From working alongside Kenny MacAskill as a trainee, to the jungles of Venezuela and all the way to the top prize at Cannes, screenwriter Paul Laverty packed up his pen, took his passion, and made it happen.

He says it was an accident, and certainly not the result of any planning on his part, but whether by default or design, Paul Laverty has made the leap out of the nine to five that surely comes as close as any to wish fulfilment. From once sharing an office with Kenny MacAskill at Levy and Macrae, now he writes movie scripts for Hollywood. Two otherwise identical careers could hardly have diverged further, and as de facto partner of legendary director Ken Loach, renowned for pitch perfect social realism, he is arguably doing his own bit for justice, albeit in a very different way from his former workmate.

“I had a hilarious apprenticeship,” he says over a coffee at Edinburgh’s Filmhouse café, where a retrospective screening of his first feature Carla’s Song is taking place.

“Kenny MacAskill and I did our apprenticeships together. Kenny was a lot of fun. We were given a free hand and we even did some campaigns there on homelessness and welfare. It was a real eye opener listening to people’s stories, especially when you are young and have been quite protected.” 

Whatever sheltering went on in Laverty’s upbringing, he was adventurous enough to follow his gut instinct all the way to South America, giving up the security and lucrativity to apply his legal skills to human rights work in volatile Nicaragua, then bearing the jackboot brunt of the Reagan era’s harshest Rambo-diplomacy.

“When I finished my apprenticeship and became qualified I was very, very curious. After I became a lawyer, I was fascinated by what was going on in latin America, especially Nicaragua. How the dictatorship was overthrown by the sandanistas, leading to universal education, the literacy campaign, wiping out polio. At the same time these people were being attacked by the contras financed by the CIA and the United States. I decided I wanted to volunteer to work there, for a domestic human rights organisation,”

“I was interested in questions of power in our lives, massive inequalities. You only have to open your eyes to see them. That influenced me and I cared about it. Nicaragua in particular really fascinated me. It was hope for the rest of latin America.  One of the most impoverished countries in the world, and they taught their population to read and write over a very short period of time. There was a successful revolution, a transfer of power, and they had a population only the size of Strathclyde region, and the United States decided to crush it, because they were scared it would be an example to the rest of latin America. There was massive propaganda to say this was a communist totality. Which it wasn’t. I was there for the free elections. I witnessed them and I saw them.  It was very interesting to see all that unfold.”

It is understandable that after seeing the literal front line of US policy delivered against what John Pilger terms ‘unpeople’ -the invisible mass of ordinary lives whose voices are ignored- the idea of getting back to law in Glasgow didn’t appeal.  Some may have devoted themselves to local legal work, or engaged somehow in the political process. There are countless ways to change the world, and Laverty’s compulsion was to to channel his experience into dramatic art.

“After that, I became sick of writing journalistic reports and sick of talking to journalists, and I wanted to try and tell a story about it. I wanted to try to capture some of the things I had witnessed and seen in a story,” he says.

“It was just an instinct, a gamble. The fury and anger at the massive, sustained slaughter I had witnessed. There was a fury and I was determined to tell a story about it.”

His first feature film collaboration with Ken Loach, ‘Carla’s Song’, was released in 1996. Laverty is too modest to acknowledge that what he did was remarkable, but the simple fact is that writing a movie script is immensely difficult, and the act of translating a story you think needs told into a workable, filmable prospect with believable characters, functional scenes and dialogue that will engage an audience is a skill akin to alchemy. It requires the discipline of an artisan and the vision of the artist.  And he has never stopped, collaborating with Loach on ‘My Name is Joe’, ‘Bread and Roses’ starring Adrien Brody, ‘Sweet Sixteen,’ ‘Ae Fond Kiss’ and ‘The Wind that Shakes the Barley,’ winner of the coveted Palm D’Or at Cannes, arguably the most significant prize in film.  It’s a long way from Levy and Macrae, but Laverty is more inclined to put his success down to happenstance, rather than rare talent.

“Films aren’t made by geniuses. It is ordinary people who make films,” he says.

“In my naivete, I wrote to lots of people to say I wanted to make ‘Carla’s Song’. I had an outline and a story I wanted to tell. For most people, the subtext in the responses was that I must be mad; I wanted to take them to Nicaragua; had never written a screenplay before; the political theme. But I also wrote to Ken Loach, and he was very open. We just talked about possibilities, and he said I should try writing some scenes, instead of just an outline.  And that was like a drug then.  I started writing scenes. I didn’t try to intellectualise it.  I wanted it to be about someone very ordinary, coming across a Nicaraguan refugee. Once I started writing, it was an incredibly exhilarating process that I really enjoyed.”

Musicians and sportsmen are among the rare breed that can turn the activity they love into a line of work.  But even they have to quickly adjust to the grinding reality of training, touring and practice required to do anything professionally, which can suck the joy out of what used to be a pleasure.  Almost anyone who has ever enjoyed a film must have considered how to write one. Only an elite few writers are even recognised, and fewer still can lay claim to a legacy of work so distinctive and identifiable. Faced with the blank screen and the blinking cursor, even the best idea must be difficult to convert into a working screenplay.

“I try not to reflect too much about it. I try to imagine characters and see situations and good stories.  It is a massive challenge to have a story that is tight enough, and an intellectual challenge to try and tell that entire story in two hours.  I try to see if I can follow and listen to the characters, and try and run with it, rather than get angst ridden about it,”

It is fortuitous that Laverty encountered director Ken Loach, who made his name with ‘Cathy Come Home’ and the bittersweet ‘Kes,’ and found him to be open enough to taking a chance.

“He is a remarkable character. He has tremendous curiosity, humanity and vitality. He’s also a very fun man.  A lot of the time we talk about football or anything but film making. But we have very different jobs. I write, he directs.  We meet in the middle as film makers. We work hand in hand. It is very organic. I can’t write to order. I have to find something that really fills me up, or I am massively curious about,”

“I try to make sure it is equally interesting to Ken, that really taps into something we are interested in. And I test the idea out on paper. What we do is see if it is a firm enough premise on which to build a film, and is worth the effort.  You can see very worthy pieces that are incredibly boring. Or that batter you over the head, are very rhetorical or incredibly clumsy.  I think the secret is to find a premise which, as the story grows, touches on different contradictory elements that really help us understand how we live our lives and what affects us and what touches us.”

It is arguable that Laverty has contributed immensely to the landscape of the law, albeit in a secondhand fashion. Today’s lawyers were once idealistic children whose passion and imagination were sparked by the issues in films, from the Grapes of Wrath all the way through to Atticus Finch, Rumpole and A Few Good Men. They had only their cinematic experience to guide them towards law in their childhood. Social passions and a sense of injustice are fuelled in the same way. Loach’s seminal 1960s ‘Cathy Come Home’ led directly to the foundation of the homelessness charity Shelter.  Movies make a difference, if they are strong and the right people watch them.  Sylvester Stallone said –much to the actor’s dismay-  that senile President Ronald Reagan told him privately that he now knew what to do about Libya after a screening of ‘Rambo: First Blood Part 2’. (Thankfully Dubya prefers the example of Ben Stiller comedies, according to those who know.) The world would indeed be a different place if the cowboy neo-cons in power in Washington enjoyed a different type of cinematic fare.

“A lot of these same bastards that were involved in the Nicaraguan war are involved in Iraq. These are the guys that manufacture torture and murder. They are war criminals,” he says.

“What the United States did was crush this tiny little democratic experiment. If more people knew about that and heard that, they wouldn’t have believed that same language that they adopted about freedom and democracy which they have done and persuaded them in this war in Iraq. It is the same bullshit, and the same people; Richard Perle, Negroponte, all those bastards who should be behind bars just now.” 

Success has clearly not dulled Laverty’s mojo, and it is heartening to be told that he and Ken Loach are in the early stages of another cinematic collaboration.  He makes screenwriting seem effortless, as Cantona’s free kicks, Mike Phelp’s breaststrokes and Dali’s doodles must have seemed to them. He is too modest to acknowledge that his talent is a rare one, and whilst it is a loss to law that he is no longer in practice, it is hard to conclude anything other than he is doing exactly the one thing that he ought to be doing.

“The great thing about the stories we tell, if they are good stories, will reflect a bit about how we live, and ask questions about ourselves; things that happen under the surface, or behind the supermarket doors.  These are simple questions, but very radical questions. A story has a great way of examining it, looking at the contradictions.  I think the most interesting choices are the toughest ones, not the easy ones,”

“I am endlessly curious, and there are lots of other things I’d like to try and investigate, examine and try to understand, and then with a bit of luck, might be able to tell a good story about them.  But we could quite easily fail, and I think failure is greatly underestimated.”