Behind Dern’s ‘late-life masterpiece’

Bruce Dern zooming in to the Edinburgh International Film Festival for a live session with audiences ahead of the world premiere of his latest film Northbound, directed by William Scoular Photo: Courtesy of EIFF

The trip from home base Toronto to the Edinburgh International Film Festival for the world premiere of Northbound featuring a career-best performance from Bruce Dern as an irascible and incorrigible inmate of a retirement home, represented both a professional and personal journey for the film’s director William Scoular.

He was born in a single end in the Gorbals in Glasgow before the family emigrated to Canada. “My father was in the Merchant Navy and he was hell bent in getting out of Glasgow. He wanted to go to Africa where he had been during the war. But my grandmother said it was too far away so instead we went to Canada. And I recall we went on a ship called the Neptunia. My father was paid something like £50 to get us there.

“Apparently I was born on the kitchen table in the flat in the Gorbals and my father came from a black tie dinner to be there for the birth and then I think he went back for his cheese course. My grandmother sent my father that song about ‘taking good care of my babies’. My father became an accountant after having been a book-keeper. I was one of seven offspring and four of us had lived in that single-end.”

Northbound director William Scoular on working with Bruce Dern: "'He told me he doesn’t rehearse because he doesn’t want the other actors to know what he is doing' Photo: Courtesy of EIFF

Scoular has made quite the leap of circumstance from his relatively modest background via Oxford University to becoming a writer, film-maker and stage director. He wrote his own screenplay from his best-selling book A Question of Guilt which became Deadly Friends, his first film. He returns to Canada to start work in earnest on his new film Second Voice set in the world of artificial intelligence.

His father died in 2005 which was when the idea of Northbound initially imposed itself. “I did accompany my father on some of his wacky expeditions to keep him out of trouble after he had retired so if I had written it would have turned out to be a rather different story,” he said. The script was written by Ashlin Halfnight (The New Look).

Scoular confessed that the form of a road movie was not one that he was especially interested in. “But it felt the right thing to do. I like the fact that it started in a dry, hard place which is Arizona and then he got to travel and cross the rubicon of his existence and over the border into Canada. He meets his end in a beautiful green place so it’s also about geography and the poetry of the setting as well.

“The week before my own father died he was still planning his jail break from the home he was living in and he said to me: ‘Can you get me the fuck out of this place? I want to go home to Scotland to die with my ain folk.’ He never made it, of course, because he was too ill to travel. In a way this film is my answer to that. This morning I walked up Arthur’s Seat and I scattered my father’s ashes at the top overlooking this beautiful city. So he made it and he was back amongst his own people. He took the scenic route home.”

In the film’s production notes Scoular expanded: “Growing up with my father was an adventure I wouldn't trade for anything. He was funny, charming, and absolutely incorrigible, a man who lived entirely on his own terms and paid the price for it. Watching him face his ‘final curtain,’ scrambling to make amends with the time he had left, raised a question I still can't shake. How do we live well, and honestly, all the way to the finish line?

Bruce Dern as he appears in Northbound. He told director William Scoular: 'That’s everything I’ve got to say and you got it all - well 90 per cent of it' Photo: Courtesy of EIFF

“On the surface, it's a road movie. Underneath, it's a very late coming-of-age story. Arthur is a man-child who's spent a lifetime acting as though the rules don't apply to him. Until, that is, mortality arrives at the door, and the question he's been running from his whole life is waiting for him at the end of the road. And so the road less travelled, the one Arthur chose his whole life, becomes a requiem. It's the comedy of a man who lived too loud to listen, and the tragedy of finding the right words too late. Comedy and tragedy, holding hands. That’s where truth lives.”

Scoular suggested that it also represented a bit of a homecoming for Dern. The festival had programmed the Vietnam war drama Coming Home featuring a relatively youthful Dern for which he was Oscar-nominated in 1978, as well as, for contrast, Northbound with Dern at 90 clearly relishing the role of an octogenarian who enlists his grandson to help him escape a nursing home and chauffeur him from Arizona to Canada.

“When I showed Bruce my director’s cut he said: ‘Way to go kid. That’s everything I’ve got to say and you got it all - well 90 per cent of it.’ Northbound in a way is a consummation of his entire career from Hitchcock to Tarantino. I consider It’s a late- life masterpiece and I am so happy that Edinburgh got to see it first,” said Scoular.

Asked how it was to work with the legend, Scoular smiled reflectively: “Well it’s like being tossed the keys to a Ferrari and sometimes he will take you to a better place than you thought you were going to and other times he would be way off course and you would have to hang on for dear life. Bruce is the ultimate actor’s actor. You never see the acting. You think you can see the trick, and I have worked with a lot of actors, but when you see the result you just don’t how he got from here to here. So you just let him squirm in the aquarium of life and hope that the camera finds it.”

Bruce Dern and Laura Dern in Cannes Photo: Amber Wilkinson

“I shot a lot because Bruce just doesn’t rehearse. So I would block off the other actors and block off the camera and Bruce would turn up with one minute to spare and ask what he was supposed to be doing. Every scene was like a round in a boxing match and he wanted to win that round. Occasionally I would say you didn’t quite make that round and he would bluster but would do it again. He told me he doesn’t rehearse because he doesn’t want the other actors to know what he is doing. It certainly keeps the pace alive and I love that because I am always looking for the truth. They say the camera never lies but it does lie at 24 frames per second.”

At the Cannes Film Festival earlier in the year Dern was in attendance with his actress daughter Laura for a premiere in Cannes Classics of the documentary Dernsie by Mike Mendez. Known as a “Dernsie” was the actor’s distinctive way of saying something that was not in the screenplay. He adopted the style on the advice of director Elia Kazan - and never looked back. He told one interviewer: “I never thought I was altogether that interesting, you know what I mean? I mean, I had played the fifth cowboy from the right for 20 years,

"He [Kazan] said, 'Since you're going to be slotted in that area, make ​sure you're the most unique fifth cowboy from the right anybody ever saw and out ‌of that ⁠came Dernsie, because you don't write the Dernsies.”

Dern has a compulsion to keep on working as long as he can. Although he was unable to make a personal appearance in Edinburgh he insisted on joining the audience by zoom. His best quote on his longevity remains: “I’ve been doing this a long fucking time. And I know what it’s like to not be found until you’ve been in the business for years. And it’s all because I played little tiny roles. But when you look at the roles I played, I made a difference in every movie.”