James Price on the films that influenced Dog Days

We knew James Price was a formidable writer-director thanks to short films like Boys Night, his bittersweet drama in which a young teen escorts his drunk dad home on an odyssey across Glasgow after a wild night out, and Spiral, his spiky spin on Groundhog Day set in and around a council flat in Springburn. We didn’t quite realise, however, that his talents extended to turning the cheezy dance track Set You Free by N-Trance into a heartbreaking anthem.

That’s just one of the magic tricks he pulls off in Dog Days, his hugely entertaining and deeply moving new BBC drama which will be released in two formats – a six-episode series, each running ten to 13-minutes, released on iPlayer, and a 60-minute film, which screened at Glasgow Film Festival in March and will be broadcast on BBC Scotland this summer.

The story follows Zoso (Conor McCarron), a young guy from Glasgow who’s down on his luck and sleeping rough in Dundee so he can be closer to his daughter, who’s recently moved to the city with her mother. Set over a week, the show follows Zoso on several adventures, which include becoming an accidental viral sensation while busking with a stolen guitar and beginning a tentative flirtation with Grace (Lois Chimimba), a young woman who teaches at the local college. He also spends a lot of time hanging out with various colourful characters who're trying to make their way in hardscrabble Dundee. 

It’s a cracking watch, reminiscent of the films of Peter Mullan, Alan Clarke and the early work of Martin Scorsese (we didn't dub Price the Springburn Scorsese for nothing), but there’s also a streak of openhearted romanticism to Dog Days that suggests Nancy Meyers as much as Mean Streets. We sat down with Price to get the lowdown on a few more films that influenced Dog Days.

Thief (Michael Mann, 1980)

“A big part of my love for Michal Mann is his visual aesthetic. It's something that's not done very often in Scotland. All my big conversations with funders here are about the themes and issues and stuff, and I'm always like, 'OK, I'll make you your sad, gritty movies but I want to inject them with a real American style’; I just want to make them more entertaining and more visually interesting.

“Cities in Scotland do look really cinematic, and I don't think enough people have come close yet to capturing that. The only film I can think of recently is Alia Ghafar's short SCUZZ. Alia shot at a lot of places in Glasgow I wanted to shoot at – so I was raging, actually, when I saw it – but I thought she did an amazing job of making Glasgow look cinematic; I just think we need more of that here. We can tell local stories but we should aim to shoot them with a bit of flair, you know?”

Just a Boy’s Game (John Mackenzie, 1979)

“Just a Boy's Game is a masterpiece. I think it might be the best film on Glasgow gang culture, and it's really underrated. But what I love about it is it's a Play for Today film so it's from a time when the BBC was really taking chances and being quite gutsy. That was something that I was passionate about trying to emulate with Dog Days. So like those Play for Today films, I was trying to push the envelope and make it as authentic and uncomfortable as possible, as well as being entertaining.

“Me and my director of photography, Gavin [Hopkins], really fought for an aspect ratio that's not been shown on the BBC before. We had loads of wanky artistic reasons for using it, but my more immature reason is that it's really close to the aspect ratio on Play for Today films like Scum and Just a Boy’s Game. I just loved the idea of having that feel from the jump. I love the stuff the BBC does now, of course – Guilt and all that –but given this was quite low budget they gave us a chance to think outside the box, and I wanted to go back to those Play to Today films, so Dog Days, in a way, is a total love letter to Just a Boy’s Game and its writer, Peter McDougall.”

The Beat That My Heart Skipped (Jacques Audiard, 2005)

“I think The Beat That My Heart Skipped is such a striking film, and I really love its central idea of a guy being caught between worlds. He’s caught up in all these dark, shady dealings and then at the same time, he’s an amazing musical artist who wants to escape this life through his music. I didn't want to watch Audiard's film on the run-up to Dog Days because I was scared it would influence me too much. But I remember it being in my head quite a lot, so I was definitely pinching stuff from it from memory.

“To be honest, if they ever let us make a follow-up to Dog Days, it would go even further into being similar to The Beat That My Heart Skips in terms of it following a guy who's caught up in a cycle of revenge.”

Heaven Knows What (Josh Safdie, Benny Safdie, 2014)

“What I took from Heaven Knows What was having characters that feel very real. I wanted to capture a real camaraderie between the people that exist in a subculture like homelessness where everybody is out looking out for each other.

“But I also wanted to make Dog Days the anti-Heaven Knows What as well, in that I think sometimes with these movies that deal with subjects like homelessness and addiction, they can be punishing. It was important to me that I didn't make a show that was solely about homelessness – I didn't want the story to be weighed down by that.

“The Safdies were also a big influence when I was writing episodically for the iPlayer version. It was always in my head that people were gonna binge this and what the Safdie Brothers are really great at is taking you to a high point of tension and then just completely undercutting it. They do that really masterfully where their work feels almost episodic, like Good Times, you could release that as a bunch of episodes and it would still work. So that was always in my head, having that ebb and flow."

Good Will Hunting (Gus Van Sant, 1998)

“The influence of Good Will Hunting on Dog Days might not be obvious at first, but once you see it you won't be able to unsee it, especially in the iPlayer version where a couple of scenes are very close to Good Will Hunting. Both are about guys who are too scared to go after the world they want; they feel unworthy, are holding themselves back and all the self-sabotage that comes with that.

“We weren't sure what kind of budget level we were gonna get when we were writing Dog Days and originally it included a Robin Williams-type mentor figure, but then we had to scale things back and he got amalgamated into the Grace character. But the structure of Good Will Hunting was always in my head as a blueprint to refer back to. Even in the scene where Connor and Grace have an argument outside, I couldn't help but shake the scene between Minnie Driver and Matt Damon where they have their big blowout. I wanted to make a version of that that was more visceral."

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Dog Days is streaming in episode form on BBC iPlayer and will be broadcast on BBC Scotland in feature form later in 2023. 

Filmography (selected): Dog Days (2023), Skint (2022), Infectious Nihilism and Small Metallic Pieces of Hope (2021), Zopa - Diamonds Into Dust (2021), Spiral (2019), Boys Night (2019), Concrete & Flowers (2019), CHIBBED (2017), Dropping Off Michael (2015, writer)

Follow James Price on Instagram @priceyfilms