Sylvain Chomet settles in Scotland

'Belleville' director picks Edinburgh for 'Illusionist'

By ADAM DAWTREY

'The Illusionist'

EDINBURGH -- In January, when the sky is gray and flat, and daylight seems to last only a couple of hours, Edinburgh is best described by the vividly dreary Scottish word "dreich." But in high summer, the city sparkles like nowhere else, its glowing Georgian terraces, its castle and its extinct volcanoes seeming to dance together in the limpid air.

That, at least, is how the Scottish capital seduced Sylvain Chomet and his wife Sally when they visited to show his film "The Triplets of Belleville" at the Edinburgh Intl. Film Festival in 2003.

Chomet decided Edinburgh was the perfect backdrop to his next movie, "The Illusionist," and the perfect place to make it. So he moved to the city and founded an animation studio, Django Films, with producer Bob Last, who had his own small animation outfit, Inkdigital, in nearby Dundee.

"Although people see Sylvain as quite French, he has always felt an outsider from the French film business (and wanted) to base himself somewhere else," Last notes. "He did much of 'Belleville' in Montreal. And when I asked him why he chose Scotland, he said it was the fantastic way the light constantly changes."

Last believes that quality of light "is reflected in an extraordinary way" in "The Illusionist." The Scottish setting also suits the storyline, based on an unproduced script by legendary French comic filmmaker Jacques Tati. And like "Belleville," the $22 million film is mostly without dialogue.

"The original story is about a performer who has to go further and further afield to survive as the old music halls disappear. So the idea of him going to London, to Edinburgh, to the west coast of Scotland, to the islands of Mull and Iona, was a natural fit," he says.

Logistically, setting up shop in Edinburgh made as much sense as anywhere else, even though the city had only a small community of animators already in place. "There's no major city outside London or Los Angeles where you could find a standing crew who could do what we wanted to do," Last says. "We were always going to have to bring people in."

Once "The Illusionist" wraps, Last expects Django to continue. "Whether Sylvain is personally inspired by the thought of doing another animation, we shall see. He's also interested in live action. But Django is owned by myself, Sylvain and Sally, and we have not built a pipeline of this scale just to see it evaporate."