Talking pictures

Behind the Edinburgh International Film Festival programme announced this week is a team of self-confessed geeks who spend every waking hour watching movies – and then dream about them. ANDREW EATON has the script.

INTERIOR: THE CAFÉ AT THE Filmhouse, Lothian Road, Edinburgh, late April, 2008. A woman in a well-worn T-shirt is fidgeting, talking excitedly. She is HANNAH MCGILL, director of the Edinburgh International Film Festival, and she is discussing FAINTHEART, the festival's closing film.

HANNAH: "I haven't yet found a polite word for geek but I think this is a really geek-friendly festival this year. I'm interested in engaging with those people we know are our most loyal customers, those people who spend their lives online looking up obscure information about cult films. They know more about the films we show than we do half the time. And Faintheart is a film about obsessives, geeks, people who live their lives around little elements of culture that they're obsessed with, in this case Viking battle re-enactments and Star Trek. It's a lovely film, very sweet, very funny. Braveheart is not directly referenced but there's a sort of reference to ideas about heroism as they are in movies and how they are in real life."

CUT TO: Slightly later. DIANE HENDERSON, deputy artistic director, and NIALL FULTON, submissions programmer, illustrate their own geekiness by getting very excited about one of the festival's 2008 guests, special effects legend RAY HARRYHAUSEN.

DIANE: "I've become a bit of an old man junkie, I think. I was lucky enough to look after (director and cinematographer] Albert Maysles some years ago and then more recently I spent a lot of time with Arthur Penn. They're so interesting, guys who have been in the business for 50 years! It's just the best. I fell in love with Albert and a year later with Arthur, and it turns out they're mates so I was able to say, 'send Albert my love!' So I'm so looking forward to Ray Harryhausen. I just think he's a God, frankly. We're screening Jason and the Argonauts as a sort of homage to him – it's so brilliant to see those films you watched growing up – and then he'll do one of the In Person events. I think people should beat the door down to hear him speak, I really do."

NIALL: "I'm another one of the generation who grew up with Jason and the Argonauts embedded in my mind. It's just lovely to see him still at it and have a chance to celebrate someone like that."

DIANE: "When he said yes we literally screamed. It often happens. I'll usually get the e-mail, I'll scream and can't speak and everyone rushes out of the other offices to find out who we've got. Everyone gets really excited, then you all go, don't tell anyone! I spoke to Tony Dalton, his co-author, who's a sort of go-between for Ray, and he said, 'Diane, we thought we might bring some of the models'. I was going, 'Oh my God! What are you bringing?' He said, 'how about the skeleton?' I was on the phone, saying (to people in the office], 'he's bringing the SKELETON!' He said, 'you're quite excited aren't you?' And I said, 'YES … M … M … Medusa?' He said, 'yeah we can bring the Medusa'. I nearly fell off my seat. I know they're all going to be like that size (indicates size of her own hand] but I won't be disappointed."

CUT TO: Slightly earlier. HANNAH and DIANE are discussing how the festival is programmed.

HANNAH: "You find you get things done by personal contact. The more people you know, the more you can just ring someone instead of going through 6,000 publicists."

DIANE: "This year we have Danny Huston (actor son of director John Huston] on the jury. Apparently in their summer house in the 1960s there was always an EIFF poster and the Huston children grew up seeing this. And Danny always wanted to come to Edinburgh. So it's so nice to actually bring him. For years our strapline was "the only festival worth a damn", which John Huston had equipped us with."

HANNAH: "Sometimes you get handed things, or you meet someone who says, 'I know this guy you should get in touch with'. Or you get inspired by one film to think about connections with another. Under the Radar (the festival's new section devoted to "cult-worthy, midnight movie" style films] came out of me meeting a director at a bus stop at Sundance (the film festival]. I was sheltering from a terrible blizzard. This guy was a volunteer for the festival and asked me if I needed any help. I got talking to him and he started telling me about this film he'd made, Blood Car, about a carnivorous vehicle. I said I really wanted to see it, he sent it to me, and I thought, I don't know where to put this in a festival but I really want to show it. So I actually invented a new festival section because of this one dude that I'd met by pure chance because of a blizzard at a bus stop."

DIANE: "Sometimes you wake up in the middle of the night thinking, I just had an epiphany! Let's do that! You don't switch off."

HANNAH: "I literally programme the festival again every night in my sleep. You wake up and think, that film's got to go there and that director's going to go there. Then you realise, I dreamed all of that, those films aren't real."

DIANE: "They just haven't been made yet! Well, you've got to think ahead."

HANNAH: "The most lovely things can happen. We had one submission, The Trail of the Screaming Forehead, which was very much inspired by Ray Harryhausen. And we thought, we should get Ray Harryhausen, he's still going. The idea of doing a Shirley Clarke retrospective literally happened with me and Niall sitting in front of a computer together and by chance looking up this woman, and thinking, bloody hell this is amazing, let's do this. And then Niall took it away and ran with it because he was very into her."

CUT TO: NIALL waxes lyrical about Shirley Clarke, the influential American filmmaker and subject of this year's retrospective.

NIALL: "Shirley Clarke is such a colourful, fascinating character. We wanted to present a picture of her that wasn't just the highlights of a great career but something that allowed you to feel like you'd met her, like you'd known her. And we have assembled, without a doubt, the most comprehensive retrospective of her work that there has ever been on the planet. I'm very proud of that and very excited about it. There were months of extensive research, a massive undertaking by James Rice (head of screenings], sourcing prints – right down to home movies by a man who lived at the Chelsea Hotel at the same time as her and filmed her at a party. That's a great clip, actually; she's like a rock star, with a huge top hat on and a feather boa, yet she delivers this academic speech about women in film. There's a very rare documentary that was part of the French television series Filmmakers of our Time, and it's basically Clark holding court with a group of students and disciples, and peppered amongst it are people like Yoko Ono."

MONTAGE: HANNAH, DIANE, NIALL, plus JAMES RICE and documentary programmer JENNY LEASK choose scenes to look out for at this year's festival.

HANNAH: "It would definitely be the trepanation scene in Strange Girls. You know, where you drill a hole in someone's head? Strange Girls has these two identical twin sisters who are obsessed with pornography and trepanation. There are two scenes in the festival that I had to avert my eyes from. One is from a film called Mum and Dad, and it's so disgusting that I can't even tell you what it is, and the other is the head-drilling. I'll be interested to see the reaction."

JENNY: "Encounters at the End of the World, the new Werner Herzog film (a documentary about the Antarctic], has the best penguin scene you're going to see in a film ever. Forget tap-dancing Happy Feet penguins. He discovers this penguin who is on its own, away from the rest of the penguins, and goes off into the wilderness by itself to certain death. All the penguin experts have been told they shouldn't try to get it to go back because it's just on some kind of mission to self-destroy. It's very poignant, this penguin waddling off into the distance. My description just doesn't do it justice at all. You need the mournful Herzog voiceover."

DIANE: "There are some truly funny moments in Trail of the Screaming Forehead, like when the forehead first attacks. Basically it's a spoof of old B-movies, which focuses on a group of brain surgeons. There are some rogue foreheads that come from outer space that attach themselves to people's heads, thus rendering them zombie-like. It's so ridiculous, but it looks beautiful."

JAMES: "There are so many moments that I think are fantastic, but one that springs to mind is in Fujian Blue, a new Chinese film by a young director called Robin Weng – it's beautifully shot, gorgeous cinematography, and it's about these young people who are trying to come to Britain. At the end, without wanting to give too much away, it becomes something very much unlike what had gone before – it moves from being very crisp, formal and elegant to a documentary, handheld-camera style. It's difficult to describe in a few words but it's one of the most affecting things I've seen all year."

NIALL: "I'm a huge fan of Klaus Kinski and we have a remarkable film this year, Jesus Christ Saviour, which is a record of a one-man show Kinski performed on stage in 1971, his rendition of the New Testament. The audience are hostile from the outset and Kinski is alternating between his acting persona and his real persona because of the heckling, but the line between the character and the person becomes blurred. The beauty of the film is that the footage jumps in close on his face and there are magical moments where you can see this performer struggling to deliver a text that he clearly feels passionate about, under immeasurable pressure from the audience."

CUT TO: HANNAH, DIANE and NIALL discussing moving the Film Festival from August to June for the first time.

HANNAH: "We'd talked for a long time about changing the dates of the festival, but it was still always going to be a bit of a leap into the dark. As much research as you do, you don't really know what it's going to be like until you do it. The process of putting a festival together is, at the best of times, long and complicated and fraught with difficulties and disappointments, so doing all of that to a completely different calendar, and losing two months of the whole process, was extremely challenging. Personally I was pretty nervous. You just don't know if people are going to turn round and say, 'June doesn't work for us'. Obviously we'd consulted extensively with film distributors and other festivals and producers, to get their input, but ultimately the message tends to come back – 'try it, it'll probably be great'. But we had a very supportive response from the audience and once you've had people saying yes, we'll absolutely come, yes, we'll take time off work, which we did, overwhelmingly, it puts you in a position where you can be quite confident that if you build it, they will come.

"And what we found is that actually, it works much better than we expected in terms of fitting in with distributors' plans, taking away the direct competition there was between us and, say, the London Film Festival. It shifts your relationship with other festivals, obviously, but in fact we ended up with far too many films. We got more submissions than in previous years by quite a lot, we programmed more than we normally would and we had to turn down stuff that we just didn't have room for."

DIANE: "We feel genuinely positive about it. It's opened up different venues to us, like the Traverse. And the Traverse is the home of new writing in Scotland, we're about promoting that new writing when it moves on to a different stage, so there's this little tie-in which we couldn't have had before. We're getting out into the city a lot more."

NIALL: "I think the move to June is going to be great for us. I'm very excited about the programme in general. I think it's one of the best programmes we've had in years. "

HANNAH: "Probably the biggest pressure on us was just psychologically. It's quite difficult to shift a mindset that's been in place for 61 years. It required taking on more staff earlier than we would have done. And we went from one festival directly into planning the next one, so it all had to move very fast. So sustaining your energy levels is a challenge. But then it always was. Ultimately it just compressed everyone's efforts."

• The Scotsman is the official media partner for the Edinburgh International Film Festival, which runs from 18-29 June. The full programme, free with today's paper, can also be found at www.edfilmfest.org.uk