In Conversation with: David Macpherson

David Macpherson – hello!

Hello.

Thank you for speaking to me today. So, David, I know you from your days as a performance poet in Edinburgh. Did you ever perform in the festival?

I did, yeah. I had a show in 2018, a solo poetry show called Odes to Joy: Happy Poetry for Happy People, that was my tagline.

Was it a success?

Yeah, it was brilliant actually. I did it through PBH Free Fringe. We had a nice room just on the corner of Southbridge and Chambers Street, in a dingy room above a pub that wasn’t supposed to be a pub. We had to build the room when we got in because it was full of filing cabinets and shit. Can I swear on this?

I can always bleep it out.

There were some filing cabinets and other things in it.

Bric-a-brac?

Yeah, bric-a-brac. I did it all on my own, so I was doing the PR bit as well, going round with flyers. If I could do the show without doing the PR bit I would do it every night. We got good attendance most of the time. Handed out a lot of free chocolate. Free chocolate or vegan equivalent.

I tend to find the flyerers are central to the Fringe. I used to do my own performance art by dodging the flyers up the Royal Mile. My own interpretive dance.

[Laughs] You’ve gotta find your tactic. Are you a headphones in, head down, do not engage kind of person? I like to make them work for it. I like to make a bit of a connection, but they really have to sell it.

I was a headphones in, curt nod and a smile, take the flyer, put it in my pocket and forget about it kinda guy. With your career moving forwards, did your time in the Fringe set you up for success?

I would say that poetry in general, performing in any sense and doing performance poetry, has been very helpful. It was a step out of my comfort zone for a while. The idea of speaking in front of a lot of people came in very useful. It comes in handy when I’m pitching ideas for screenwriting, and being comfortable in those sort of rooms. I think that the experience of performing a poem in front of an audience, that experience, what you want out of that, is very similar to what you want out of pitching a TV idea to a producer. You want a connection, you want an emotional hook, you don’t want to go on too long.

You can see David performing as part of I Am Loud productions below:

That’s a very interesting way of looking at it, that when you’re doing a poem you are pitching yourself. Did you find, now you’re working with producers and editors and people, that transition difficult?

It is quite a change, but I don’t think I found it too difficult. I’ve been very lucky to work with some great people. I’ve had a long run-in to get to this now. Before even poetry I’d written a novel, and during that process I’d done a lot of feedback with a friend. She was sort of my informal editor, and I did the same for her. That process of getting notes and making changes and listening to people’s opinions, I'd had a run at it. Once I got into screenwriting there was a lot more of that. But I knew not to take it personally. Take nothing personally, that’s my advice.

I think that’s good advice. So you had a running jump as a novelist, then poetry, now screenwriting. Was that always the aim, or did you fall into it accidentally?

Not necessarily accidentally. ‘Professional writer’ generally was the ultimate aim. I had never really nailed down exactly what kind. The first step on my journey was an I Taught Myself Screenwriting book when I was 21 or something, and that was my first real attempt. Then I started on my book, and I definitely saw myself becoming a novelist. I spent a lot of energy on that. And still now I’m looking forward to, when I have time, writing more novels. One of the reasons I went towards screenwriting more than anything else – I enjoy the process of it. The physical acts of writing a screenplay, and editing it, is very enjoyable. And the tiny one, the one you’re not supposed to mention [David raises a quizzical eyebrow] it pays much better than any of the others.

I’m just going to make a note of that: *pays better than the other ones*. Would you say you’ve now shifted away from performing? Do you have plans to get back to the Festival?

I’d love to get back to the Festival. I wouldn’t be able to do it now as we’re in production anyway. I would love to do that same show again, because it was very fun. The poetry – I do it for me, and the audience in the room. I don’t really have any ambitions to make it a career. I just really love performing and making that connection in the room. What’s great about performing is you get the instant reaction. You can write your piece, you perform it that night, and then you know if it’s good. You will quickly realise if you’ve made that connection.

From the three facets there, I imagine there is nothing quite as visceral as standing up on stage and, as happened to me the first time I performed, forgetting it halfway through. Now I've never known fear like it since, but I’d love to feel it again.

It’s addictive, isn’t it?

It’s adrenaline. Do you find if you don’t have that adrenaline in the writing process, does it become a slog?

I wouldn’t say its necessarily a slog. Sometimes its very hard work. It’s high pressure, there’s a lot to keep on top of. Of the show we’re making, there's six episodes. They’re an hour long each. I'm writing four. The first three we did, I wrote all of them, and at the end of that someone said to me: "That’s a Lord of The Rings film we’ve just written." And I shouldn’t talk myself up, but three hours, that’s a lot to hold in your head all at once. But I don’t see it as a slog. In my experience the things that scare you are the best things to do, and if you’re pressing yourself at the best of your ability, I often find that’s when I do my best work. I like to be busy.

Thank you for that very thoughtful and useful answer. Going back to Lord of the Rings – I love that metric for measuring your work. So if you wanted to make an independent film, you would only be making half of a Lord of the Rings – sounds more achievable.

There was a new fantasy novelist on Twitter, and he was talking about how people have their set word counts for a day. He tried to write a thousand words a day, and he couldn’t do it. Then he went down to 200 words a day, and he felt bad, because he couldn’t do it. And then he found out that Terry Pratchett used to write 400 words a day – which sometimes doesn’t seem like much – but Terry Pratchett used to publish three books a year. So, he was doing half a Terry Pratchett. Achievable goals are good.

You said it was a very big effort – how hard is it to find the time to not only write something like this, but get your head around it, and conceive of it all in one go?

Well time wise, I was very luck with screenwriting. Essentially, I made a decision that I was gonna save up some money – once I was starting to gain traction with a few scripts – quit my job for a while, and do it full time. It managed to work out, because the company that makes this show – The Rig – they gave me a script commission early on. It’s a lot about discipline. I did a really good course at the NFTS [the National Film and Television School in Scotland] where we had a challenge to write a fifty-page script in two weeks. Previous to that, all my pilots had taken me months and months to write. But you get the discipline, you have the deadline every day, and we all managed to do it. Now that’s how I do all my first draft scripts. I give myself two weeks, five pages a day, six days a week, until its finished.

Thinking about the future then, the studio building out in Leith, I understand The Rig is being filmed here.

Most of it is here, yeah.

It must be very nice to be involved in that stage for the city.

It is. Like most Scottish people I don’t like to toot my own horn, or even admit I have a horn to toot, but I think we’re all very proud that we’ve been able to do this in Scotland. It is a Scottish story, and I was very keen to film it here. Getting a proper film and television studio in Edinburgh has been a saga for years, that has gone on and on and on. So to be the first production made here, with a largely Scottish cast, lots of Scottish crew – yeah, we’re all very proud of that.

David Macpherson thank you very much for your time. Any last things to plug?

Everyone should watch The Rig when it comes out. It will hopefully be Summer 2022. You’ll definitely see it because the marketing machine will crank it all out. But yeah, we’re very excited to show everyone what we’re doing.

David Macpherson - thank you.