Interview: Peter McDougall

‘I am inclined to this darkness’

The Times, 26 May 2017

I walk into the bar where I am meant to be interviewing Peter McDougall and find him fast asleep in a booth, his head tilted back against the polished wood. I give him a wee shake and say his name. He wakes with a start and squints at me, then his face breaks into a huge grin. In front of him on the table is an empty wine glass.

It is 2pm and I have no idea how long Scotland’s most celebrated screenwriter has been drinking. There is a possibility he has been on a bender lasting many days. When I spoke to him the day before, on the phone, to confirm our appointment, he confessed then that he was drunk. The call was made at 10.30am.

With a fresh glass of white wine in hand, McDougall admits he is in the doghouse with his long-time partner, Morag Fullarton, the film, TV and theatre director. “Mo isn’t speaking to me,” he says. “She hasn’t spoken to me for three days. I’ve only got the cat to speak to.”

The reason for this domestic tension seems to be an extended visit McDougall has just paid to his home town of Greenock, visiting old haunts and being besieged by ghosts. Especially the ghost of his mother, who is dominating his thoughts today in a way he is clearly finding hard to control. “My maw was a horror,” he says, shaking his head at the memory. “She treated me very badly. She used to hit me with a poker. I mean, I was a wean, for f***’s sake.

“She f***ing battered me. I keep thinking back to what she used to do to me, and the hurt she gave me. I can’t help it. I carry about with me a thing about my maw and where I came from.”

Tears start rolling down McDougall’s cheeks. We have been talking for less than five minutes.

He reaches over the table and grabs my arm in a tight grip just above the wrist. This is intended, I think, to demonstrate his ownership of the conversation. But the effect is more of a man being swept downstream reaching for an overhanging branch.

The reason for our interview is the imminent release of a remake of Whisky Galore, the 1949 Ealing comedy based on a novel by Compton Mackenzie. McDougall wrote the screenplay but does not seem particularly enamoured by the result.

“It’s not a great movie,” he says, a comment that will delight the promoters who have set up our meeting. “It’s a kinda nice thing, that’s all it is, nothing more than that. It’s a nice piece of work.

“I think I’m the greatest writer that Scotland ever produced, except nobody gave me a turn.”

This is not quite true. In films in the 1970s such as Just Another Saturday, which explored Scotland’s sectarian divide and drew from his experience as a drum major in a Protestant flute band, McDougall gave voice to a Scottish working-class experience that had never before been explored with such honesty. It was considered so incendiary that Glasgow police tried to stop it being broadcast on TV, fearing blood on the streets.

McDougall began his career in film after a chance meeting with Colin Welland, the screenwriter, who he met while painting his house. In the decades since, he has made dozens of films, and fans include Martin Scorsese, who was fascinated by the way the Scot portrayed violence, and Harvey Keitel, who has said he would “play a blade of grass for Peter McDougall”.

Today McDougall is wearing pink Converse shoes, mustard jeans, an unbuttoned pink shirt and a yellow v-neck t-shirt. The dandy air is topped off with expensive-smelling eau de cologne. Sitting with him, I feel extremely dowdy. At one point, he grabs me by the collar of my shirt, which is rather foxed round the edges. “Buy yourself a new shirt, eh?” he suggests, in the tone of a friend who loves you enough to tell you when you have bad breath.

I can’t figure out if his eyes are blue or grey. Maybe they’re both, depending on a mood that swings from best pal to would-be assailant. The eyes soften and harden and moisten and harden again, keeping you on your toes.

Peter McDougall has always been a man with no boundaries. Everything is out in the open. To his mind there is no story so personal it cannot be told, a belief that has led to endless arguments down the years with close relatives, when family secrets have been plundered for the plots of his films.

Today, he tells me a long story about a scene from his childhood when his seafaring father brought home two Dutch sailors and then went to bed and left them alone with his wife.

“They had nowhere to go, and my mother said to me, ‘go to bed now’,” he says. He believes the two men wanted to have sex with her. “I was ten, maybe. I wasn’t yet a man.”

Normally, I would have qualms about writing up an interview with a 79-year-old gent the worse for wear through drink. Yet, remarkably, there is never a point in our conversation when I feel McDougall has lost his dignity. Lost his train of thought, yes. Often, in fact. But he is never less than impressive. Throughout our conversation his integrity remains intact.

Interviewing McDougall is a hazardous business. In the 1990s a journalist friend of mine went to his flat at 11am to interview him, hoping to be back in the office by lunchtime. The interview ended ten and three-quarters of an hour later in the Ubiquitous Chip, the legendary West End watering hole, with McDougall called to the phone in the bar a number of times to enact some business or other.

Reporting a conversation with McDougall is tricky in other ways. You are never sure which of the anecdotes — he tells me a story about taking a knife off one of Scotland’s most talented screen actors — are accurate and which are the product of his imagination. One of his old drinking companions from the 1990s, who contacted last week, told me: “He’s a confabulist, which is not the same thing as a liar. The brain makes things up to patch the holes created by decades of hard-living.

“It’s interesting at first, then profoundly boring. He was a friend of mine — but it was a bit like being friends with someone from another galaxy.”

His alcohol intake is legendary. Billy Connolly, a lifelong friend and collaborator since the days when they both worked in the same Clyde shipyard, says he finally gave up drinking after a marathon session with McDougall. Connolly found himself in a phone box, unable to figure out where the door was. Eventually he had to call his agent to come and get him out.

There is a line from David Foster Wallace that goes: “The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.” The truth about his childhood has not yet finished messing with McDougall.

“Please forgive me for crying,” he says. “I cry all the time.”

His mind is still on his mother.

“I once said of my mother that she was a woman who didn’t want her washing to come in. She looked out at it all f***ing day through her kitchen window. The flapping of her blouse on the line gave her a sense of freedom she never had in her life. She knew that the blouse was pegged.”

Another line he once wrote about her comes to the surface of his mind. “I rifled the wardrobe of imagination,” he says, “and I ran away with the best of her dreams. I didn’t let her down.”

Again, he grabs my arm. This time the look in his eyes suggests that he is about to chop off my hand with a cleaver he is holding under the able.

“I’m as hard as f***, by the way. I’m the hardest f***er you’ll ever meet. I could f***ing take you right now.”

He reaches his other hand across the table and very slowly pats me on the cheek. I have no idea if this is a moment of affection or the precursor of a punch.

What makes him happy these days, I ask.

“I will ask you back, what does happy mean?”

When he feels fully alive, I suggest.

He nods approvingly. “I do that. I feel alive. I upset everyone that comes near me. I cause mayhem everywhere I f***ing go. But that’s not happiness.

“I know I’m talented and I can write, but I’m inclined to this darkness. I’ve won the Prix Italia, every f***ing thing. But I always come back to my childhood. My maw battered me, but I’m quite a strong person.”

Strong despite the violence, I ask, or because of it?

“I would say because of it. But I use that strength, unwarrantedly, on other people. I shouldn’t be doing that.

“My wife, Morag, she’s nothing to do with this. This all comes from f***ing me.”

McDougall says he is under no illusions about what other people think of him.

“I am barred in so many places in the town, because I do things that other people don’t do. Like I fight. I’m not the nicest person in the world. I know that. I f***ing know that. Whether it’s darkness, or whether you drink, or whatever, it doesn’t matter, it all comes down to the same thing: I’m no good.

“You f*** off the people around you. Because they get it to such a bad extent they’re not willing to take care of you any more. And I can’t take care of myself.

“I’m a nightmare to people, and I’m also a nightmare to myself. I’m not in charge of myself. Most people think they’re in charge of things. But I’m not in charge of myself.”

We have been talking for an hour, and McDougall says he is going to go home to bed. Before he goes he gives me some career advice as a writer.

“Keep it going,” he says. “Write like f***. You hit, you hit, you hit, you hit, and you keep on hitting. It’s your duty as a person. It is the way to keep your integrity.”

He gives me a huge hug. I am left unsure whether, with that parting advice, he was talking to me or talking to himself.