Far, Far Away

Ewan McGregor could easily be living the high life right now. He could be getting wined, dined, fawned upon and treated like a superstar at George Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch in Marin County, the press junket for “Star Wars: Episode II Attack of the Clones” (in which he plays Obi-Wan Kenobi) hanging on his every word.

Instead, McGregor, 31, has been toiling here in his native land on “Young Adam,” a low-budget British film that calls for its cast and crew to work in decidedly unglamorous, even spartan conditions. It is set in 1954, and much of the action takes place on a barge traversing the canals around Glasgow. The film’s producers have re-created the harshness of life for canal workers in that era and are shooting on canal towpaths in some of the city’s most insalubrious areas.

On this particular day in April, the production finds itself beside a stretch of canal in Ruchill, an impoverished part of Glasgow south of the city center. The water is dark and murky, and the grass areas beside the canal, out of camera range, are strewn with litter. A preponderance of open, empty potato chip bags suggests that local juvenile delinquents use this site for inhaling glue or solvents. McGregor looks around him. “Aye, it’s bleak, isn’t it?” he says.

It is, and one wonders if he has a masochistic streak, opting for long hours of modest, low-profile labor over all the attention, perks and luxury accommodations that a star actor with a mega-movie to sell can expect. But McGregor’s reasons are simple: “Young Adam” didn’t wrap until today, and he is in almost every scene; having committed to the film last summer, and then having stayed with it even when funding originally collapsed late last year, he simply wants to see it through.

He is also eager to stress that his absence from the Lucas ranch implies no lack of enthusiasm for “Attack of the Clones,” which opens nationwide May 16. (McGregor is planning to attend the film’s lavish Hollywood premiere on Sunday.)

“All that hype looks after itself,” he says. “It doesn’t have anything to do with me. The ‘Star Wars’ series is the star, so the hype is built in. For ‘Attack of the Clones,’ I’ve seen the second trailer and I thought it was brilliant. It had the flavor of the first three ‘Star Wars’ movies. So I think the new film will be an improvement on the last one we made,” “’Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace” from 1999.

Is McGregor unhappy with that film? “No, it was fine, but it had a lot of setting up to do. It had six movies to establish. And all that stuff about the senate wasn’t even mentioned in the first three, so all of that had to be explained.”

In the latest episode McGregor plays an older, wiser Obi-Wan--a change of pace for the boyish-looking actor--who must teach the ways of the Jedi Knight to the brash Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen). McGregor thinks the film will be more pleasing than “Episode I” to the “Star Wars” faithful.

“I have a feeling that in ‘Episode II’ we have more opportunity to get back into the heart and soul of what the first three films were about,” he says. “I think it’s got more action in it, and it’ll be more fun to watch.”

Still, McGregor has no regrets about staying away from the “Star Wars” junket to complete “Young Adam.” He stars as Joe, a young drifter who works on a barge with Les (Scottish actor Peter Mullan, from “The Claim” and “My Name Is Joe”) and his younger wife, Ella (played by Tilda Swinton, from last year’s “The Deep End”). Joe and Les find the corpse of a young woman in the canal and fish it out. Shortly afterward, Joe embarks on an affair with Ella.

“Young Adam” is directed by David Mackenzie, a Scottish veteran of shorts and documentaries, making his feature film debut.

“There’s some beautiful stuff to play in it,” McGregor says with enthusiasm. “A lot of looks and moods, and scenes without words. It’s really tasty stuff. It feels like proper filmmaking. We’ve really moved into the area of not allowing the audience to do any work at all, explaining every line and the one that’s just gone--and talking, talking, talking, like nobody does in real life. It’s gone insane.

“But this film isn’t like that at all. It’s more like Steve McQueen stuff. He’d cut all his lines and only say the lines he needed to say. This whole script is written like that.... I think this film could really make a difference.”

The film’s producer, Jeremy Thomas, calls McGregor “a real man of the people.” “He’s here, he’s in one of those little trailers divided into three tiny spaces for actors, and he doesn’t complain. He doesn’t ask for anything special, and he doesn’t expect it.”

More to the point, McGregor stayed loyal when the film was postponed in August after funding collapsed. “I’d gone on the trail of trying to raise money for an adventurous film by a first-time director,” Thomas recalled. “The first time, I failed. We didn’t make it last September, but Ewan and Tilda were so keen to do it they stuck with us. So I began again. We found another angel and started shooting” in March.

Not only did McGregor stay with the project, he even publicly criticized Britain’s Film Council for its reluctance to back commercially risky films. The budget for “Young Adam” was about $6.5 million, raised from the Film Council; Scottish Screen; Warner Bros. UK, which acquired the British rights; and pre-sales to Spain and Italy. (By way of comparison, “Star Wars: Episode I” cost a reported $120 million.)

The script of “Young Adam” is noteworthy for its sexual candor. Mackenzie, 35, admits that “one or two scenes are fairly frank and shocking, but I don’t know if it’s sensible to be courting sexual controversy at this point in history. You can’t go much further into that territory without entering into pornography. I wouldn’t want it to be sold as the steamiest thing around.”

He adapted his script from the novel of the same name by the intriguing Beat writer Alexander Trocchi (1925-1984), who was born and raised in Glasgow. Trocchi’s underground cult reputation rests largely on “Young Adam” (first published in 1954) and “Cain’s Book” (1963), a harrowing account of heroin addiction; Trocchi was in thrall to hard drugs for long spells of his adult life.

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Trocchi keeps appearing, in a manner reminiscent of Woody Allen’s Zelig, on the margins of the Beat movement. He befriended William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Terry Southern. Norman Mailer knew him and said of “Cain’s Book,” “It is true, it has art, it is brave.” When Trocchi had to leave the U.S. in 1961 because of his drug use, he fled to Canada, staying at Leonard Cohen’s Montreal apartment. “I understand it was only four or five days,” Cohen recalled later. “In retrospect it seemed like three or four months or even years, because you couldn’t escape the guy.” Cohen wrote a poem about him, titled “Alexander Trocchi, public junkie, prie pour nous (pray for us).”

Of the film’s cast, Swinton is Trocchi’s biggest champion. . “This book reads as a screenplay. It might have been his first experiment in writing cinema.... I’ve always found the Beats quite magnetic--the work itself and the muscular element of the writing, not just the mystique.”

The outspoken Mullan, on the other hand, is rather scornful about Trocchi: “He’s a good prose writer but a bad dialogue writer. I prefer David Mackenzie’s script of ‘Young Adam’ to the book. I haven’t even got to the end of the book.”

But McGregor has the most serious doubts about the Trocchi legend. “Now that I’m a father of kids, I find that’s turned me into a man who realizes the responsibility of having children,” he says. “And I find such joy and pleasure in it. Trocchi had kids who got in the way of his writing, so he left. There’s a horrible arrogance about that. At one point he was pimping his wife to supply his heroin habit while he had this baby who wasn’t getting fed.

“I don’t like that terrible self-centeredness of the outsider, that attitude of ‘this is how I’m living my life.’ Trocchi’s an interesting character, and I like the book, but I love the script more.”

And with that McGregor turns on his heel and walks across the litter-strewn grassland down to the barge for the next scene of “Young Adam.” Any thoughts about another movie are in a galaxy far, far away.