Paul Whitelaw 

Stuart Murdoch on God Help the Girl: ‘I never thought I’d make a film’

Paul Whitelaw: No one was more surprised than the Belle and Sebastian frontman himself when he started directing his first movie
  
  

God Help the Girl
God Help the Girl: ‘Eve was real to me.’ Photograph: Neil Davidson Photograph: Neil Davidson

Stuart Murdoch has never been short of determination. You don’t become one of the world’s biggest cult bands on luck and a prayer alone (though, as a Christian, Murdoch isn’t averse to a little divine assistance).

Two years ago, when the Belle and Sebastian singer arrived for the first day of filming on his debut feature film as writer/director, his nerve almost failed. “It was like opening your mouth and expecting to speak French – when you don’t speak French.”

The crew was shooting on one of Glasgow’s busiest thoroughfares, without the cash to shut it down. “I had this five-minute window where everybody seemed to be occupied, so I walked down to the church at Nelson Mandela Place and I said a prayer.‘I hope we’re going to do OK here, I’m a bit out of my depth.’”

The Guardian film team review God Help the Girl

At 45, Murdoch cuts a spry, duffle-coated dash. We chat about his film, God Help The Girl – based on his 2009 album of the same name – over coffee and cake in a Glasgow cafe. There are strong autobiographical elements in the story of Eve, an institutionalised young woman with anorexia who escapes from hospital and embarks on a meandering summer adventure with two fellow misfits, James and Cassie. Budding musicians, they write songs as part of the healing process.

Murdoch himself fell ill with ME in his 20s, spending several years in enforced isolation, where he wrote most of his classic early songs. “I do look to the past,” he says. “But it certainly wasn’t nostalgia that was propelling me to write, the main thing was the characters. This might sound like I’m making excuses, but there was enough distance between my life and this happening now for the characters to feel real. Obviously I could empathise with Eve because I’d been through a lot of the same things, but this wasn’t just a device I was using, this was real to me. Eve was real.”

A lot of those same things include his past struggles with eating disorders – sensitive subject matter for a musical. But Murdoch felt he was on solid ground – consulting anorexia specialists, corresponding with a friend who had similar issues. The character first came to Murdoch one dark December night in 2003, while out for a run along a Sheffield canal. “Hearing that first song was like a radio switching on inside my head. This was before digital recorders, so I used a tiny pencil and a bit of paper and wrote: ‘God help the girl, she needs all the help she can get.’ That was the seed.”

As the songs kept coming, they gradually formed a narrative. “I pretty quickly realised this could be the backbone for a film. But it’s a little bit like when I first got into music; it was never a planned ambition of mine to become a musician. The songs came along and I followed them. So in this instance, the character of Eve came along and I followed her. I never thought I’d make a feature film like this.”

Nor, for a while, did anyone else; Murdoch was turned down by almost every major UK funder. But following a successful Kickstarter campaign, with rewards including Murdoch’s gold disc for first album Tigermilk, they eventually secured the cash and made it in five weeks on the streets of Glasgow.

“It was pretty manic,” he recalls. “We were a small crew, we passed silently through the night, we didn’t have much lighting, there wasn’t much razzmatazz. You wouldn’t have even known we were there. Sometimes we’d even move from scene to scene without putting anything in a truck or a car, we’d just push our trolleys around the West End.”

Despite being strongly rooted in Glasgow, the film has no Scottish leads. Emily Browning, who plays Eve, is Australian, while Olly Alexander and Skins and Game of Thrones star Hannah Murray are English. Was that an issue? “It was,” he concedes. “James was definitely meant to be Mr Glasgow, and I always imagined Eve coming from a small town in Fife. Cassie was supposed to be the only odd one out, she was English or American.”

Elle Fanning was originally cast as Cassie before dropping out when Disney came calling. “That was definitely the right career move for her,” smiles Murdoch, who says his desire for Scottish voices simply vanished when he found the right actors. “The first person we picked was Olly, and obviously he’s as English as all get out. But you just go with it.”

With a new Belle and Sebastian album due in early 2015, Murdoch has no immediate plans for another film, and still betrays some of the self-doubt that he had two years ago, starting work on a film that went on to win awards at Sundance. “It would be fun to throw yourself into that world,” he grins. But only on his own terms. “I wouldn’t be in a position to direct something I hadn’t written, or at least originated. You could get 50 other guys who would do a better job.”

God Help the Girl is released on 22 August

 

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