Robert the Bruce is a labour of love, a film that has been pushing to be made for over a decade. Co-written by Angus Macfadyen – who also reprises his Braveheart role as the eponymous lead – and directed by Richard [Richie] Gray, the film also stars Anna Hutchison (who was instrumental to producing it) and Zach McGowan. We sat down with them to talk about the long-awaited feature.
This is a film that has been in the works for a long time now, what motivated you [Angus] to reprise the role and keep pushing for this?
Angus: Well, after Braveheart, I’d had such a great experience and the movie had been so good, but there was a lingering disappointment in me because we hadn’t finished the story. Scottish history didn’t just end with the death of William Wallace. This man [Robert the Bruce] went on to become King, and I really wanted to tell that story, it just took a long time to get out there – longer even than it took for him to become King! Only took him seven years, it took me thirteen… what does that say about me?
Richie: It says that it’s harder to get a film made in Hollywood than it is to become King of Scotland!
What about the rest of you, why did you want to be a part of this project?
Anna: I’d worked with Angus on a hilariously weird film before, and we’d wanted to work together again, so I met up with him again after I’d done a couple of other films, and I told him, “Ugh, I’m so bored!” I’d been on set for six months, and suddenly I wasn’t. And he said, “Well, did you read any of those scripts that I sent you?” and I said, “No, I’ve been so busy!” and he said, “You’re not busy now.”
So I read this one, went home, called him an hour and a half later and said, “Hey, do you want to make this film?”. And he said, “I don’t want it on my laptop forever!” and I asked, “Well are you okay if I run with it?”. So I spoke to my husband and told him, “I just read the most beautiful script, it has to get made!” and my husband was like, “So make it.” I knew a few directors, and it needed to be intimate because in my mind, it’s not a big-budget film, it’s very beautiful and spoke to my heritage because my family is from Scotland – and with Richie, this is the third time we’ve worked together. The two previous times on set were just wonderful… so I called up Richie and was like, “I know you’re working with some people in Montana about a Western film, but would you like to read this script?”. He reads it, and an hour and a half later he’s like, “Yo, when can we meet Angus?”. And credit to Richie, he got it up and going in four months. No time had passed.
That’s very, very fast.
Richie: Braveheart, for me when we got it in Australia, I was fifteen years old. My acting teacher took the class to see Braveheart, and I must have seen it a dozen times. And when we got back for the next class, he laid all down on the floor and he played the entire soundtrack from start to finish. He asked us to think of the film as we were listening – and I don’t think I told you this [he signals to Angus]. The teacher of that class went on to become a producer, he produced Hacksaw Ridge, the Mel Gibson film, and now I’m directing Robert the Bruce. So when Anna calls me about this script… it gives me goosebumps just thinking about it… And it was a story I’d never heard before, of this widow and her children saving the King of Scotland.
It’s not a story you hear about.
Richie: We were just walking about this, we see so many thousands of deaths in action films, but what’s going on back at the farms when the fathers don’t come home? That’s what makes it special.
Zach: As for me, Braveheart is one of my favourite movies of all time. My friends from high school are bugging out about this project, because we used to watch it before every single football match we’d play. It’d hype us up… And I’d been working with Richie on that Western up in Montana, and that was when Mike – her husband [pointing to Anna] is my manager as well – brought the film to me and I lost my damn mind… I was just excited, and I like a challenge so everything about this excited me. I’m so stoked to be here.
Robert the Bruce is obviously a Scottish story, but it’s also one that people have fallen in love with internationally. What about this history do you think appeals to people?
Anna: I think it’s timeless – a story of a defeated King trying to find his courage again, and finding that from such an unlikely source… So if a story is about courage, determination, persistence, that’s going to be timeless. And everyone likes to root for the underdog, or even the guy who had it all and now has nothing.
Angus: He hits rock bottom, where there’s nowhere lower to go except death and madness. That’s a common theme, Shakespeare wrote about it all the time.
It’s an intimate story set in the midst of a gigantic history, and I know Richie, you’ve said you were working on a Western; there is that kind of Western feel to it, it being quiet and personal. Is that intentional?
Richie: What was scary is that we didn’t have time to make the whole film in Scotland, and it had to be in winter. And the more epic and brutal the landscape looks, the more it lifts the stakes of the story… but these were the cowboys of back then, it was clans versus clans, and internal rivalries. And we didn’t want to see another battle film about the English against the Scots. And we didn’t want to do that again.
It sounds like you might have Outlaw King in mind when you say that…
Richie: No, it’s a fabulous film! It’s just not our film. And Angus has been working at this for thirteen years, but it’s the right time for it now.
Funny how that works out, in terms of political relevance, for it to come out now. Maybe it paid off to wait that long.
Angus: Well it wasn’t as if I did it on purpose! I wrote this in 2006 and wanted it to be made in 2007, and God knows it would have come and gone, and we would have all bought a house and private jets. But instead, the forces of destiny stifled me and put me in my own personal cave of despair, and slowly the hope faded away and I had my own spider in my head, telling me it would never happen. And then Anna came into my life… and made it all happen.
Zach: One thing you can’t buy is passion, and I think everyone in this movie has that passion, that desire to make it good and bring it to life. That’s everything.
Anna: And people had to like our script, because it was minus 21 degrees in Montana, it was like, “How much do you love this film?”.
Angus: And going back to the timing, it wasn’t my choice but something bigger than all of us put it off, and the timing just so happens to be perfect – I couldn’t have chosen a better time to bring it out than during this Brexit shambles… The film used to be called The Mighty Hand, and it feels like that mighty hand controlled the timing. It was like, “You’re going to do it now, and you’re going to help the Scottish Independent movement, we’ll have that flag flying over the castle any day now.”
That would make quite the by-line for the film. And besides Montana, parts of the film were filmed in Scotland, correct?
Richie: We filmed just outside of Stirling, and up and down Glencoe, on the Isle of Skye, all during the Beast from the East! And people couldn’t fly out of here [Edinburgh] when they got here, but we embraced it because it helps the movie that it’s hard, and looks hard, because it makes it real.
And the transitions between Montana and Scotland are absolutely seamless.
Zach: I had never been to Scotland, so in Montana I was like, “Does this look like Scotland?” and Angus was telling me the Highlands look just like that. I’ll never forget rocking up the first day, they were shooting at the croft and there was eight feet of snow on the ground… and I was like, “this movie is not for the faint-hearted!” … I was lying in the bed in the croft, waiting for something because it was marginally warmer in there than outside, and I was watching this family of mice making their home and living their lives on the set, and the line between reality and the story started blurring.
Anna: It definitely made the filming, and the film itself, feel so much more real.
This interview has been edited and condensed. Read our review here.
Robert the Bruce is in cinemas in the UK; a US date has yet to be announced.