Paul Sng's Irvine Welsh: Reality Is Not Enough documentary shows 'another side' to author and features Bradford's Dean Cavanagh
A new documentary about Irvine Welsh sheds new light on the Scottish author. Director Paul Sng talks to John Blow about showing a different side to the man behind Trainspotting.
Paul Sng’s new documentary begins with Irvine Welsh reciting words from his hit 1993 novel Trainspotting.
"We start off with high hopes, then we bottle it. We realise that we're all going to die, without really finding out the big answers.”
So far, so Irvine Welsh.
By making the documentary, however, Sng aims to show a different shade to the author, one which is revealed gradually through the one hour and 28 minutes of film.
“Irvine’s very private person,” says Sng. “There's a persona that you see, I think, online and in the media of this kind of sweary, outspoken figure, but he's a very loyal guy, he's a very romantic person and that was what we wanted to show in the film – that there is this other side to him that most people don't get to see.”
Before becoming an independent filmmaker Sng, who is British Chinese, had a series of what he describes as “dead end” jobs until co-directing Sleaford Mods – Invisible Britain, having decided to document the duo’s tour of places hit hard by austerity in the run up to the 2015 general election.
“I was always just captivated by cinema and being a filmmaker didn't really seem like a job that somebody like me could do,” says Paul, 48. “I grew up on a council estate, single parent family, and it just seemed like something that people in Hollywood do.
"But I think getting into it later, in some ways, did me a favour, really, because I think if I'd have got into it at a younger age, I might not have been ready for it mentally. Because I think making films, particularly independent films, puts a lot of pressure on you and I think when I'd been younger it would have been difficult.”
When it came to making Invisible Britain, he had “the confidence of ignorance that Orson Welles refers to, where we didn't know what to do so we just kind of did what we thought was right, and it seemed to work, and it gave me a career”.
He continued to address social issues with Dispossession: The Great Social Housing Swindle (2017), which by coincidence premiered five days before the tragic Grenfell Tower fire.
His third feature documentary, Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché, in 2021, focused on the punk icon’s story as told by her daughter, Celeste Bell, and won multiple awards including BIFA 2021 Best Documentary and the ceremony’s Raindance Discovery Award.
In 2022, Sng was named as a BAFTA Breakthrough Artist and directed Folding (2022), his first short drama film, funded by Screen Scotland and BFI Network.
The following year Tish, a portrait of North-East working class photographer Tish Murtha, was selected as the Opening Gala film for Sheffield DocFest 2023.
“When I first met Tish's daughter, Ella, to talk about the film, that was the main point of making it - that Tish, in her lifetime, for various reasons, had not been given the support to amplify her and her work. And so the film was kind of made to right a wrong.”
He says that his six films so far are all about people who are outsiders and ask what it means to be working class.
Irvine Welsh fits the bill well. Trainspotting, about a group of heroin addicts, was followed by a film version in 1996. Paul watched the movie at Greenwich Picturehouse, then read the book – one which the author followed with more than 20 works including The Acid House (1994), Filth (1998), Glue (2001) and this year’s Men in Love – and says it “changed my life”.
Sng says: “It made me feel alive. Renton’s cynicism about the world and the way that he rejects… I didn't know that they were neoliberal politics at the time because I don't think I was politicised to that level, but just seeing that you didn't have to agree with, I suppose, what's acceptable in society. And it was really funny and it was amusing and it kind of celebrates youth and friendship. Then reading the book afterwards, it was exciting.”
Years later, a mutual friend introduced Sng to Welsh when the London-born director had moved to Edinburgh, where he is now based. Welsh invited him along to watch his team Hibernian FC and the two became pals. The pair went to see Todd Haynes’ documentary The Velvet Underground and Sng brought up the idea of a film about Welsh himself.
During the documentary Sng visited Leeds, where Welsh met his screenwriting partner, Bradfordian-born Dean Cavanagh, with whom he co-created 2007 film Wedding Belles and recent TV show Crime, based on one of the books.
The film also follows Welsh to locations such as his native Edinburgh, Glasgow, Miami, Los Angeles and on a book tour in Canada, where the author “chooses to explore the boundaries of consciousness” by taking DMT - a strong psychedelic - at a Toronto drug therapy centre.
The resulting hallucinogenic trip, illustrated within a kaleidoscopic “imagined memory space”, is interspersed with observational footage, cinematic archive, and novel excerpts, as Welsh wanders around absorbing all the visual material.
The recognisable voices of Liam Neeson, Ruth Negga, Stephen Graham, Nick Cave, Maxine Peake, Mark Hannah, Olivia Caw and Helen Behan can be heard in documentary, reading out sections of Welsh’s works.
“I think they are the bedrock of the film in some ways,” says Sng, “because they're constant. They place us in Irvine's life and although he might not have written them to reflect what he's been speaking about in the film, because obviously he couldn't have done that or had that foresight, they were designed to reinforce some of what he's telling us.”
Irvine Welsh: Reality Is Not Enough (18 certificate) is released today (September 26) and can be seen at The Light in Bradford on Wednesday, October 1; and at Ilkley Cinema on Saturday, October 4 and Thursday, October 9; and Wetherby Cinema on Saturday, October 4.