Interview with Jim Hickey, Director of the Edinburgh Filmhouse (1979-1993)

Photo of Jim Hickey outside of FIlmhouse (88 Lothian Road)

The Edinburgh Filmhouse was one of city’s most cherished arthouse cinemas on 88 Lothian Road and home to the oldest continuously running film festival in the world, The Edinburgh International Film Festival. On the 6th of October, the Centre of Moving Image (the larger organisation that ran both the FIlmhouse and the festival) went into administration, closing the daily operations of the Filmhouse immediately. Various attempts have been made to bring back the Filmhouse including the “Save the Filmhouse” campaign, and the future of this beloved cinema is still unresolved.

Amanda Rogers from Cinetopia interviewed Jim Hickey who ran the Filmhouse in Edinburgh from 1979-1993 and was Director of the Edinburgh International Film Festival for part of that time as well. In this interview, Jim Hickey speaks of the history of the founding of the Film Festival, the move of the Filmhouse to 88 Lothian Road, and the history of these organisations during this time.

This interview has been edited and condensed for the purpose of the blog.

AR: Jim, thank you so much for letting us do this interview with you and talking a little bit about the history of the filmhouse. I really appreciate you being here.

Jim Hickey: No, pleasure to be here.

AR: So I read a little bit about your history and actually it got me into learning a little bit more about the [Edinburgh] Film Festival. Now, can you kind of give us an overview? The festival of 75 years old. It's said to be the continuously running oldest film festival in the world, but the Filmhouse is 40 years old or 40 plus now. I went to hear you speak at the Filmhouse a few years ago on the 40th anniversary. How did that all come about, the film festival and the filmhouse and how are they connected?

JH: Well the Filmhouse before it took over this church in Lothian Road in [19]78 -79, it had base… run by the Edinburgh Film Guild, which is the oldest continuously running film society. They owned the building in the West End of Edinburgh in Randolph Crescent which the [Edinburgh] film festival used, and they founded the film festival in 1947. So they had a small cinema in one of the earlier buildings, and they moved to Randolph Crescent, and had a basement cinema there and offices and so they were able to operate as this film society. They started the film festival in '47, and initially it was a documentary film festival so it really just showed documentary film, documentaries, but it had lots of, gradually got lots of invited films from different countries. I mean, it's different from the days that Linda Myles and myself experienced where we would travel to lots of festivals and look at lots of films and select stuff. What was happening then was quite often an official entry from a country would be submitted to the festival, and the festival would show it. That's where the Film Festival began, through that film society.

Eventually, Linda and I got to work. We met at university. We worked together on the film society there. We made it along with her partner at the time, David Will. We made it into a society with like 2,000 members, and we would show one film each week at the local Odeon Cinema, which had 1500 seats, so we could get most of the members to one screening. And it broadened out into two nights a week, usually double bills.

Dave and Linda were really fanatical about film. They used to go to the Cinemateque [Francaise] in Paris to look at films. They knew a lot more than I did. But, you know, we were all really passionate about learning more about cinema. It was the days of people talking about auteurs, emphasizing the role of the director more than anything else.

Edinburgh began to do a series under Murray Grigor who was the director in 1967. He started to do retrospectives. So, with the help of Dave and Linda, he would be doing, there would be retrospectives of Sam Fuller, Roger Corman, Douglas Sirk, Raoul Walsh. And these were an attempt to show people, you know, the complete works, or as near -complete as they could get, of one particular filmmaker. And it got to the point with the Raoul Walsh retrospective, where we actually showed 48 of his films during the festival. So it was really very rigorous. And it was done alongside lots of people working in the British Film Institute in London, who were doing a lot of the writing and helping with the programming. The National Film Archive would chase down prints from other archives or collectors and allowed us to, Edinburgh, to be this focal point each year. And a lot of those people from London would come up to the festival as well. People interested in cinema, people who wrote about cinema, or taught it even. So they would come to Edinburgh as a fixture in their year. You know, it just became somewhere where they all got together. So Linda took over from Murray, and throughout the 70s I worked as her deputy director.

Jim Hickey (left) during the 1980s at the Filmhouse (photo by unknown)

AR: This connection between the Film Guild and also your connection with the film society, how much these film societies really built what became the Filmhouse and the Edinburgh National Film Festival and they're so tied together which is really which is really fascinating and also that John Grierson started the film festival or he was one of the people…

JH: That's right. Yes and for Forsyth Hardy was his biographer I mean the main book on Grierson is by Forsyth Hardy, and in one of the years in the 70s we had a documentary 50th event where a lot of these people, not Grierson, then he [had] died, but there were people like Basil Wright, all came to the festival of these old documentary British filmmakers were all there, but there was also Pennebaker from America. He was there too because of course, you know, his more recent documentaries at that time were things everybody wanted to get hold of. He was one of the more one of the pioneers of our kind of generation, existing from the Grierson generation.

AR: You started to mention that [first] there was [only] Cinema 2. Is that the current Cinema 2?

JH: That's right, yes…

AR: That was the first cinema and the current on 88th Lothian Road, and then you were to develop and get money to make the Filmhouse 1…

JH: Yeah, and that finally opened in [19]82, so it took three years of work and fundraising to complete Cinema 1, and the foyer, obviously in the box office area, and to open the front doors because when we only had Cinema 2, people had to go through the back lane to the rear entrance of the building, but once we got to 82, people were able to go in the main door, and the area that was to become the cafe bar was completely walled off. You couldn't go through there, so that you'd go through a narrow tunnel through the back to Cinema 2, and you'd go up the stairs to Cinema 1. So that functioned for the following three years until the cafe bar opened, and then the whole building was opened by that time.

AR: And how did the cafe bar kind of bring a different energy to the [Filmhouse]? Did it bring more people in, or was it helpful in terms of keeping the Filmhouse alive in terms of finances, or I'm just always very curious on how you know, all these things work together?

JH: Well, it became the thing that all of the film theaters, similar to Filmhouse, everybody began to realize that you needed more than just, you know, a box office and a cinema. You actually needed to have a place where people could meet and people could sit and enjoy being together and spending time in the building and spending money, obviously. So it became crucial for most cinemas of this kind of generation. And so the bar and cafe were essential, actually, for income to boost what takings we were getting at the box office, because you really did need that extra money.

And it made the place something that people wanted to come to more often. You know, it was somewhere where they'd arranged to meet. And it was also lucky that on Lothian Road, we were in an area where there was the Usher Hall, where there were lots of concerts and events going on. There was the Traverse Theatre and the Lyceum Theatre. So there was a whole cultural quarter in that small area of Edinburgh, which became very important, you know, that audiences that would go to the Usher Hall or to the Traverse Theatre would come to Filmhouse to have a meal beforehand or go to Filmhouse for a drink after they've been to the theatre.

So you had enough people interested in other things coming to Filmhouse and probably learning that it was a safe place to be. I mean, women could come in...it sounds ridiculous, but women were happy to come to the bar and cafe there alone whereas normally on Lothian Road, you might not be, because there's a lot of pubs on Lothian Road. The weekends and Friday nights were always quite noisy. There was a period where we put a guard on the front door on Friday for the late night film that we would show to stop people just wandering in who were drunk and so on. You know, all those problems that you have when you've got a public building, you've got to deal with it and make sure people feel secure. And we learned quite quickly that women felt very secure coming there. They would meet in the mornings for coffees and things, you know, before screenings, starting at two o 'clock. You know, the place was quite busy at lunchtime.

So we began to realise that, you know, the loyal audience that a cinema like this needs was beginning to develop. And we were, you know, once we had the front doors open and it was visibly a cinema and you could walk in. There was no membership. There's no club involved. So you didn't have to sign up to anything. You could just walk in and treat it like a normal cinema. You know, it seems that it's just a normal cinema.

Cinema 2 at the Filmhouse during a Edinburgh Short Film Festival Screening in 2019 (photo by Luka Vukos)

AR: The Filmhouse started and its current location in the early 80s, as you say. A lot of Filmhouses or a lot of cinemas went away, way before that, you know, there's so many cinemas in the UK and Edinburgh for years and years and years. When do you think Filmhouse itself, this one on 88 Lothian Road, maybe had its hay day or was it always very busy over the years?

JH: Well, it's a good point you make, because when I took on the job in '79, it was probably the worst time to be thinking about creating another cinema, because in the UK, attendances were plummeting, cinemas were being closed, old-style cinemas with 1500 seats were not getting audiences that were big enough to keep them running. And it definitely felt like the cinema, as we knew it, was beginning to just disappear.

And here we were deciding to build and raise money for a new building to show more films, but we knew that it would be programmed, we knew that the Filmhouse would be showing films that nobody else was showing, and it would seek out things that were ones that we believed were great films. Equally, it would put on new films, it would work with distributors and the British Film Institute to program films that were of the moment and to do little mini-seasons and retrospectives and things like that.

So it had a kind of, I suppose, I mean, it's perhaps not the right word to use, but it's sort of educational element to it. So during the early '80s, it was the worst time for cinema, and it was the multiplexes opening in roughly mid 80s, 84-5 that changed everything because then suddenly there was cinemas with 8 or 10 or 12 screens showing lots of different films, sometimes the same film in several screens when they were really busy and that persist even to today of course.

But I remember people saying to me when we'd completed an opened Filmhouse, there was a guy came up to me and he said this sort of building you know it'll be gone in 10 years. They'll all be gone by then. Nobody want this kind of thing and we couldn't believe anyone would think that you know because we assume that always there would be an audience for cinema we couldn't conceive of a day when we would have to close because the catalogue of film history that we were drawing from was vast. Even if we never showed a new film we would have so many great films that we could be showing and programming in interesting and different ways that that would keep the cinema alive and keep people coming. So there's a lot of flexibility about how we programmed and and worked with distributors and worked with archives and so on. But yes, it was a tough time, but we gradually got through it.

AR: You say that your colleagues at the film society Linda [and David] were cinephiles and they went to the Cinémathèque [Française] which I'm super fascinated to to know about anyway. What drew you to doing this for so long and what was your favorite part of working as the director of the Filmhouse? Was it the festival?

I kind of liked all of it I mean it seems a bit obvious but I liked all the elements of it because going to festivals we didn't have a lot of money but we would go and I followed Linda in this that the main ones we would go to each year were Rotterdam and Berlin at the beginning of the year. They'd be around about February every year and Cannes in May, because by the time we got to Cannes we'd be looking at films that would be opening in the UK in the autumn. British distributors would use the festival as a kind of launch pad because they knew that it would get reviews at the festival that a film being shown in a festival atmosphere and possibly filling one of the big cinemas like the Playhouse in Edinburgh, which had 3 ,000 seats at one time. We would be filling that with one or two performances every festival, but equally all the films were taken, all of the films were given as much prominence as we could give them, especially helping to get the directors there, so the directors would spend time with audiences, the things that are just taken for granted almost today, that's what you do.

But that was good, but I also enjoyed the way in which back in Edinburgh we watched this thing grow, you know, we were watching it year by year getting better and better, and I think by the late ‘80s we were getting something like 3,000 people a week coming to the two cinemas that were open then. And so it was really an exciting time. We felt we'd made it. You know, once we got past ‘86, ‘87, we really felt Filmhouse had come into its own and we couldn't conceive of it ever disappearing.

AR: As you were saying in a previous question, really became super well known for the like as the preeminent UK Film Festival. And it also has a different feel to it. I mean, maybe it's slightly for me, it feels slightly more intimate because it's very much connected to the Filmhouse. How do you think you as part of, you know, and Linda and the other people that you worked with during that time, sort of crafted a festival that was unique, but it was also sort of on the international kind of landscape as one of the top film festivals in the world?

Well, I think it was the it was the way that Edinburgh looked after filmmakers. I think that was a really crucial thing that we would make sure that we as best we could, we would get the filmmakers to come to the festival. And I remember saying very early on when we were doing the job back in Murray Grigor’s day that each filmmaker who comes to the festival has to believe that theirs is the most important film in the festival, you know, you have to treat them all as equally as you can.

Now, that's difficult if you've got Martin Scorsese coming because, you know, you've got a retrospective of his films and therefore the distributor expects, you know, lunches or dinners and hotels being paid and so on. And a lot of it was a balancing act between trying to cover as many of the filmmakers as we could, but also being glad of any distributors that would pay for their filmmaker to come because they were on a circuit where they're heading off to the German launch and the French launch of their film or whatever it is.

So Edinburgh could be built into their itinerary. But the thing about all of that meant that those people were going away and telling other filmmakers, Edinburgh's the place to go. This is somewhere you should get your film next year because you get looked after, you meet amazing people, the quality of projection and the comfort of the cinema as all these things count.

AR: Jim, thank you so much for taking the time. I think it's so important to hear this. I mean, it's something that I really value you taking this time to go through the history.

JH: Thank you, I enjoyed it.

I think also just to finish, there was one thing that did happen, I think, that Murray Grigger, leading to Linda Miles, leading to me running the festival, you had this wonderful kind of overlap of people who worked together for a short period in the sort of changeover periods.

And it's almost like the film festival grew organically from this, that, you know, we all were moving in the same direction as it were. And it was a time when that was needed. There was a kind of stability about how film festival grew during the late 60s onwards. And I think that got a bit lost suddenly. It needed that sort of transition of people who understood each other and understood what Edinburgh meant and tried to keep that going, you know, but that I'm talking a long time ago.

I'm very conscious of the fact that I'm talking about years where most of the people who are caring about Filmhouse and worried about it at the moment are younger people who weren't even born when I was doing what I was doing. So I can't tell them, you know, they will come, it will grow out of this movement, hopefully, that it will, it will get redefined and things will change, hopefully.

Listen to the longer version of the interview that aired part of our monthly radio show and podcast below: