Bill Forsyth interview: ‘If we hadn’t made a go of it, my plan was just to disappear.’

I watched the new DVD of Gregory’s Girl on the train from London up to Edinburgh. I hadn’t seen Bill Forsyth’s school-yard comedy in more than 30 years. Incredibly, it hasn’t dated in the slightest. When I saw it in the cinema, in 1981, as an acne-ridden adolescent, this tender romance was a revelation — for me, and millions like me. Funny yet heartfelt, it was that rare and precious thing — a rite of passage movie that was neither patronising nor pretentious. Half a lifetime later, Gregory’s Girl still rings true.

A reticent, retiring man, Forsyth doesn’t do many interviews, but to promote this new DVD he’s agreed to meet amid the serene splendour of Edinburgh’s Museum of Modern Art. ‘The kids in the film are over 50 years old now,’ he says, over coffee in a quiet corner of the museum’s cosy café. ‘Why am I still being asked to stand up and yak about it?’ Because it’s brilliant, that’s why. But you can tell he’s tired of talking about it, so I start by asking him about his childhood. Maybe that’s the best way in. A slight and wiry man with a thinning mop of lank grey hair, he looks older than his 67 years, but when he starts talking he seems younger. As he recalls the Glasgow of his youth, his weathered face softens, his voice lightens, and the past few decades melt away.

He was born in 1946, near the shipyard where his father worked. ‘I grew up very close to the river.’ Sitting at his desk at school, he could hear the shipbuilders on the Clyde. He was the youngest of three children, with two older sisters. ‘There weren’t too many books in the house,’ he recalls, but he liked novels more than movies: The History of Mr Polly; The Catcher in the Rye… He wanted to become a writer, but when he left school, in 1964, he answered an advert in the local paper: lad required for film company.