesting experiences.”

“As an independent filmmaker, you have to try to make Hollywood work for you at certain stages,” he said. “In Scotland, things are seen in more black and white terms. They don’t have the information about the film business to know how it really works, so everything is in headline terms: ‘Forsyth Goes to Hollywood.’ ‘Forsyth Flops in Hollywood.’ ‘Forsyth Is Back.’ The reality is that I feel that as an independent filmmaker I have used Hollywood quite astutely once or twice. On balance, I don’t feel battered and bruised. I don’t feel that I’ve tried to crack Hollywood. I just set out to use it.”

But, clearly, he is glad to be back on home turf with independent financing and relative autonomy, although neither of them think that Film Four, which is distributing the film in the United Kingdom and selling it in the States, is as confident about it as they are. In fact, they’re already thinking about a follow-up to the follow-up, which would make a nice, neat trilogy.

“ ‘Gregory’s Daughters’ we’re thinking about,” Forsyth said. “In 12 years he’s got a couple of teenagers. I think the formula is the girls stay the same age.”

“And he keeps getting older,” Gordon-Sinclair said, grinning.

“So pencil in 2010,” Forsyth said, grinning back. *