FROM HERO TO ZERO COVER STORY COVER STORY LOCAL HERO MADE THE

0 Comments | Sunday Herald, The, Feb 17, 2008

So, how many people actually live here?

"A few. Quite a few" Ten?

"No, not 10, maybe seven, if that. The disadvantage of the film [Local Hero] is that it hasn't done much good for the village. You don't have people, and if you don't have people you don't have a community . . . You have people that come here from outside and they change things too." And the inn being shut at the moment?

"It doesn't help. Well, I'd better go, it's freezing." Thankfully, Baden Gibson, who I eventually meet in Fraserburgh, can talk for Scotland. Pennan's harbourmaster since 1970, he still goes lobster fishing in the bay. He makes his own creels as his father and grandfather did before him. He can trace his ancestors in the village back to 1680 and considers it home. Now 57, he was 32 when the Local Hero bandwagon rolled into town.

"It was something completely new to us, completely unexpected, " he says. The first meeting between film crew and villagers took place in the Pennan Inn during the winter of 1982, and was conducted in candlelight due to a power cut. Filming began in May of the same year. Gibson had two roles in the film. His first was to play "a drunk at a ceilidh", where he had to dance along to live music and nurse a can of Export through several exhausting takes. He was also required to be out on his trawler during filming, thanks to his expert local knowledge of the bay. "You don't see me on the boat, " he says. "They asked me to lie down on the floor while they were filming because I was only on the boat for insurance purposes." It wasn't until he saw an advance screening of the film in Peterhead the following year that he began to distinguish cast and crew. "I'd seen Peter Riegert in the village but I didn't speak to him because I didn't know who he was, " he says. "Only later did I realise he was the star and not just a worker on the set. It was the same with Peter Capaldi because I hadn't seen him in anything before, but they were all really nice folk." Movie buffs and curious tourists had already begun visiting the village during filming, but it was five years after Local Hero's release, in 1988 following its broadcast on television that people started arriving in numbers. "It was shown at the start of winter, " Gibson remembers. "You couldn't get moving in Pennan that December because of the amount of people coming down the hill. It was great. People thought the film had just been made and we had to explain that it was filmed in 1982. I'll never forget that year because I could hardly get a drink in the pub." He says he was paid GBP80 for the hire of his boat by the film's producers. "Some folk say that we were all taken advantage of by the film company but really, for me, it was fine. We weren't chosen as extras because of our beauty we were simply in the right place during filming." Along with the positives, Gibson outlines some negatives of the film's legacy. Property prices have risen in accordance with the village's fame, and there is a certain dogma to how buildings are presented. Although many of the buildings were red sandstone in the past, the image of whitewashed walls deliberately dirtied during filming and then repainted is now all-important.