As Hollywood counts down to the 90th Academy Awards, VisitScotland is celebrating Scotland’s own stars of the big screen in a special map linking this year’s Oscar contenders with film locations across the country.
Six Degrees of Scotland, created by the national tourism organisation, connects each of the Best Actor and Best Actress nominees with a movie filmed on-location in Scotland – in just six simple steps.
Each actor links to the next by a film they have appeared in together, until the chain reaches the Scottish film.
It is inspired by the six degrees of separation theory in which everyone in the world can be connected to each other in six steps or fewer, and with about 50 million people world-wide claiming Scottish ancestry, there are already plenty of connections to be made to Scotland.
VisitScotland hopes Six Degrees of Scotland will boost film tourism by encouraging film fans to not only set-jet (visit the locations of the films) but come up with more Hollywood links of their own.
The 90th Academy Awards will take place in Los Angeles on Sunday, 4 March.
Six Degrees of Scotland connects:
• Daniel Day-Lewis (Phantom Thread) to Mrs Brown (filmed at Duns Castle, Scottish Borders)
• Daniel Kaluuya (Get Out) to Macbeth (filmed at various locations on Isle of Skye)
• Denzel Washington (Roman J Israel, Esq) to Whisky Galore (2016) (filmed at Portsoy, Aberdeenshire)
• Frances McDormand (Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri) to Mission Impossible (filmed footage on the Annan to Dumfries rail line, Dumfries and Galloway)
• Gary Oldman (Darkest Hour) to Monty Python and the Holy Grail (filmed at Castle Stalker, Argyll)
• Margot Robbie (I, Tonya) to Skyfall (filmed at Glen Coe, Highlands)
• Meryl Streep (The Post) to Trainspotting (filmed at various locations in Edinburgh)
• Sally Hawkins (The Shape of Water) to Rob Roy (filmed at Drummond Castle Gardens, Perthshire)
• Saoirse Ronan (Lady Bird) to The Da Vinci Code (filmed at Rosslyn Chapel, Midlothian)
• Timothée Chalamet (Call Me by Your Name) to Highlander (filmed at Eilean Donan Castle, Kyle of Lochalsh)
Scotland’s onscreen presence has grown in recent years, with film and television productions spending £69.4million in Scotland in 2016, however research shows the impact of productions is felt far beyond their time spent on Scottish soil. The latest Scotland Visitor Survey found that almost a fifth of visitors were influenced to come to Scotland after seeing it on the big or small screen.
Film tourism is set for a further bump this year with the release of The Avengers: Infinity War, Outlaw King and Mary Queen of Scots, which were all filmed across the country.
Jenni Steele, Film and Creative Industries Manager at VisitScotland, said: “Film tourism is booming in Scotland. With James Bond, Transformers and The Avengers – some of the world’s biggest film franchises – choosing to film here, the country’s celluloid connections are as strong as ever.
“It’s the unique mix of stunning landscapes, rich heritage and fascinating stories that make Scotland an irresistible draw for filmmakers from across the world. Our Six Degrees of Scotland offers a fun way to reveal those movie connections and we hope it will inspire many more set-jetters to make connections of their own.”
Brodie Pringle, Head of Screen Commission at Creative Scotland said: “Scotland continues to be an extremely popular destination for international productions, with record levels of production spend in 2016. Scotland’s unique and versatile locations, coupled with our world class crews make it a very attractive place for productions to base themselves.
“In the past year, we have welcomed some of the biggest productions ever to have filmed in Scotland, including Avengers: Infinity War and Netflix’s Outlaw King, both of which will showcase our unrivalled film locations to global audiences and give visitors to Scotland the opportunity to step into the big screen and visit some of these iconic places.”
Set in Scotland: A Film Fan’s Odyssey, published by VisitScotland, reveals details of more than 100 films shot in Scotland over the decades, from Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps (1935) to the Michael Fassbender-starring Macbeth (2015).
For more on Scotland’s film locations, go to: www.visitscotland.com/film
For more on the film locations used in Six Degrees of Scotland, go to: https://www.visitscotland.com/blog/films/six-degrees-of-scotland/
To download a copy of Six Degrees of Scotland go to: https://static.visitscotland.com/pdf/six-degrees-film-map.pdf
