Hollywood’s hottest filmmakers are flocking to shoot on this rugged, windswept Scottish isle, making a cinematic tour of the area, well, epic.
The Isle of Skye in the northwest Highlands of Scotland is as rustic and rugged as it gets. Where the jagged peaks of the Black Cuillin Mountains meet the sea, the coast is battered by Atlantic gales and monsoon rains. Cold fronts whip the Duirinish and Trotternish peninsulas, giving Skye a dank, mysterious personality. Locals don’t call it Eilean a’Cheo – the island of mist – for nothing.
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Remote, windswept and devoid of any glitz and glamour, Skye and its single-track roads couldn’t be farther from Hollywood’s starry Walk of Fame. But in the past few years, movie moguls and film directors such as JJ Abrams, Ridley Scott and Matthew Vaughn have taken their productions to this remote isle to film some of the world’s biggest blockbusters. So much so that Skye is now a firm favourite with location scouts.
It’s the scenery – sharp-cliff landfalls, shingle beaches and small rock islands known as skerries – that has made it a star. When that damp weather blanket is pulled back and the skies clear, cinematographers love to capture the island’s magical, almost ethereal quality. Even the tourist board, Visit Scotland, has gotten in on the act, developing a Hollywood-style trailer to invite newcomers to discover the island’s connections with the world of film. Its tagline: “An epic land, a natural film set”.
Creative Scotland, the country’s development body for the arts and creative industries, has played a crucial role, providing financial support, development, location scouting and assistance to up to 30 films a year. The pay-off is the reported local spend for features such as Prometheus and Snow White and The Huntsman, which were shot on Skye, and many other productions filmed nearby in Glencoe and the Cairngorms on the mainland, including the Harry Potter series, The Dark Knight Rises, Skyfall and Cloud Atlas.
The latest Skye-shot film to generate buzz is a new version of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, starring Academy Award nominees Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard. Iain Canning, the producer of The King’s Speech, said he could “imagine witches coming out of the landscape”.
Outsiders’ appreciation of Skye dates back at least as far as 1773 with the arrival of the celebrated writer Dr Samuel Johnson, whose account of his visit when he was touring the Western Isles sparked the imaginations of the masses that followed. With diarist and author James Boswell, Johnson stayed at the Ullinish Country Lodge in Struan, now renovated and turned from two-storey farm house into a guest house. In fact, you can stay in the same room where the great writers once slept.
But perhaps the best place start a cinematic tour of Skye is at The Old Man of Storr, a sigh-triggering rock formation on the Trotternish Ridge. Overlooking the Sound of Raasay, it’s the most photographed spot on the island and with good reason. Its lunar-like landscape was used by Ridley Scott to shoot the opening sequence of Prometheus in 2012, and the area stood in for 18th Century Japan in the 2013 Keanu Reeves samurai film Ronin 47. JJ Abrams’ Star Wars crew reportedly even used the location in the latest instalment of the franchise,The Force Awakens, due out in December 2015.
A 20km drive north takes you to the Quiraing, a wonderful valley cracked and split by prehistoric landslides and used as a backdrop for a number of films. That list includes Fassbender’s Macbeth; Snow White and the Huntsman, starring Charlize Theron and Kirsten Stewart; Stardust with Clare Danes and Michelle Pfeiffer; classic sci-fi swashbuckler Highlander, starring Christopher Lambert and Sean Connery (who, bizarrely, plays an Egyptian-born Spaniard with an unshakeable Scottish accent); and The Land That Time Forgot. Hike the 7km circuit around the escarpment and you can imagine a dinosaur or two traipsing through the heather several millions of years ago. The closest you’ll get is a pterodactyl manoeuvre from a soaring golden eagle.
About 35km south, past the island’s pint-sized capital of Portree, is the Black Cuillin Ridge, a star of the small screen. Topped out by the 968m-high Inaccessible Pinnacle, a splinter of jagged rock, the mountains have most recently served as an impromptu BMX park for world-renowned Red Bull rider and local Dunvegan lad Danny MacAskill. His cycle from Loch Scavaig up and over the Black Cuillin for last year’s short film The Ridge has resulted in more than 28 million views on YouTube. Unbelievably, he summits its 12 peaks using only crags, rock fissures and determination.
Inspired by the ridge’s natural drama, Ben Stiller hiked the misty Cuillins with Bear Grylls, before overnighting in the stunning Spar Cave, near Elgol for NBC reality adventure show Get Out Alive.
Finally, if you’re headed to the airport in Inverness, keep in mind that no cinematic tour of this part of Scotland would be complete without a visit to Dunnottar Castle, south of Stonehaven on the Aberdeenshire coast. A ruined medieval relic of toothy turrets and crumbling walls perched atop a rocky peninsula, the fortress was the inspiration for the DunBroch family home in Walt Disney’s Brave, the animated fairy-tale romp that features every ginger-haired, haggis-eating, kilt-wearing, bagpipe-playing cliche you could throw at the Scots.
At least for now, they are labels that the locals on Skye have managed to avoid.