A PROLIFIC filmmaker and producer, Douglas Eadie was, to quote his friend, novelist James Robertson, a “pioneer of modern Scottish film and television”.
“If he heard you saying that, he would kind of huff and puff, but he was quite a cool person,” Robertson said. “I think what I liked most about him was that he was very direct, you know, he just told you what he thought and he didn’t hold back!
“If he had a strong opinion about something, he would just tell you and that was very refreshing. But he was very funny as well. He had quite a sort of cynical view on life, but he could be very, very entertaining.”
Robertson is set to co-host a collection of Eadie’s work, showing at Edinburgh Tradfest, but he wouldn’t be there if it wasn’t for his friend: “I knew him quite well and I’d worked on a project with him that never actually came to fruition, so when talking to [co-host] Jim Mackintosh and Douglas [Robertson], who were involved in organising the film festival, we just thought it was a great opportunity to mark Douglas’s contributions to Scottish film over the years.”
Born in 1943, Eadie worked as a journalist before turning to filmmaking, and he championed Scottish voices in his work all the way from the 1970s to the late 2010s – most importantly, the lives of his favourite poets.
“He obviously was a producer rather than a director, so you couldn’t say ‘that’s a Douglas Eadie film’ straight off, although quite often, you did kind of recognise him,” Robertson said.
“The film that he made about the poet William Soutar quite early on in his career, The Garden Beyond, is one of my favourites, it was a really nice film. Because he grew up in Perth, he had a liking for his poetry.
“He also produced a really great film about Hamish Henderson which was called Hamish which I thought was fantastic, that was kind of at the other end of his career.”
Robertson grew close to Eadie when working on a film together that unfortunately never came to fruition, but they stayed firm friends.
“I think we both shared a lot of common concerns – we were both really interested in Scottish literature and Scottish music – culture in its widest sense. I felt like he was a kindred spirit, put it that way.”
And Robertson’s passion for Scottish culture shines through in both his work and in conversation.
“I suppose I think the thing I feel is missing in our high school education system is for example, when we get kids to learn poetry or read poetry around Burns Night, that’s great that they get access to Robert Burns but sometimes it’s almost as if Burns is treated as though he’s the only poet that Scotland ever produced and that’s just so untrue,” Robertson said.
“I just wish we didn’t treat Burns as this kind of isolated incident in hundreds of years of Scottish culture. It would be good to put him into context, I think. Maybe that would be something I would say we should be more careful about. Giving a more rounded view of what is in our past history because it’s so rich.”
But would he want a change in the Scottish curriculum to cover these poets?
“I think for a lot of us of my sort of vintage, you know, I’m in my late 60s, we grew up in a time when a lot of Scottish culture and literature just wasn’t taught in schools and so we had to go and find it all out for ourselves.
“But in a sense, that’s a really good way of learning it because you really go looking for it and you become really quite sort of enthused, almost fanatical about finding out about stuff you really thought you should’ve been taught.
“On the other hand, most countries in the world, I think, do try to give their children a grounding in their own culture growing up, and I think Douglas Eadie felt that quite strongly as well, one of the things we agreed about was that each generation shouldn’t have to learn it all over again every time.”
And celebrating Scottish culture is what Edinburgh’s Tradfest is all about.
“I think the day celebrating Douglas’s work, in a wider sense, what we’re trying to do is to sort of highlight not just what he did for his entire career but the fact that there is so much good work being made in Scotland which quite often stays below the radar, a lot of people don’t know that it’s going on, and I suppose this whole folk festival and what we’re doing, in particular in the days [covering] Douglas, is to try and say, look at all the stuff that’s here if you just know about it.
“So hopefully maybe a few people will come along who don’t know much about his work and they’ll go off and explore and find out more.”
Edinburgh Tradfest runs from May 2-12. Remembering Douglas Eadie plays at Edinburgh Tradfest on Sunday, May 11
