Local Hero at 40: Why we’re all still mad about Bill Forsyth’s endearing Eighties classic

At the end of production on Bill Forsyth’s Local Hero – re-released this week to mark its 40th anniversary – there was a wrap party in a local hotel in the north of Scotland. The cast and crew chipped in together to get the film’s star, the Hollywood legend Burt Lancaster, his very own full-dress Highland costume, in the Knox tartan. Lancaster, who loved all things Scottish, reacted with delight. “He dropped his pants!” his co-star Denis Lawson tells me with mock horror.

The film’s associate producer, Iain Smith, who later executive produced Mad Max: Fury Road, adds: “He charmingly put it [the kilt] on there and then, revealing his fine physique.” Lancaster was around 70 at the time but was a former acrobat and still very buff. “He looked very well in it as I remember,” recalls Smith.

Lancaster’s mini striptease is the kind of incident that could easily have been included in the film itself. One reason audiences still cherish Local Hero, and why Top Gun mogul Jerry Bruckheimer numbers it among his favourite movies, is that it is full of whimsical and endearing moments like this.

This is the story of Texan tycoon Felix Happer (Lancaster), who runs Knox Oil and Gas in Houston. He wants to acquire a picturesque Scottish village to build a refinery on the beach there and dispatches his underling Mac (Peter Riegert) to prepare the deal. Mac is a slick young American exec, but the longer he spends in the Highlands of Scotland, the more enraptured he becomes by the local way of life. He doesn’t quite realise that the villagers are trying to fleece him.

The film is full of quirky, observational humour and stunning visuals, from the close-up of the injured rabbit that Mac and his gawky Scottish minder, Danny (newcomer Peter Capaldi), pick up on the road, to the recurring images of a phantom motorcyclist who whizzes through the village at a breakneck pace, but with no obvious destination. There is the married couple in the B&B who have sex every five minutes and the beautiful marine scientist (Jenny Seagrove) with more than a passing resemblance to a mermaid.

This is a world before wifi and 5G. That means even hotshot US businessmen such as Mac keep in touch with their bosses by feeding 10p pieces into the voracious, money-guzzling handset in the red telephone box by the pier.

“[Producer David] Puttnam was the initiator. He got Bill and me together and said we need to do something about Scottish oil,” Smith tells me about how the project was initially hatched.

Puttnam, who had just made Oscar-winner Chariots of Fire for Goldcrest, told Forsyth and Smith that they should consider making something along the lines of Whisky Galore! (1949), the old Ealing Studios classic. Forsyth and Smith repaired to the pub to discuss the idea with only moderate enthusiasm. They liked Whisky Galore! but felt it had a “saccharine” quality, which they didn’t want to emulate.

“Bill went off at that point and was left alone for many months to play and ponder with this idea,” Smith remembers. “He [Forsyth] wanted something a little bit harder, and not actually about oil but about people. Bill’s films are really about the truth, about the way people are.”

Local Hero is regarded with such affectionate nostalgia that it’s easy to forget its portrayal of Highland life is actually very barbed. Lawson, who plays the village solicitor, restaurateur, B&B owner and priapic husband, Gordon Urquhart, remembers that writer-director Forsyth didn’t actually think he was making a comedy.

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The early scenes, when Mac first arrives, have a whiff of The Wicker Man about them. The villagers eye up Mac very suspiciously, as if they wouldn’t mind setting fire to him. Urquhart and his wife Stella (Jennifer Black) serve him the rescued rabbit in a stew. “How is the casserole de lapin?” Urquhart asks Mac who ingenuously replies “delicious” without realising he is tucking into the beloved bunny.

“When I read the script, it was a no-brainer [to do it],” says Lawson, who turned down a season at the Royal Shakespeare Company to take the role. “Yes, the script has a lot of laughs and dry humour and eccentricity but, on the other hand, it’s quite tough.”

Local Hero was shot in the summer of 1982, at the time that the Falklands War was being fought on the other side of the world. One or two images of jets scorching across the skies give a hint that this was a turbulent period in UK history.

The lovable, eccentric Highlanders are every bit as materialistic as the rapacious Texan oil folk. Led by Urquhart, they pretend they don’t want to sell when they’re really just trying to drive the price up. By the time Mac arrives, the fishermen are already busily debating among themselves whether they should be buying Rolls-Royces or Maseratis. “I’d like to see you get four or five winter lambs and a box of clams into the back of a Maserati. That’s what you need your Rolls for,” one chides the other.

“I think it was something in the air in the 1980s. I think people were losing it slightly because it was a decade of excessive acquisition,” director Forsyth told the BBC in a 2008 interview about how Thatcherite values had reached even into sleepy rural communities like the one he showed in Local Hero.

Movie producer Iain Brown, then a young film school student, was drafted on to the production and ended up working with the cinematographer Chris Menges as “the video playback guy”. This was one of the first productions on which the filmmakers could use video to look back on what they had just shot. “It was kind of wonderful. I had them build a little cabinet for me and carried the kit around with me like a giant beatbox on the beaches of Scotland,” Brown tells me.

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Brown has very fond memories of Lancaster “bouncing” over the sand dunes in Arisaig. “He was like a mountain goat. For a man of his age, he was incredibly fit.” Riegert and Lawson were left trailing in his wake.

Forsyth had originally wanted US actor Brian Keith, best known for The Parent Trap, to play the Texan oil tycoon. Puttnam felt they could aim higher and approached Lancaster instead. With him on board, Warner Bros were prepared to pay far more for the distribution rights.

According to Smith, Lancaster “picked up on it [the script] right away. He knew Scotland well having already spent time in the Findhorn community [a New Age retreat] in the north-east”.

Lancaster had signed on for 19 days. He came with a reputation for being domineering and difficult, but the veteran US star of films like Elmer Gantry and Sweet Smell of Success was on his best behaviour. He jokingly said at the end of the production that he hadn’t understood a single word Forsyth had said to him, but he was respectful to crew members and remembered everybody’s names.

He even joined them for a session in a pub somewhere between Mallaig and Fort William, where they were all based. Brown describes him as “wonderful to be around, he was an absolute delight. Never once was he anything other than incredibly affable and committed to the whole project”.

The Hollywood old-timer didn’t even grumble when Forsyth kept him waiting for a small eternity as the perfectionist director tried to capture a sunset shot of a helicopter arriving in the village.

Forsyth had chosen Riegert to play Mac against other more obvious choices because the American was deadpan and a little dour. “He [Forsyth] hates the obvious, he hates overstatement,” Smith says of him.

Fulton Mackay, best known to UK audiences at the time for his role as the prison guard in TV sitcom Porridge, played Ben Knox, the wise old hermit on the seashore who can’t be persuaded into selling his land. Capaldi, meanwhile, had been talent spotted in Glasgow. Forsyth was attracted by the art student’s unlikely combination of fecklessness and matinee idol looks.

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“It was an interesting mix, eclectic I think is the word, and I think that is part of the charm of the film,” Smith observes.

Puttnam was behind the hiring of Mark Knopfler to write the music. The Dire Straits singer-songwriter had been looking to do a movie score. He was invited to the Highlands to witness the filmmakers at work and join them in a ceilidh or two.

Long before making Local Hero, Forsyth and Smith had worked together on a series of promotional films for the Highlands and Islands Development Board and for other similar organisations. These were “pretty tedious documentaries”, but they gave the filmmakers an intimate knowledge of potential locations. “We knew the lie of the land and we had a sense of how to do this,” says Smith.

The filmmakers travelled round Scotland with their production designer Roger Murray-Leach in tow. “We needed a particular kind of linkage, which we never found, which was the linkage between the village and the beach. We found the beach up near Arisaig and we found the village up near Banff on the east coast – it was called Pennan.”

Forsyth had to stitch the two locations together as if they were a single place, a challenge which required all his powers of creative geography. At least he and Smith understood the local weather. They realised that May was the best month to film. “You get better weather and midges haven’t yet decided to assault the human race. That happens in June, July and August.” At times, the sun would be shining over the filmmakers while just a few miles away, further inland, it would be pouring with rain.

Forsyth relished, and shared, the very dry West Highland Highland sense of humour. “Local Hero we knew would be fun to watch. I have had conversations in subsequent years with big players in Hollywood who have told me with a straight face that Local Hero is one of their favourite films. The biggest one was [Jerry] Bruckheimer,” Smith says. He believes that the reason the Hollywood action movie producer liked it so much was that it was so utterly different to the macho blockbusters that Bruckheimer makes.

Local Hero has qualities that you simply don’t find in a Top Gun or a Bad Boys. It is lyrical, digressive and full of playful humour. These are all elements that come courtesy of the film’s director, whom Smith describes in almost mystical terms.

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“I always say you can’t pour Bill out of a bottle. Bill comes to things in his own time and his own way,” Smith observes of the reclusive Scottish filmmaker, now 76, who hasn’t made a feature in more than 20 years, since Gregory’s Two Girls (1999), his sequel to his classic comedy, Gregory’s Girl. “He’s very, very delicate and actually very vulnerable.”

Most viewers will realise very quickly that Local Hero is not really about oil or about a Highland community trying to get filthy rich. It’s a far more profound film than its reputation for whimsy suggests. Forsyth was issuing probing questions about values and how people want to live. This is also one of UK cinema’s first environmental dramas, with its very own just stop oil message.

“We were in this delightful Local Hero bubble. I think it was the warmth that exuded from it that pleased audiences,” says Brown, summing up why the film is still so treasured today. “And people still remember the one-liners. Some of them are just great,” Brown adds, citing, for example, the scene in which one irritating local asks a fisherman painting his boat if there are two ‘ls’ in the word dollar. Back instantly comes the reply “are there two ‘gs’ in bugger off?’”

“My wife still says that to me frequently,” Brown confides about the piece of dialogue from Local Hero that has now come back to bite him.

‘Local Hero’ is re-released in cinemas across the UK & Ireland from 19 May 2023 to celebrate its 40th anniversary