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- The Herald Scotland
You need to see wild movie by Scots director that breaks all the rules
Not so, as it turns out. It's only now, a decade on, that Slow West's follow-up is preparing to make its theatrical bow after a well-received premiere at this year's Glasgow Film Festival where it was the opening film.
A blend of samurai flick, chase film, historical epic and heist movie, Tornado follows the titular heroine, a Japanese puppeteer, as she and her father Fujin eke out a living somewhere in northern Britain at the end of the 18th century. Into their lives one day comes a band of brigands led by the ruthless Sugarman and his argumentative son, Little Sugar. The thieves are toting a sack of stolen gold coins, but it's when they are robbed in turn that the trouble begins for Fujin and, in particular, Tornado.
A scene from Tornado by John Maclean (Image: free)Maclean's second film began life in 2016, immediately after the success of Slow West. You can't say he didn't hit the ground running.
'Having done a Western in America that to me was a little bit about immigration, I thought I could do the same for Britain – write a film where there's an African bandit, a French performer, a Japanese wanderer,' he tells me over Zoom.
'That was one idea. But then when I started the script, the heart of it started to come from father-daughter relationships. In Slow West, the thing I took from my personal life was a young Scottish boy being in love with somebody who didn't necessarily love him back, and him going to the ends of the earth for her. With Tornado, it was a father trying to teach his daughter his own Japanese culture, and her not being interested.'
The process of writing the script continued into 2017 and then into 2018. When the pandemic happened it inevitably had an effect on production, but Maclean says a major issue even before then was one far more familiar to film-makers than zoonotic diseases – cash.
'I was ready to go but we just couldn't find people interested in funding it for a good while. I think it's just tough out there. You need a certain calibre of actor attached to finance films these days, and the actors have to become bigger and bigger to finance lower and lower budget films because – bottom line – people aren't going to the cinema so much.'
Luckily, Maclean has never had much difficulty attracting big names to his films or identifying talents on the rise. He even managed it in his BAFTA-winning short Pitch Black Heist, which starred Michael Fassbender. It was released in the same year the Irishman won a slew of awards for his role in Steve McQueen's Hunger and first appeared as Magneto in X Men: First Class. Fassbender then returned to Team Maclean in order to work on Slow West and his co-star on that film was Kodi Smit-McPhee, who would also go on to star in the X-Men films (as Nightcrawler) and garner an Oscar nomination in Jane Campion's 2021 film, The Power Of The Dog.
Things are little different this time around. The great Tim Roth plays Sugarman, Jack Lowden is Little Sugar and, for the roles of Fujin and Tornado, Maclean has cast Giri/Haji star Takehiro Hira and 22-year-old Mitsuku Kimura, who goes by the name Kōki. She may be new to acting, but by her late teens she was already a magazine cover star in her homeland, had walked the Paris Fashion Week runways as a model for Chanel, and was enjoying a successful pop career.
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In fact Maclean had despaired about finding the right actress to play Tornado, even resorting to street castings to try to find non-actors. In the end Kōki was recommended by someone who had worked with her actor father Takuya Kimura, star of Takashi Miike's 2017 samurai action film Blade Of The Immortal. Meanwhile her mother, Shizuka Kudo, is a celebrated singer and 1980s pop star with 11 Japanese number one hits to her name.
Maclean laughs as he remembers his first Zoom call with his prospective star. 'After about 10 seconds I was like: 'She's the one'.'
So how big is she in Japan? 'Massive,' he says. 'She's known more as a model, but they don't know how great she is at acting – yet. And she came over here to Edinburgh and I think for the first time in her life she was able to walk around without being absolutely mobbed. People camp outside her house in Japan because her parents are so famous, so she's never had freedom. She came over here and absolutely loved it. She could walk around, didn't get hassled. She could perform and act and be creative. She's incredible. I didn't have to say anything to her, there was no direction. She just go it.'
Lowden was recruited after an Edinburgh International Film Festival event at Edinburgh Castle – 'He told me he loved Slow West so I went straight back to the script and thought: 'I'm going to tweak this'' – while Maclean impressed Roth with his love of the work of British film-maker Alan Clarke.
Best known for directing Scum in 1979, Clarke also made an iconic series of films in the Play For Today strand including folk horror Penda's Fen, Elephant (about the Troubles) and 1982's Made In Britain, which starred Roth as a racist 16-year-old skinhead. 'As soon as we got talking, he could see my love of Alan Clarke and that meant a lot to him.'
For Maclean, meanwhile, it was a dream come true: as a student working at the Cameo Cinema in Edinburgh he had been wowed by an appearance by Quentin Tarantino in 1994 to promote Pulp Fiction. To work with the star of Reservoir Dogs made him feel he had come 'full circle', as he puts it.
Japanese singer and model Kōki as Tornado in John Maclean's new film of the same name (Image: free) A shared influence for Maclean and Tarantino, both scholars of Japanese cinema, is Lady Snowblood, the 1973 film starring Meiko Kaji as a kickass assassin bent on revenge. It directly inspired the American's Kill Bill films and in Maclean's film it's a touchstone for Tornado's transformation from bored Gen Z-er into samurai sword-toting avenging angel.
For the Scot, it's only one of a great many influences, however.
'When I'm writing a script I consume such a huge variety of films,' he admits. 'The most recent ones which were an influence were films coming out of Iran and Turkey. I'll always love action films, so my cinematic bedrock would Predator and Die Hard and Robocop, those sorts of films. But equally I love Tarkovsky, Bergman and Bresson ... This one was influenced by everything from touches of David Lynch's Blue Velvet all the way through to Steel Magnolias even. I watched that for some reason.'
A 1989 comedy drama set in Louisiana and starring Dolly Parton and a young Julia Roberts is hard to place in Tornado's DNA. But, though the ingredients may be many and varied, it's the eventual dish which is the thing that matters – and this one has been worth the wait.
Tornado is released on June 13. Since this interview was conducted The Beta Band have reformed for a tour of the UK starting at Glasgow Barrowland on September 25.
