Scotland on Screen: David Hayman

Every year, critics and programmers come to Edinburgh International Film Festival hoping to unearth exciting new filmmaking talent. But one of the discoveries of this year’s event might turn out to be a feature that premiered at the festival 35 years ago: Silent Scream, the directorial debut from Scottish actor David Hayman. It’s a mind-bending portrait of poet Larry Winters, a prisoner at the Barlinnie Special Unit, who died in his cell from an overdose in 1977. Despite bagging a Silver Bear at the 1990 Berlinale for Iain Glen’s towering performance as Winters, not to mention winning the inaugural Michael Powell Award at Edinburgh the same year, the film has been little seen since. “It just kind of disappeared,” admits Hayman. 

The Barlinnie Special Unit was a small, experimental unit within the sprawling Glasgow prison that aimed to rehabilitate prisoners through radical new approaches, which included arts therapy. Hayman, through his work at the Citizens’ Theatre, was a regular visitor and got to know Winters and other inmates like Jimmy Boyle and 'Toe' Elliot well. “I'd go once, twice, sometimes three times a week,” recalls Hayman. “We’d do improvisations and I'd perhaps take rehearsals in there, or work on whatever thing I was directing.”

Hayman would go on to play Boyle in 1981’s A Sense of Freedom, based on Boyle’s autobiography of the same name, and was offered to direct Winters’ story by producer Paddy Higson, another regular visitor to the Special Unit. “He was extremely clever,” Hayman says of Winters. “He was a poet, he was a musician, he just had the soul of an artist.” The actor recalls visiting Winters when he was in the middle of preparing to play Hamlet at the Citz. “Larry took me into his cell and sat me down and said, ‘OK, sir, let me tell you about Hamlet.’ And he told me, in the space of 20 minutes, all the ins and outs and complexities of that play. He gave me insights I could never have gotten in a professional theatre, and that I wasn't getting in rehearsals.”

So he helped with the performance? “Oh yes. He had a wonderful insight into tortured minds, because his own mind was tortured. So he had great empathy with Hamlet.”

Silent Scream is not your typical gritty prison drama. It’s a poetic, wildly uninhibited film with a jumbled chronology and mosaic editing; it looks more like Performance than Scum. “I wanted it to be different,” explains Hayman. “I wanted it to be radical because the nature of the man was radical.” The novice director deftly blends a patchwork of Winters’ memories with expressionistic fantasies and hallucinations, and weaves in psychedelic animations based on Winters’ writing. “You can't put all of those desperate elements together in a normal storytelling mode,” Hayman tells me. “You have to invent something else, another way of telling that story. It's a kaleidoscope of a man's life; that's what it is. It's a genuinely rich kaleidoscope of a tortured mind.”

Despite the awards, Silent Scream wasn’t particularly embraced by critics here in the UK. According to Hayman, it even split the Michael Powell panel. “The famous English critic Derek Malcolm was on the jury and I was told he didn’t particularly like the film, but he was outvoted by all the other members, who were European.” This story rings true to Hayman, as he reckons Silent Scream's sensibility is naturally more European. “I think Brits tend to like films with a beginning, a middle and an end. We aren’t as imaginative as those on the continent in finding metaphors for what we want to say.” 

The occasion for Silent Scream’s revival is to pay tribute to Higson, who died in April this year, aged 83. Hayman famously described Higson as “the mother of the Scottish film industry” when he presented her with her BAFTA Scotland lifetime achievement award in 2018. He uses similar words to describe her today. “She was a great mother figure to all of us. And if you look down the list of the people she's introduced to movies and kind of mentored and helped them become more professional, her contribution was staggering.”

Let’s consider that list. She helped shepherd the debut projects by Bill Forsyth (That Sinking Feeling and Gregory’s Girl), Peter Mullan (Orphans and The Magdalene Sisters), Michael Caton-Jones (TV show Brond) and Line of Duty writer Jed Mercurio (TV show Cardiac Arrest). Towards the end of her career, she was a mentor at Glasgow’s GMAC Film, where one of her protégés was Skinny fave James Price; his short, Dropping Off Michael, was one of Higson's final production credits.

The creative team she put together for Silent Scream was also made up of newbies. “I remember in her flat on St Vincent Cresent there was Andy Harris, the designer, who'd never done a feature, there was Willy Wands, a line producer who'd never line produced, there was me, and Paddy looked around at all us babies in the world of movies, rubbed her hands and said, ‘Oh, goody.’” As a producer and as a human being, Hayman describes her as a joy. “Paddy was the single most positive person I've ever worked with in the world of film or television. The word ‘no’ was not in her vocabulary, which is vital for a producer: you cannot cut off someone's creative juices.”

There was much outpouring of love from the Scottish industry when Higson passed away, but like Silent Scream, Hayman reckons she’s a bit underappreciated in her home nation. “I remember when I gave that BAFTA speech and afterwards everyone came up to me looking really surprised, saying, ‘Wow, Paddy did all that? Paddy was responsible for all those people’s development?’ It was as if it all happened in secret.” The team at EIFF might be surprised too, as coincidentally they’re screening another of Higson’s productions, the 1985 caper Restless Natives, but don’t seem to have made the connection. “I think they should do a whole season of Paddy Higson films,” suggests Hayman, “not just a one-off with Silent Scream.”

We couldn’t agree more.

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EIFF, 14-20 Aug

Silent Scream, 20 Aug, Cameo

Restless Natives, 18 Aug, Filmhouse

David Hayman (director, selected): The Near Room (1995), The Hawk (1993), Silent Scream (1990), Govan Ghost Story (TV, 1989)

Paddy Higson (selected): Dropping Off Michael (2015), The Magdalene Sisters (2002), Orphans (1998), Cardiac Arrest (TV, 1996-97), Silent Scream (1990), Brond (TV, 1987), The Girl in the Picture (1985), Restless Natives (1985), Comfort and Joy (1984), Living Apart Together (1982), Gregory's Girl (1981), That Sinking Feeling (1979)