Slow West director John Maclean: From Beta Band to Wild West

Cult pop heroes The Beta Band were one of Britain's most critically acclaimed (and least commercially successful) bands. Now, a decade after they split, former member John Maclean has re-emerged as a film-maker who is winning awards and rave reviews for his debut feature, starring Michael Fassbender.

For eight years, John Maclean stood behind keyboards, samplers and turntables as he and three college friends melted down garage rock, electronica, folk and hip-hop, and moulded them into hypnotic art-pop.

Fans of The Beta Band included Radiohead, who invited them on a US arena tour, and Oasis, who cited their influence in the late 1990s.

But, to the group's disappointment, they were just too esoteric to match the popularity of their admirers, and they petered out in 2004.

John Maclean has been described as a major new director

But now Maclean is back in the spotlight - this time not as a musician but as one of Britain's hottest film-makers.

He is "a major new director", according to the Guardian, a "supremely promising talent", Village Voice says, who has made what The Hollywood Reporter calls a "pitch-perfect debut".

That debut, Slow West, won the grand jury prize for best international drama at this year's Sundance Film Festival.

'Crazy' music videos

There is a direct link between Maclean's careers in music and film.

While in The Beta Band, he began experimenting with video when directing the group's pop promos. "They were these zero-budget crazy films with my friends starring," he recalls.

And the group's artistic approach encompassed doing their own films, cover art and live visuals as well as music.

The Beta Band, with John Maclean right, had two UK top 40 singles and three top 20 albums

"It was the mid-90s and I was obsessed with [Andy] Warhol and the Velvet Underground and that idea that we could all do the record covers and make the multi-media live show and the music videos," Maclean recalls.

"It felt like it was more of an artistic thing. So even that didn't feel like just music."

But after The Beta Band and Maclean's next group The Aliens split up, he decided to focus on film.

Fassbender friendship

Meanwhile, an up-and-coming actor named Michael Fassbender was shown some Beta Band videos by his agent, and liked what he saw.

"They were very lo-fi, but I was trying to tell stories and using a lot of tricks without money," Maclean says. "So I think he saw the seeds of something that was interesting and left-field."

Fassbender agreed to be in one of Maclean's short films. "He was shooting Tarantino at the time, so the fact that he even offered his services was a great thing."

Maclean, pictured with producer Gerardine O'Flynn, won the Bafta for best short film in 2012

A second film with Fassbender, Pitch Black Heist, won the Bafta Award for best short film in 2012 - and opened the door for Maclean's first feature.

Fassbender is on board again for the atmospheric western Slow West, starring as cigar-chomping outlaw Silas.

"It's the journey of a boy who goes from Scotland to the Wild West of America at the end of 1870," Maclean explains. "He's a naive young man chasing the love of his life to a dangerous land and meets Silas, who chaperones him across Colorado."

Dark humour

For Slow West, Maclean conjures up an environment in which mortal danger and dark humour lurk in the shadows of the stunning landscape.

As the name suggests, the pace of the film is measured without becoming dull. "It's like slow food compared to fast food," Maclean says. "Slow should be something that's more enjoyable."

The film is populated by shady characters who have run away from - or been chased out of - Europe. The director had noticed that the history of early migrants to the Wild West is not reflected in many classic westerns.

"I've read a lot about people coming from Scotland and Ireland and going to America. And then you watch a western, and they feel like two entirely different worlds. But in actual fact they're not."

Maclean (centre) has now directed Fassbender (right) in one feature and two short films

Many Scots ended up in America as a result of the Highland clearances, in which tenants were forcibly evicted from estates in the late 18th and early 19th Centuries.

Those cleared off the land in the north of Scotland included Maclean's own ancestors. Although his family did not emigrate, the director has been brought up on stories of Scots being forced to scatter.

The background for the film's Scottish characters, he says, "came from knowing a little bit from my dad and mum about the history of Scotland".

For the filming, New Zealand ably acted as the American west, and the Slow West film shoot was on a much bigger scale than anything he had done in his Beta Band and short film days.

"There was a whole big floor space in Auckland with 30 people making costumes," he recalls. "You think, wow, this is just because I decided to write this and not this.

"The yin and yang is that, when you're actually shooting, it's just the same. It's just the actor, me and the cameraman. I didn't have a lot of extras, if any.

"It was just dealing with two or three actors, which was what I was used to."

So the budget may be bigger and the cast different, but Slow West is not so far removed from the crazy videos he once made - and the acclaim is once again flowing.