Richard Jobson on way to Afghanistan for film

Published on Saturday 20 February 2010 19:29

SCOTTISH film director Richard Jobson heads to Afghanistan this week to research his new war film Into The Valley, which he will shoot later this year on a budget of £500,000.

With two thirds of his funding already in place from private investors, Jobson is confident the film can make an impact.

Danfung Dennis, a London-based photojournalist who has been embedded with US marines making a war documentary, will shoot the film and is escorting the Scottish filmmaker in and around the Afghan capital, Kabul.

Into The Valley tells the story of Scottish soldiers returning home after an ugly incident in Afghanistan. It will be shot mainly in Fife but with locations in Morocco substituting for Helmand.

The director insists his film, anti-war but not "anti-soldier", could outdo many better-funded films which he describes as "disappointing" and "patronising".

His short film The Journey, a graphic attack on people-trafficking with narration by Emma Thompson, receives its first big screen showing at Glasgow Film Festival next week.

That cost "nothing" to make, Jobson says, and with modern high-definition cameras he plans to repeat the exercise, producing Into The Valley on a shoestring.

The new film will feature actor Dougray Scott, who starred in Jobson's previous movie, New Town Killers, as a wealthy Edinburgh banker hunting poorer citizens of the city for sport. Jobson also hopes to persuade Thompson to take a small role.

The plot centres on an incident in Afghanistan where a young soldier from the east of Scotland who joined the army for the pay packet faces a young boy from northern Pakistan who is being paid five dollars to kill him.

Growing up in Fife, Jobson knew young men who joined the British Army, then as now, for economic reasons.

"A lot of those young boys that I've met and interviewed have been entirely lucid and articulate and smart in their own way," he says. "They wanted a job. They didn't want to be another statistic."

Jobson is outspoken about big-budget war films such as Brian de Palma's 2007 Iraq movie Redacted, which he calls "deeply patronising". The Battle For Haditha by British director Nick Broomfield "made all the young soldiers look like pathological murderers", he says.

He also criticises The Hurt Locker, which won nine Oscar nominations, as written "by somebody who clearly had never been near a war zone" – although the story's original writer was a war correspondent who reported on bomb squads.

Filmmaker and writer Mark Cousins believes it is possible to make a war film for 500,000. Alexandra, a stunning Russian account of a grandmother visiting her son on the front lines in Chechnya, was made for less, he says. "The danger of making a big-budget war film is that you get away from the grass roots and the intimate story."