Edinburgh – Day 11

After a late night at Friday's Scottish Screen party (let's just say that it was already light when Empire wandered home), it's a relief to ease into the day with tea and shortbread in the Sheraton Hotel lobby bar with Carol McGregor. When she's not being Ewan's mum, Carol runs International Audio Describer Agency, which has provided audio description for Sexy Beast, Jeepers Creepers 2, Girl With A Pearl Earring, Moulin Rouge and others. Today, she's hoping that the future distributor of Scottish film Blinded (see Day 10) will save some of the budget for an audio-described print and DVD track. Audio description is a tricky process: Carol has to come up with a script of her own that draws attention to key visual elements while not stepping on top of the existing dialogue or music. It's then recorded by a professional actor - but not one who's already in the film, as that would create a confusing blur between description and screenplay. She managed to rope Ewan in for the audio description track on Peter Mullan's film Orphans, and admits to Empire that her boy found it quite a challenge to get the timing right to the exact second. Elsewhere at the Festival, today is the day that a few unexpected guests are in town. Christopher Doyle, cinematographer on In The Mood For Love, Rabbit-Proof Fence, Chungking Express and new release Hero, is a late addition to the line-up, giving a Reel Life masterclass on his art. Then the special one-off screening of the reconstructed version of Samuel Fuller's World War Two movie, The Big Red One, is graced by an introduction and Q&A by actor Robert Carradine and Pamela Marvin, widow of star Lee. By chance, Empire happens to be sitting next to Lynda Myles, producer of The Commitments and a previous Director of the Edinburgh International Film Festival. She reminisces about the Fuller retrospective that Edinburgh mounted in 1969 and how even back then this particular film was the passion of his life. On its release in 1980, The Big Red One's running time was hacked back by production company Lorimar, but now an hour of footage has been restored. The result is a tough-as-nails epic that follows Marvin and four young soldiers (including a post-Star Wars Mark Hamill) from desert skirmishes in North Africa, through the liberation of France, to the discovery of Nazi concentration camps. When the EIFF was founded in 1947, it began as a documentary film festival. Factual films are still a strong backbone in the programme, with McDonald's expose Super Size Me, rags-to-riches-to-rags story Overnight, surfing history Riding Giants and Argentinian state-of-the-nation doc A Social Genocide all creating a buzz. Today Empire catches Ramones: End Of The Century, a hilarious and completely comprehensive history of the New York punk band. Along with fellow EIFF doc Metallica: Some Kind Of Monster, it seems to prove that the band unit is the ultimate dysfunctional family that makes The Simpsons look like The Waltons. At the end of the day, Empire catches up with the aforementioned Peter Mullan at a post-premiere party for Blinded. It's not his role as a violent and hostile blind man that's most on his mind, however, but the fact that his beloved Glasgow Celtic have been drawn against Barcelona in the Champions League, meaning that club legend Henrik Larsson will be returning to Scotland sooner than anyone thought. "It's a drama of Sophoclean proportions," he tells us in his deep-throaty growl. "You send your favourite son out into the world, saying 'Go, find your own way'. And he comes back with a gun and shoots you. When the fitba' gives you this, who needs the movies?"