Frantic rushes - Mark Cousins on his 4-week film

MARK COUSINS was thrilled at the chance to make films with Tilda Swinton and Irvine Welsh. Trouble was, he only had four weeks to do it

AT THE END OF 2007, PRODUCERS Nick Higgins and Noe Mendelle asked me if I would get involved with a film they were making to celebrate 60 years of the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights. They were looking for ten directors to tell ten short human rights stories about Scotland today.

I had reservations. For more than a decade now I have been arguing against documentary being the issue wing of the film world. In the mid-1990s, Kevin Macdonald and I did a book for Faber & Faber, called Imagining Reality, which passionately argued that non-fiction film is as creative as fiction. Though the best non-fiction films I know – mostly made in Japan by little-known masters such as Shinsuke Ogawa and Noriaki Tsuchimoto – are profoundly engaged with human rights, too many documentaries sermonise or are simply vehicles for information. Didn't Higgins and Mendelle's film risk falling into the same boring trap?

No. Mendelle's Edinburgh College of Art-based Scottish Documentary Institute had consistently championed the cinematic and inventive over the pedagogic. She and Higgins were talking as if their human rights film, which they wanted to call The New Ten Commandments, should be the same. So I started thinking, and an idea formed.

A year previously, Tilda Swinton's eight-year-old son, Xavier, had asked his mum what people dreamed about before the movies were invented. She loved the question and wrote a letter to him, answering it. I loved her answer and wanted to respond, but as I don't have an eight-year-old son, I wrote to my eight-year-old self. What if Tilda and I co-directed a very simple wee film in which each reads our letter? I asked her if she'd be on for the idea. Very much so, came the reply. I asked Higgins and Mendelle if such a lyrical little film would fit into their portmanteau one. They said yes. Tilda and I wanted it to be the 8½th Human Right: The Right to Cinema but our producers perhaps thought that that was too playful, so it became The Right to Freedom of Thought. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights talks of the freedom to worship. Our letters are about worshipping a wide range of world movies and feeling bullied by Hollywood blockbusters. So it fits.

A few weeks later, I was in Dublin working with Irvine Welsh on The Man Who Walks, his directorial debut based on the great novel by Alan Warner. About a year previously, Irvine had suggested he and I co-direct a feature documentary on Kenny Richey, the Scot freed after being on death row in Ohio for more than 20 years. But after I left Dublin, on a windy train station at Prestwick Airport, it struck me that we could make an inventive little film about Richey's appalling incarceration for The New Ten Commandments. Instead of doing something current affairsy – yuck – we could do a montage of images and sounds from the last two decades of Scottish life, to conjure the years that Richey had missed. I texted the idea to Irvine. "F***ing brilliant, let's do it," was his reply. We would call the piece Three Songs for Kenny Richey after a great Soviet montage film, Three Songs for Lenin. Again, Higgins and Mendelle liked the idea.

Great. Except Tilda had just won an Oscar and was the busiest woman in the world, and Irvine produces books like hot dinners and so is always travelling, and I was off to China for two weeks and then would be in Cannes from early May, which meant that we had to get two films shot and made in April, as the movie was to play at the Edinburgh International Film Festival in June! A daunting double dash.

What would be the first step? Meeting Richey. Irvine got his mobile number from a mutual friend and he and I went to meet him at the Dickens pub in Dalry. We were both nervous. We drank beer. Kenny was not there. We drank more beer. Then he arrived, a brooding, angry, then gentle man who tested us with his tar-black humour. We told him our idea. He seemed distracted. He told us he had cancer. We talked about karaoke. His favourite song is Honey by Bobby Goldsboro. And then, in Dickens pub, on a boozy, windy afternoon, Kenny Richey, Irvine Welsh and I sang Honey. "See the trees, how big they grow." Our bonding moment. Kenny gave us the go-ahead.

Cut to the other film. How would Tilda and I shoot our letters? Where? We needed to talk. She invited me to Colonsay, where she was staying. It took me a day to get there and when I did, it was shrouded in mist. Tilda and her kids were waiting on the pier.

That night we talked about our wee movie, Tilda stretched out on a sofa. She was wearing big fluffy slippers, the kind my granny used to buy in Dunnes. I loved this. A fashion icon in fluffy slippers. I asked if I could film her just like that. She said yes. We arranged the shoot for a few weeks hence.

Back with the Kenny film, we began to gather footage – the poll tax, Dunblane, sporting successes, Piper Alpha. Our plan was to use pop songs – Movin' on Up by Primal Scream, something by The Associates? – but then our editor Timo mentioned that he had worked with Clint Mansell, formerly of Pop will Eat Itself, who wrote the brilliant scores for the movies Requiem for a Dream and Pi.

We asked Mansell if he would write a "sweet, sour then angry" score for us and, because he admires Irvine's writing so much, he said yes. It arrived a few weeks later and, to be honest, it blew us away. Timo started to edit. The pictures of Scottish life brooded and raged against Mansell's music. Our short film began to take on the darkness of Richey himself.

We shot the Tilda film over two sunny days in Nairn. We filmed in her house, played with her children, raved about movies, planned a passionate, surreal film festival that we hope will happen in August, and had a great time. We cut our footage to Jim Sutherland's lovely score, written especially for The New Ten Commandments, and the result was 20 minutes. Twice as long as it needed to be. Our producers said we had to cut it, which we did.

When we asked if we could also show the 20-minute version in festivals, because it is about cinema, they said no. We are still not convinced by their reasons. We have made a little manifesto for vivid, wondrous cinema, and think it would be a shame not to show it in its longer length.

There have been other problems. Some of them relate to the dash of this production, but also to its unusualness. Ours are two of ten short films that will be combined into a whole. The idea of the collective is exciting, but we have not seen the other eight pieces so it is difficult to know how the mood and tone of our two films (one lyrical, one angry) will fit into the film overall. I'm sure we will agree with the politics of the other films, but what if we don't? What if we hate the view of human life one or more of them provides? It's a strange feeling. Like recording a vocal that will be mixed with others to make a song.

It will be strange, indeed, to sit in Edinburgh's Filmhouse with Irvine and Kenny and watch our attempt at a tribute to him unspool on the big screen, Mansell's music raging. It will be odd, too, to watch Tilda and me reading love letters to the movies and get upset.

So the last month has been a real dash with doubts, but both added to the adrenalin rush. Decision-making at speed is exhilarating. Our films would not have been better with more time. Along the way I've met one of the most powerful personalities I've ever come across, Kenny; I've worked with two great composers; Tilda and I have planned lots of other projects, Irvine has been razor sharp as always and I've felt creatively more stimulated than I've done in years.

Tilda wrote to her son: "Cinema is a state and, like all great states, it's a state of mind." I can't wait to see what sort of cinematic state Scotland will appear to be in The New Ten Commandments.

• The New Ten Commandments screens today at Filmhouse, 1:45pm, as part of the 62nd Edinburgh International Film Festival.