Trump plans car park on paradise, says film legend

THE Local Hero director, Bill Forsyth, yesterday accused Donald Trump of "burying paradise under a car park" with his plans for a luxury golf resort.

The Scottish film-maker said yesterday he would happily write a film about the "machinations and cynicism" he saw behind the project.

Forsyth's classic film tells the story of an American oilman sent to a Scottish coastal village with the task of ruining it with a refinery. In the event he is seduced by the beauty of the village and the plan fails.

Speaking during a visit to the Edinburgh International Film Festival, the director said: "Donald Trump gets off a plane and wanders off to a Scottish beach, declares how beautiful it is and wants to destroy it."

He said he was not an environmental campaigner, though he had a ground-source heating system at his Loch Lomond home, with pipes drawing heat from the ground.

No fan of golf, he said he would be "quite against" the New York tycoon's plans for two championship golf courses, 950 holiday homes and 500 houses in the £1 billion project on the coast at Menie, Aberdeenshire.

Asked if he would consider making the development saga into a film, he said: "If someone made me an offer I would be quite happy to write it. I would go really dark, into the machinations behind it, and the cynicism behind something like that."

Describing Trump's project, he echoed the famous lyrics of Joni Mitchell's song Big Yellow Taxi. "He came to a paradise, and all he wanted to do was make it into a car park," he said.

Responding to Forsyth, Neil Hobday, project manager for Trump International Golf Links, said: "I think Bill Forsyth should come and speak to us first before making such misinformed and inaccurate statements. And he is very welcome to do so."

Local resident Molly Forbes, 85, is the mother of Michael Forbes, the campaigner against the project who has been compared in the press to Local Hero's beach-dweller, Ben Knox.

Mr Forbes owns land on the site of the planned development and has resisted all efforts to persuade him to sell it to Trump. Ms Forbes said: "When I moved here, I called it Paradise. This is Paradise, and Trump has just come and spoiled it. He should just go back home."

Forsyth, a legendary but reclusive figure in the Scottish film world, also revealed yesterday that Gregory's Girl, his hit comedy made for less than £200,000 in 1981, was still generating revenues of up to about £50,000 a year. He takes a percentage of the figure as writer and director.

"Gregory's Girl was the most successful movie, because it made 1,000 per cent of its original cost," he said.

Regular sales of TV rights in America or Europe bring in small but steady sums, he said – though he was recently paid just 14 cents for his share from a screening in Belgium.

Local Hero, by contrast, a bigger production in 1983 with a cast including Burt Lancaster, Peter Riegert, Jenny Seagrove and Peter Capaldi, took 15-20 years before any revenues came back, he said.

His first film was That Sinking Feeling, from 1970, which remains his favourite. He has not made a film in ten years since Gregory's Two Girls, which flopped.

Two years of controversy

DONALD Trump's plans to build "the best golf course in the world" in a £1 billion development project at Menie, Aberdeenshire have been mired in controversy since being announced in April 2007.

The plan, for two golf courses with nearly 1,500 housing units, was rejected by Aberdeenshire council, citing issues regarding wildlife, before being called in and approved by the Scottish Government.

Conservationists were particularly outraged that ministers allow the project to encroach on the Foveran links, a system of naturally shifting sand dunes, designated a site of special scientific interest by the European Union.

In 2005, a planned space film where the main cast live on a rickety space station for six months fell through because Hugh Grant was not available to star. Another project, about eastern Europeans in Britain, fell behind the times because of delays.

Mr Forsyth is developing a new film, Exile, with the Wanted producer and his friend, Iain Smith. It is not a comedy, but details have been kept secret.

Critics praise Forsyth's comedies for their gentle, mystical style. But in Gregory's Two Girls, his most political film, he opted for sharper satire, of the kind that could be turned on Trump's development.

The villain is a New Labour businessman who returns home to Scotland, ostensibly with an electronics company, but actually selling torture equipment.

Jonny Murray, a lecturer on film and visual culture at the Edinburgh College of Art, who interviewed Forsyth for the festival and is writing a book on his films, said: "I don't think the quality of the work has been surpassed by another Scottish film-maker, and his example creates a lot of confidence in the idea that feature films can be made in and about Scotland."