Interview: Douglas Rae - Somewhere man

• Picture: TSPL

"I've never had a stalker before," chuckles the Scottish film producer. "It was quite remarkable". Perhaps that's because said stalker was Turner Prize-nominated artist Sam Taylor-Wood, who cornered Rae at a charity do – at Downing Street of all places – and confessed she had been tracking him because she wanted to direct Nowhere Boy, his forthcoming biopic of the young John Lennon (a gig she subsequently won). "She'd been offered about 100 scripts to read and Harvey Weinstein had started talking seriously to her about doing a movie, but she'd turned everything down. Then Joe Wright (the director of Atonement] gave her this."

All of which says a lot about Rae's elevated position in the film community. Nostalgia junkies may remember him best as Dougie Ray, presenter of 1970s children's TV show Magpie, but over the years he's quietly become a key figure in the British film and television industry. Ecosse Films, the independent production company he founded 21 years ago last month, has been a genuine success story, responsible for generating international box-office hits, such as Mrs Brown and the $150 million-grossing The Water Horse, as well as producing successful TV shows like Monarch of the Glen and Mistresses. With 50 film and TV projects at a script stage of development, only the studio-owned Working Title surpasses it.

"Effectively, Ecosse is an ideas factory," explains Rae. "We operate out of Parson's Green in London with about 15 people. We have a team on the film side and a team on the television side, and they're all bright, motivated young people who are inspired by coming up with good ideas." They receive on average 50 unsolicited scripts a week, though it's rare they'll use any of them. Everything tends to be generated in-house. Usually we have meetings every week with writers, and it's usually through talking with them that a spark is generated."

Nowhere Boy is a case in point. With the 70th anniversary of John Lennon's birth coming up next year, Rae's team asked themselves, "What's the Lennon story that hasn't been told?", then hired Matt Greenhalgh, the Bafta-winning screenwriter of Control, to write a film about his complex, troubled upbringing. The resulting script topped the agency list of best screenplays doing the rounds in London. "Directors like Danny Boyle were aware of it, so we were starting to get interest from that calibre of director – and then Sam came on the scene."

As Ecosse operates mainly on budgets of 10 million or less, it makes sense to take a chance on a new director such as Taylor-Wood. Keeping costs down is one way to protect the integrity of the script. "We've done nine films now and by far the best experiences have been when we've had final cut and have sourced financing independently," says Rae. "The moment you go to a studio it becomes a studio picture, and even though you're the producer, you're not really." That happened on Rae's second film, Charlotte Gray, which tanked at the box office. The experience didn't sour him on the studios, though. Ecosse is currently developing a "darker" version of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island. Budgeted at 20m, the plan is to do one film, "like a pilot", and then two together "to create a brand".

"That's a studio picture because it's expensive, but we're trying to finance it in a way that we can hold on to the rights," reveals Rae. "It's set for a November shoot in Australia because of the tax breaks, but we need to pre-sell it, and to pre-sell it everybody asks: 'Who's in it? Have you got Robert Downey jnr?"

And does he?

Rae laughs. "We've got a wish list. Long John Silver is the iconic role and there are great people out there like Robert Downey jnr. But goodness knows what he costs now. But we're trying to operate on a global scale, rather than just a domestic British scale. If you want to make a decent film, you need to be able to sell around the world, not just to the British market."

It's an ambitious outlook, but then Rae is an ambitious person. Born and raised in Edinburgh, he began as a trainee reporter aged 16, was Britain's youngest newspaper editor at 17 (The Kirriemuir Herald in Angus) and went on to work as a reporter for the Daily Mail, covering the Beatles at Dundee's Caird Hall ("you couldn't hear them, but it was pulsating with energy") and interviewing Bob Dylan when he played Edinburgh after going electric. "I went into the dressing room and there was a fug of smoke, all sorts of 'funny' cigarettes were being smoked," beams Rae.

The Magpie job came about almost by default after doing spot of television reporting on STV. He had never thought of himself as a presenter, but it proved a useful motivation for his subsequent career trajectory. "If you've done children's programmes for five years you either leave or go mad." Ecosse evolved directly from producing and directing a documentary series about India for the still-fledgling Channel 4. "It was a huge gamble," he says. "I'd just got married and had a baby on the way, but because Channel 4 wouldn't deal with an individual, I had to form a company". He wanted to call it "Scottish Films", but was told by Companies House that naming something after a country required permission from the Queen – so he went back the next day and used the French version instead.

Though Ecosse scored early successes producing arts programmes, it was its debut film, Mrs Brown, starring Billy Connolly and Judi Dench, that put it on the map. Initially conceived for TV, Rae persuaded Harvey Weinstein, who had just done Pulp Fiction and The English Patient, to take a look at it. "He said, 'This is an amazing movie, I want to run with it'. It's the sort of thing you can't quite believe is happening. And then we were at the Oscars with Judi!"

Mrs Brown also gave Ecosse the confidence to take risks. Casting American actress Anne Hathaway as Jane Austen in Becoming Jane helped to make it the highest-grossing independent movie of 2006, but daring to make a film version of Brideshead Revisited last year resulted in a box-office-destroying critical savaging. Laughs Rae: "It was almost like, 'How dare you make something that can't be bettered?' But if you thought that way you'd never do anything. You'd never do Shakespeare again, or Dickens or Bront."

As it happens, Rae is doing Bront next. Ecosse has a new version of Wuthering Heights scheduled to start shooting in the Borders in the spring. Also due to go into production next year is Decoy Bride, a Scottish-set romantic comedy starring David Tennant and Kelly Macdonald about a bitchy American actress who comes over to Scotland to get married, Madonna-style, in a glitzy castle.

"The title kind of says it all, really," says Rae. "She doesn't want the hassle of the paparazzi chasing her, so she hires a decoy. Her boyfriend, who is played by David Tenant, falls for the decoy. It's a fairytale. Kelly Macdonald is going to play the Scottish decoy."

With all these projects, and Nowhere Boy just one of three films set for release in the coming months (cult novel adaptation Pelican Blood and medieval horror film Black Death are the others), it's clear Ecosse has found a way to negotiate the "bloody tough" boom-bust fortunes of British film production. In this, Rae reckons he learned a valuable lesson from Judi Dench on his first day on Mrs Brown. "She just showed tremendous respect to everybody, which just seemed to me to be the way to do things. You can be a screamer – but what's the point of that? I prefer operating through stealth."

Nowhere Boy is on general release from 26 December.