Jon S Baird on his rise from ad salesman to eminent filmmaker

He is telling me this not because he wants to boast, but as a way of measuring the distance he has travelled in recent years. “I was selling advertising space 25 years ago,” he reminds me and, perhaps more importantly, himself.

Now he is mixing with some of the biggest names in his industry. “I’m sure they still thought I was a waiter,” he adds, smiling. “But at least I was convinced myself that I had got somewhere.”

Oh, he has. From Aberdeen to Casa Cipriani and from selling advertising space to making movies. He has become a director of note. Since he made his first film, Cass, in 2008, Baird has been busy. He adapted Irvine Welsh’s scabrous novel Filth with James McAvoy, worked on Danny Boyle’s TV series Babylon and Scorsese’s 1970s rock and roll drama Vinyl. Then came Stan & Ollie, his affectionate film about Laurel and Hardy, starring Steve Coogan and John C Reilly.

Jon S Baird with Martin Scorsese (Image: free)

Most recently he directed the ITV drama Stonehouse, about the MP who unsuccessfully faked his own death in 1974, and his latest film, Tetris, premieres on Apple TV+ at the end of the month.

It’s a globetrotting comedy thriller that takes in, as the title might suggest, computer games, but also the collapse of the Soviet Union, the end days of Robert Maxwell, the launch of the Game Boy, military parades in Red Square, and a car chase through the streets of Moscow. And it was all filmed in Scotland.

No, really, he says. “Everything. Apart from a couple of days, maybe a year and a half later. We had to do a few pickup scenes in London. But the 10 weeks’ photography was all done in Glasgow, Aberdeen and a tiny bit in Edinburgh.”

Yes, even the car chase. It was filmed in an old refrigerator factory in Bellshill, Baird says.

The car chase was the thing he was most worried about, he admits. “Even when we were supposed to be shooting in east Berlin we thought, ‘How are we going to replicate Moscow?’ And eventually somebody said we should just do it all in visual effects. I didn’t think it was possible and we were then convinced by a visual effects company that it was.

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“Cut to a few years later and we’ve got a car chase that is two minutes long through the centre of Moscow in the late 1980s and not one bit of it is real. It’s all visual effects.

“I had never done massive visual effects before so that was the scariest thing.”

I’m not sure what it says about contemporary Scotland that it could stand in so easily for Soviet Russia, I say to him.

“Well, Charles Cameron, the architect who was Catherine the Great’s favourite, was a Scottish architect who designed a lot of the neoclassical stuff in Moscow and St Petersburg. And apparently he had taken inspiration from Glasgow.

“So, the more neoclassical buildings we found in Glasgow. But the brutalist Stalinist stuff we got up in Aberdeen, which is my home turf.

“And that was quite surprising. I’ve not lived in Aberdeen for 25 years, but when you live somewhere you don’t really appreciate what’s around you. So when they said, ‘Oh we’ve found these great places in Aberdeen,’ I was thinking, ‘Really?’

“I took a bit of convincing. But it was great for me to be able to take a movie of this size up to my hometown because it has never had that up there before.”

John C. Reilly, Jon S.Baird and Steve Coogan attending the Stan and Ollie Premiere as part of the BFI London Film Festival at the Cineworld Cinema in London. (Image: free)

Baird is talking to me via Zoom from his home in Surrey where he has lived for the last 26 years. Not that you would know it given that his accent remains pure Peterhead.

He first read the script for Tetris in 2019. “I had been working on Kingsman 3 with the same production company [as Tetris] and that film was getting delayed because the franchise was working a few things out. So this other one came along and they said, ‘Do you want to do this instead?’ I said, ‘Yes.’”

The film then started shooting in 2020, “bang in the middle of lockdown”. Tetris tells the story of American businessman Henk Rogers (played very winningly by Taran Egerton) who in the late 1980s travels to the Soviet Union to meet the inventor of the titular computer game, Alexey Pajitnov (Nikita Yefremov) and try and buy the rights for the game, only to find that Robert Maxwell and his son Kevin are hoping to do the same. And then the KGB get involved.

“I’m a politics graduate and I think the whole Cold War international relations thing was a big draw for me,” Baird explains, “because I remember those days very clearly when the Berlin Wall fell.

“But I didn’t know anything about this story and I’m not a particularly avid gamer at all. But I liked the backdrop, I’m still fascinated by east-west relations.

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“I think the more I get to know people from central and eastern Europe the more I think they’re like the Scots. Their humour is very tuned into the Scots. They’ve got this dark gallows humour to get them through things and I’ve always found making friends very easy over there.”

It is one of those stranger-than-fiction stories, he adds. “If you had gone into the middle of the Soviet Union in the height of the Cold War … It was just an incredibly dangerous decision to make. Going to Moscow now would be similar. It would be a very scary thing to try and do now.”

Rogers, the subject of the movie, is an executive producer on the film and Baird spoke to both him and Pajitnov. Mostly to check small things, he says.

“When you get the details right it does keep the real people onside and I think it’s really important. You have a responsibility to them because it is their life story.”

He even talked to Kevin Maxwell. I’m a bit surprised that Maxwell would be wanting to talk to you, I say, given the way both he and his father are presented in the film.

“It’s funny because Kevin read the script and then we had the call and I said, ‘Are you OK with this?’ He said, ‘You probably could have gone a bit harder on my dad.’”

There is a sense of responsibility inherent in telling any story drawn from real life. But, inevitably not everyone is on the same page all the time. The family of the MP John Stonehouse have said they were unhappy with the recent ITV drama which starred Matthew McFadyen and Keeley Hawes.

Tetris (Image: free)

“Responsibility is a really good word,” Baird says. “In Stonehouse we tried to involve the family. They just didn’t want to know. They were just not interested at all. So we were like, ‘OK, this is the story we’re making.’ And we made it quite heightened and farcical because he was quite a ridiculous character, John Stonehouse.

“But with something like this we were very open with Henk and Alexey. ‘This is the story we are trying to tell. Are you interested?’ And they were very interested.

“You do try and take some responsibility. And even in Stonehouse that guy had done some despicable things to his family, but I think at the end you still feel for him. He made a lot of mistakes, but, despite that, you still feel for him. Regardless of how satirical our approach, we still humanised him in a way.

“The ultimate thing we always say is, ‘I’m not making a documentary.’ If I had wanted to do that I would work in documentaries. But in Stan & Ollie we took Stan Laurel’s great granddaughter and involved her in a lot of the process as well. We tried to take that responsibility.”

Not that Baird only does real-life stories. Filth certainly isn’t. But is there anything that connects all the things he does?

“I think for me it’s probably love, whether it’s platonic or not. I think there’s always an element of love in there. And there’s a heart really.” He pauses, rethinks.

“I’m not sure love’s the right word, but there’s definitely a heart.

“Even in Filth, at the end there, he was so close to being loved. It just fell out of his grasp. I don’t think I could do something that didn’t have a humanising factor to the story.”

Now that he is partying with Scorsese it’s fair to suggest that Baird has arrived. He tells me he has another project in mind but he can’t really talk about it.

“I’ve got something that I really hope goes because it has two of my favourite actors on the planet and if I get to work with them I’ll just be delighted.

“It’s a modest film. It’s in the vein of Little Miss Sunshine, but that’s all I can say and I can’t give you the actors.”

What continent are they from?

“They are from North America. That’s all you’re getting.”

This must all seem a long way from his younger days working in the call centre and selling ad space in London in the late 1990s when he didn’t know how to break into the film business?

“Yes, it feels like another person. The great thing is I’m still in touch with a lot of people who I worked with back then, so I’m always reminded of how ridiculous and naive and totally lost I was as a person back then.

“I think I was quite immature right into my mid-20s. It was really a dark time for me. I was down in London for a couple of years and I couldn’t see a way of getting into this industry that I was so desperate to get involved in.

“I was in a dark place, so when I look back on it I shudder at some of the behaviour and how unhappy I was at the time. And now I appreciate what is happening in my life and how lucky I am.

“I think when I’m older … I’m still in the middle of it now. I’m still very much like, ‘Where is my next job coming from? How do I get through this? How do I navigate through this crazy industry?’ … I think maybe when I retire and look back I’ll appreciate it more because I was totally lost, you know?”

He looks down the lens, smiles. “Sorry, I went a bit dark there.”

We reach for the light because that’s what he does in life. What, I ask him, would he like to do that he hasn’t yet?

“I have done lower budget stuff, £5 million-£10 million range. This,” he adds, referring to Tetris, “is mid-budget. I would like to have a go at a big studio movie, even just once, to see what the experience was like and to have a bigger canvas. It’s like any artist, you want to have the tools, the canvas. Just to have the resources to go, ‘Right, let’s see what you can do with that.’ I’ll maybe only do it once and be too scared or too scunnered with the experience, but I would like to have a go.”

Jon S Baird is dreaming in widescreen these days.

Tetris will have its world premiere on Apple TV+ on March 31

ITV drama Stonehouse (Image: free)

JON S BAIRD ON THE RISE OF AI

At one point in our conversation I ask Jon S Baird if there is a danger that computer graphics are taking over cinema. He sees a bigger, more worrying picture: “I think there’s a big danger not specifically for storytelling but for life in general. Some of this AI is progressing so quickly … I know AI is different from computer graphics … I really don’t know how you put the brakes on it.

“At the moment for filmmaking it really does help. It helps if you don’t see it. Once you notice it … I don’t respond to that, but if there’s a way of using it so that you don’t notice it …

“But I think AI really scares me. There’s a scriptwriting package at the moment that you just put in a description of a character and a scene setting and it writes scripts for you. They’re not great but … That kind of scares me.

“And this deepfake stuff scares me. It’s quite frightening but we’ve just got to embrace it. What can you do? There’s no way we’re stopping that. We just have to manage it.

“Our parents and grandparents, if they had seen what we are doing now on this Zoom … My grandmother died in the early eighties. If she could come back for a day and watch what we’re doing now she would be absolutely blown away. People wouldn’t be able to take it in. My own mother is 87 and the changes she has seen from being born in 1936 to now … You think of how far we have progressed in a tiny amount of time.

“I think like any revolution - whether it’s the industrial revolution or whatever - you’re not going to be able to stop it, you just have to try and manage it and be a good person. Hold on for dear life and hope, yeah.”