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| The Make It To Munich team on the 2025 Glasgow Film Festival red carpet with festival director Allison Gardner. Photo: Eoin Carey |
When promising young Aberdeenshire football protégé Ethan Walker was severely injured in a car accident, it initially looked as if he might be struggling to do even basic things for the rest of his life. His dream of a professional sporting career seemed far away. But thanks to the efforts of pioneering surgeon Gordon Mackay, the teenager not only got back on his feet – he got on a bike. Make It To Munich is a film chronicling the 1,300km journey that he made – along with the surgeon, fellow fan Stephen Collie and film director Martyn Robertson - to carry the Scotland team’s official pennant all the way to Munich for the European Cup.
Initially intended as a minor, private project, Make It To Munich found moments of magic in this journey – enough to turn it into a feature length documentary, which had the honour of closing the 2025 Glasgow Film Festival. When Martyn and I met up to chat about it, I began by asking him about the challenge of developing a film where nothing dramatic really happens after the accident itself – but which has still proven to be a real crowd-pleaser.
“I suppose the biggest piece of jeopardy in the film is the accident itself, and that largely happened before we started filming,” he says. “I suppose you never know what you're going to get when you go on one of these journeys as a filmmaker. You don't know whether he's going to struggle or whether there's going to be a big problem along the way. But I think part of the joy of the film is the fact that he's so eternally positive and that in the end, it's all of us that struggle.
“I think ultimately what kept us going was Ethan's spirit and his determination and his eternal positivity throughout all of this. And that's what's probably got him out of his hospital bed and back on a bike and doing fitness again. So it was a difficult film to make. You know, it's making a film with one hand on a bike when you're not a cyclist – nor am I an experienced camera operator from two wheels – was a real challenge for me. But I think what we have at the end of it is a story about optimism, a story about positivity and passion, and a side of four men cycling to a football tournament that perhaps might be a little unexpected, which is actually a caring side, a side that's about looking after each other and looking out for each other.”
There's a lot of that in football fandom, I observe, but it's something that doesn't get talked about much.
“That's right, yeah. And I think a lot of people, when we were making this film, expected it to be maybe a kind of lads’ football holiday film. I don't think it's that at all? The irony is that although it doesn't look like it, we all took it quite seriously. Like we stopped drinking for six months. We did do some training, but clearly not enough. And the film is a kind of rite of passage.
“For Ethan, the film is a conversation that the surgeon found it too difficult to have in his hospital consultation room. So instead of having a simple conversation where he says ‘You're not going to play football again,’ which is a devastating thing for him to hear, he takes him on this 1,300km journey to have that difficult conversation. So it's as much about him as a surgeon and how much the story had impacted him. You know, as a former footballer himself, he's a real pro at telling people every day that they can't do things again, so it intrigued me that this particular individual really got to him in terms of the stage he was at in his life and his dreams.”
I mention that I see a lot of films which are all about how disabled people can achieve anything if they just put their minds to it, and speaking as a disabled person, that's a bit unrealistic really. Ethan starts out with that attitude here, but the film is more about how sometimes there are things you can't achieve and sometimes you find other things to do instead and maybe get a more expansive perspective on the world because of that. How did Martyn go about finding that balance and getting it to work?
“I think you're right,” he says. “I think it's about having a conversation with Gordon all the way. I was talking to Gordon all the time. I learned about Ethan's story probably about six months prior to doing the cycle. Gordon and I have made other things together. We were on a long haul flight and we were talking about Ethan as a character and so I was asking the question ‘Will he play again?’ really early on. And Gordon said ‘Well, his legs are capable of playing football, but his brain injury means he’s not going to be able to do it.’ The jury was still out on that throughout the process, but it became really clear that he wouldn't play football again and that somehow Gordon needed to find a way of telling him that.
“Ethan was devastated. Even though he plays it down in the film, you can tell he was devastated hearing it out loud. But yeah, I mean, I suppose it was just through conversation. I just had to keep having conversations with them. And some of the material we used in the film wasn't so much provoked by me as some of the other conversations that weren't used. So I would have conversations about where he was in his career, what he was thinking, whether he would get back to football. Some of them were off camera and then they naturally started talking about the things that I was having conversations about when they were together on the bikes, which helped me. So I suppose making the film helped them to find a way of having their conversation.
“It's a film about disability as well, a film about change and having to just slightly alter your path in order to be the best version of yourself that you can be. But listen, this is a film that I had no plans on making. It was in between things. I'm making two other films at the moment that are financed. This pops along with no time for funding, no time for anything. We literally just made the decision to get on the bikes. Well, I'd made the decision to cycle, so I had been training. But the decision to make a film, we did make early, but we had no idea that it was going to turn out to be a feature doc.
“We thought we were just making a film that was going to document the cycle and it might be something nice to share, a 15 or 20 minute thing. But the more I learned about Ethan's journey and the more I worked with him and his parents, the more I felt that there was something else there. And so it's been great to get it into Glasgow Film Festival, to close the festival and to now be doing a release for the film that's been made just on good spirit.”
There was Ethan saying that he wanted to live a quiet life and now he’s going to be on big screens all around the country, I remark.
“I know, I know!” He laughs, with a slightly guilty expression. “Although he's coming with us, and what's nice about this tour is that we're opening that conversation up beyond. We're inviting former professional footballers around the country to join us and be part of the conversation about injury and how injury can end a career. For instance, head injury is a big subject matter at the moment because if you have a long term injury due to a head injury to heading the ball, for instance, football clubs are not paying out, they're not compensating players, and it can be crippling for people that have dedicated their life to a sport. So we're opening up that conversation as part of these events in each of the cities that we're visiting. We're hoping that it will be good for folk to see the films in these places but also meet a local footballer and hear from them as well about their experience.”
It’s interesting as a film about brain injury because it's largely an invisible disability, which creates challenges for a filmmaker. When people slur their speech as Ethan does when he’s tired, people tend to think that that means someone's stupid, but he comes across as a very bright young man. One hopes that this will help people to understand experiences like that a little better.
“Yeah, exactly – that's the main thing, you know? Some of the venues that we're taking to on its release, the purpose of that is to show young people cinema. They probably don't get to see much cinema in their local community. We're taking it to Ethan's hometown, which is a tiny little village in Aberdeenshire, and that's of course selling like hot cakes at the moment. There's like 300 people packed into this hall. But it's also to show young people that you can do inspiring things in spite of bad injury or accidents or things, obstacles that come along. Ethan's a good role model for that. You know, not enough young folk have enough confidence with that kind of stuff, so I hope it inspires young people.”
Football has been a real lifelong passion for Ethan. There’s some fantastic home movie footage in there, going back to when he was just two-years-old. I ask Martyn if he knew that was available at the start of the project.
“No,” he says. “Actually, we got one of the tapes and we thought ‘This is good.’ It's just about perseverance, that stuff. Keep asking if there's more. Eventually the attic was ransacked and we found a bit more, and that stuff's golden. It's lovely to work with, and it just crystallizes him as a character, and his parents as well, and how they've supported him.”
The various different sections are brought together using animation.
“That was fun,” says Martyn. “We wanted to use maps in some way, and actually we got an artist that worked with me on a film about ten years ago just to do caricatures of us. We had a bit of fun with them. And then we thought, well, it would actually be nice to have us moving. In some ways it's quite complicated. Layers of things. It's not just four guys cycling to Germany. It's the football, it's the pennant. We had a few bits of information we needed to get in there and those graphic sequences just became useful for us to convey some information in.”
The journey seems to fit really well with Scottish football’s story, because there is that sense of eternal optimism every time a chance comes along. We may not have the world’s most successful team, but we’re very good at how we handle that. We find enormous joy in it, whether or not we get the result that we're hoping for.
“Yeah, I mean, I've been a Scotland supporter all my life, and I've experienced that all my life. But ultimately, the success of the Euros for us was Ethan's story and Ethan's success and. And, you know, we enjoyed everything up until the game.” He laughs. “So the journey is the best bit for Scotland fans. And for Ethan, of course, that was a big success. But, yeah, I mean, imagine cycling 1,300 kilometers to go and watch that. You know, I paid a lot of money. Ethan won his tickets, but I paid a lot of money for my tickets. I think I left just after half time.”
Was he ever worried that they wouldn't make it in time for the match – that the cycling was too much?
“Most days, yeah, it'd be tough. I mean the thing with making a film on a cycle like that is we're leaving at 8:00 or 8:30 every day. I was up at 5:30 getting the kit. You know, we had cameras on bikes. I had a camera in my hand, we had a camera in the van. So I had to prep all the kit every day and then we'd cycle. Most days we were cycling 12 hours at least and then they all got to go and relax afterwards and I had to sit and do all the back-ups until the small hours. So I think that's what was really grueling – just the lack of sleep. Every time I got on the bike in the morning, I found the first two hours of the day almost impossible, because I was exhausted.
“The middle of it was difficult. We scheduled it so it got gradually easier too. The days became shorter as the mileage was a bit shorter, but some of the hills in Bavaria were really, really tough. So yeah, listen, it was a great experience we'll never ever forget. And I suppose it stays with you, you know, that we got on our bikes and did that and we've got some evidence, which is nice.”
So how is Ethan getting on with getting his coaching badges now?
“It's going really well. So he has his first and second level of badges which allows him to coach as part of a team. He can't take a team on his own yet. He's working, he's back at college finishing his sports course and he's coaching with a local team at the moment every Saturday, and he's taking a youth team as well, he's training them. So he's doing really, really well. And he's really looking forward to coming on this tour around Scotland and the UK cinemas. It should be good fun just seeing that conversation come along live again.
“None of us really imagined that we would be doing a cinema release. The biggest thing out of this is I really hope it gets people that wouldn't otherwise go to the cinema to come out to independent cinemas and watch a film that might appeal to them and engage with independent cinema where they maybe haven't before.”
Before we go, I ask him about another project that he mentioned to me previously, about a Liverpool man who worked with horses.
“I'm still making that film and that's a slow burner,” he says. “We're basically halfway through with that film. So I was talking to him last night. He's actually moved to Scotland, which is a good story point, but it's also very convenient for me. And I'm also making a film in India, about a lady who runs a mission hospital in Bihar. So two very different projects. Both have small amounts of finance in them and are moving along, but quite slowly, partly because of story and partly because of finance. So I think the Munich film for me was a chance to get up and do something within a set amount of time.
“We knew we had to finish it within a reasonable time frame for it to be appealing to the audience. And I think that's important. It's important to keep making and keep getting things finished. It's a tough environment out there and if you can get a film away and do something with it, it's brilliant for the director in terms of keeping me active. You know, you can sit and talk about a film for a very long time before it gets made. So this was an opportunity to practice what I preach and turn it around quickly, and I’m delighted with the result.”
Make It To Munich is in UK cinemas from Friday 16 May.
