Undergoing 10 days of the Edinburgh International Film Festival is like starring in a war picture. Moving from film to film, trench to trench, shelled by symbolism and gassed by profundities, the Diary emerges dazed but gratified at the end of it all.
You made it, you're alive and you only lost a section of your head. You may even collect a medal, like the Croix de Fatigue Connery, for surviving such a steady movie bombardment with only a few duds. And next year, we hope McGill and her lieutenants
will return with some even bigger guns.
Leading the betting for today's festival awards is The Visitor with Richard Jenkins. His director Tom McCarthy is the boyish 42-year-old whose pals include George Clooney and Brad Pitt. Together they like to trade digs. McCarthy says that when he was on set his star took calls from the Coen brothers, who were trying to sign him up to appear alongside Clooney and Tilda Swinton in their next film Burn After Reading.
"You'll notice that about halfway through The Visitor I kind of lose interest?" claims Jenkins, gravely. "That's about the time the Coens mentioned Tilda."
Shane Meadows had no difficulty holding attention in a packed Cineworld for a Q&A. This year's Bafta award-winning director was remarkably candid in reviewing his work so far, including his regrets for the artwork for A Room For Romeo Brass ("a pair of big pants – worst film poster ever"), while the festival's closing film Faintheart gears up tonight with the ubiquitous Eddie Marsan as a nerd with a passion for Viking battle re-enactments and Spaced's Jessica Hynes, left, as his long-suffering wife.
"Mostly I remember doing a scene at 3am where we screamed our heads off," Hynes told me. "And yet none of the residents complained or even bothered looking out their windows, which suggests it's a bit livelier than you'd think in Ludlow."
Plenty of screaming from the Diary's seat while watching Man On Wire, which premiered this weekend in Edinburgh. More than 30 years ago tightrope-walker Philippe Petit, above, caught the world off-balance when he walked a high wire between the Twin Towers – an image that is as good as any for this 62nd Edinburgh Film Festival, as it tries to balance art and commerce in its new June slot. For years, even after the fall of the towers, Petit refused movie offers for his story but now he finally appears in an entertaining and sometimes moving documentary.
In Edinburgh for a few days, he had nothing but sympathy for the city's buskers: in his lifelong career as a street juggler he has been arrested 500 times. "Everywhere I go," he says, "I am illegal." A lithe, puckish figure, he has nothing but affection for his unprecedented New York skywalk and clandestine operations between the pylons of Sydney Harbour Bridge and across Notre Dame. He's not so keen on the town that charged him £150 for the damage his rigging caused to the side of the building however. "They don't make Mikhail Baryshnikov clean up the stage after a performance," says Petit.
The full article contains 529 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
