Ten years ago, John Maclean launched his directorial debut Slow West at the Sundance Film Festival, and in that 1860s Western film, the writer-director populated the story with immigrants from Ireland, Germany and Scotland who all mixed on the American frontier with Native Americans. For his second directorial effort Tornado, which opened the Glasgow Film Festival on Wednesday, the Scottish helmer applied a similar premise.
“Slow West was populated from people all over the world and I wanted to suggest the same thing in Britain,” Maclean tells Deadline of his newest film. “I had read and heard a few things about samurais turning up in Spain and, a bit later, turning up in Scotland. There was a bit of an exodus of samurais because they were changing position all the time in Japan and they were becoming less warriors and more guns for hire, or swords for hire, and they wandered. So, I just made them wander into 1790s Britain.”
Tornado stars Tim Roth, Jack Lowden and Japanese stars Kōki and Takehiro Hira (Shōgun). The film, set in the rugged landscape of 1790s Britain, follows Tornado (Kōki), a young and determined woman who finds herself caught in a perilous situation when she and her father’s (Hira) traveling puppet samurai show crosses paths with a gang of ruthless criminals led by Sugarman (Roth) and his ambitious son Little Sugar (Lowden). In an attempt to create a new life for herself, Tornado seizes the opportunity to take matters into her own hands and steal the gold from their most recent heist.
“This period in Britain was a turning point before the Industrial Revolution,” Maclean says. “There’s a strong tradition in Britain of period drama being very much about class and kings and queens but I just wanted to make something about outsiders of the time.”
It’s a project that has been a long time in the making with Maclean first writing the script for Tornado in 2017. He immersed himself in Japanese cinema, particularly the work of legendary filmmaker Akira Kurosawa. “The thing I loved about samurai films was the build-up in the stories, and then any kind of violence is super quick and not that exploitative.”
With the script finished in 2018, the director admits getting the project off of the ground proved to be a huge challenge. “It took a long time to raise the finances,” he says. “And it took a long time to find the people that wanted to make it. I guess it was just something different, which is always trickier to make.”
Having a cast that included reputable actors such as Roth and Lowden helped, and Maclean credits their “generosity” in working on a film that predominantly hung on relative newcomer Kōki.
“They’re generous actors to say yes to this because it’s an ensemble and they all have to be under Kōki – it’s her film really,” he says. “So, to get people like Jack Lowden spending two or three days leaning against a tree in the background while I’m filming someone else, that’s extreme generosity and not every actor is interested in that.”
Tornado is produced by Leonora Darby, James Harris and Mark Lane for Tea Shop productions. Financing for the low-budget film (under $5M) was eventually secured through Ashland Hill and Screen Scotland, with Hanway Films preselling the title to Lionsgate in the UK and IFC Films and Shudder in the U.S.
“This is my second film, and we made it for a lot less money than Slow West, which is not really the direction you want to go in,” admits Maclean. “But I did feel that this story didn’t need a lot of money. It felt like if everyone involved was invested – and they were whether it be from handmade costumes to shooting on 35mm –, we could make this on a low budget and reduce the script and characters right down to what was absolutely necessary. But again, when you’re doing genre, that can work and I think Westerns are one of the few genres that, the bigger the budget, the worse they can be.”
For Maclean, time was the enemy in this tight shoot. Tornado was shot across 26 days in January 2024, ten miles outside of Edinburgh and Maclean admits that it was “foot to the floor – there was no time to breathe.”
“In a strange way, that kept everyone on their toes,” he says. “In Slow West, we had the luxury of filming some scenes that didn’t make the cut, whereas in Tornado, we didn’t have that luxury. So, everything you see in Tornado is there – nothing is on the cutting room floor.”
Maclean credits his cinematographer Robbie Ryan, whom he also collaborated with on Slow West, as being key to making the version of the film he wanted. “We did a lot of storyboarding,” he says. “And then it was about leaving Robbie room to make the magic with the light and the camera. The mixture between knowing the storyboard and being able to use the light was the ultimate collaboration.”
Lionsgate is releasing Tornado in cinemas in the UK and Ireland on May 23.
