Tornado: The wild west samurai movie set in 18th Century Scotland

BBC News

27-02-2025

Scottish filmmaker John Maclean has always loved westerns.His 2015 debut film Slow West was still on the festival circuit when he sat down and began to write a new film.This time, he wanted to set his story in Britain in 1790, drawing on characters who he felt had never been given screen time before: the outlaws, the musicians, the circus performers.And he was determined to add a samurai element.
"At the time I had immersed myself in Japanese cinema," he says."I had seen and loved some of Kurosawa's films but decided to watch his entire work in order and read every book analysing his technique and storytelling style in order to analyse the to-and-fro between the American western and the samurai film."The result is Tornado, a British period drama and a coming of age story. Filmed on location in the Pentland Hills in January 2023, it stars Japanese actress Kōki as the eponymous Tornado, a performer in a travelling circus who learns to use a sword for the show, but by the end of the film is wielding it to survive.At the tender age of 22, she has many talents: catwalk model, musician, composer and actor. But she'd never been asked to use a samurai sword before."I was completely new to it so I contacted an action team in Japan and started to learn before shooting," she says."It was a completely new experience, the way you use your muscles, your posture, the mindset."
Takehiro Hira plays her father – and the character who teaches her to use the samurai sword. He was impressed by her skills."She was always practising off-set, and posting photos on Instagram," he says.He recently appeared in the FX series Shogun, which is the first Japanese language series to win an Emmy (18 of them).And he didn't doubt John Maclean's knowledge of the culture."I was so impressed with his knowledge of Japanese film," he says."Not just the obvious ones but some even I didn't know."When we first met on a Zoom call, he showed me a copy of my father Mikijirō Hira's debut film which I'd never seen."
A founding member of the Beta Band, John Maclean started out making music promos with budgets ranging from zero to £70,000.In 2009, he wrote his first short film, Man on a Motorcycle. It starred Michael Fassbender, who went on to appear in his next short film Pitch Black Heist and his first feature Slow West.And having proved he could make a western, he wanted to see if he could transplant the genre to 18th Century Britain."1790s Britain felt like 1860s America," he says."It was wild and lawless, but things were changing. The law was coming, the industrial revolution was coming."And like the wild west, it's a multicultural mix and a fight for survival.There's even a band of outlaws led by Sugarman, played by Tim Roth.
"I remember coming in for the costume-fitting and what they were quietly doing was crossing time periods," he says."I was wearing things which could have been worn in the 1940s, but there were other elements which were maybe more in keeping with the 1790s. There was an extraordinary freedom in that."John Maclean agrees: "There wasn't that much recorded about these sorts of people then so if you do look up costumes from the 1790s, you get the powdered wigs and the breeks but we really have no idea what ordinary people wore."Takehiro Hira adjusted his traditional costumes for the Scottish weather."We had kimono costumes but not the kind I would wear in Japanese cinema," he says."This had a lot of pieces and I would wear it like a coat although it was meant to be worn like a scarf so we were improvising just as any ordinary person of the time would have done."
Midgie season
John Maclean says it was the tight-knit cast and crew, working on a low budget, which allowed his dream of a Scottish samurai western to at last become a reality."I was very fortunate to work with cast, crew, producers and financers that embraced the originality of the story. I think the only way we managed to shoot this in 25 days was the amount of preparation done."Kōki is an absolute star and there is nothing she cannot do, her acting skills matched by her fighting skills. Jack Lowden embraced the mantra 'there are no small parts'. Tim Roth, lying on the ground of a freezing Scottish forest delivered a performance which can be fully appreciated on a large cinema screen."For Roth, the freezing forest was a breeze compared to his experiences filming Rob Roy in 1995. "I know a lot of people think January in Scotland would be the worst time of year to shoot a film, but when we shot Rob Roy it was midgie season and I would take this over that any time. It's hard to explain just how awful it was, swarms of them, and unless you keep moving…"One of Roth's other films has an important place in John Maclean's heart."I worked at the Cameo cinema as a student. Tarantino came with Reservoir Dogs and I met him and talked to him and thought I could maybe be a director. "So to have Tim Roth in this film feels like coming full circle."Tornado is out in UK and Ireland cinemas on 23 May