With his intriguing and innovative feature documentary My Old School, filmmaker Jono McLeod revisits the now legendary, stranger-than-fiction story of a Scottish high school student who went by the name of Brandon Lee. A former classmate of McLeod’s, Lee had enrolled at Bearsden Academy in Glasgow, Scotland in 1993. After leaving the school the following year, an incredible secret about Lee was uncovered and become headline news.
Nearly 30 years on, McLeod reexamines the Brandon Lee story, along with his Bearsden classmates, in an unconventional high school reunion exploring their collective memory of events. The film incorporates vibrant animated sequences that reflect the decades it covers and there’s a captivating lip-sync performance by Alan Cumming of Lee’s words as given in a previously unheard audio interview. Cumming already had an in-depth knowledge of the subject, having been set to direct and star in a film about Brandon Lee back in the 1990s, Younger Than Springtime, which never reached production.
Following its world premiere at Sundance, My Old School will receive a US theatrical release beginning at New York’s Film Forum on Friday, July 22nd. Ahead of the release, The Queer Review’s editor James Kleinmann spoke exclusively with Jono McLeod and Alan Cumming about reexamining the curious case of Brandon Lee.
Watch the full interview:
“Myself and my classmates were all aware that there had been various attempts to tell this story on film over the years that hadn’t been successful”, shares McLeod. “I was the only one of us who grew up to be a filmmaker and realized that if anybody was going to try and tell the story from everyone’s perspective, rather than just Brandon’s, then it was going to fall on me to do it. So we got the gang back together, had our school reunion, rebuilt our classroom, and we went for it. I wanted the audience to feel like they were a member of Class 5C at Bearsden Academy and to capture that connection that we all had with each other. It was a connection that I didn’t know existed until I started making this film. I walked away from school and didn’t really keep in touch with that many people. So with a lot of my classmates that you see in the film, I hadn’t seen them for 25 years. It was really surreal to suddenly see our 40-something selves sitting back at a school desk again. It was really strange.”
“The question that you always get asked if you were in Brandon’s class”, continues McLeod, “Is how did you not know that this hoax was going on?! For me, it was because I had my own secrets. I was a 16-year-old gay kid and I just kept my head down. How was I to know there was a tabloid scandal three desks away from me when I was so focused on not being picked out and not being bullied? Now, I look back and think, gosh, if I could do it all over again I’d know how to do it better and how to help people. I’d know how to stand up for myself.”
For Alan Cumming, Brandon Lee’s experience of pretending to be something that he wasn’t while at Bearsden and of “hiding in plain sight”, has a particular resonance for queer people. “I think that’s why so many queer icons are people who are playing a role or only representing a side of themselves and maybe not able to fully reveal everything about themselves. That’s why characters like Wonder Woman appeal to us. I once spoke to Lynda Carter about why she thought she was a gay icon, and she said, ‘Because I think the Wonder Woman character is really fabulous, but she’s not allowed to be so fabulous in her life’. That’s something that we understand, that idea of having multiple realities, and I think Brandon is definitely the epitome of that.”
Rather than being inspired by other documentaries in his approach to making My Old School, McLeod instead turned to the high school movie genre. “This was the perfect high school movie setup; a stranger arrives in a high school class and things will never be the same. It’s Mean Girls, it’s Clueless, it’s all those amazing high school movies. I think a lot of people expected me to make something like The Tinder Swindler or The Imposter, or one of those true crime movies, but I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to make a high school movie and that’s why I put those nods to high school movies in it. We’ve got Clare Grogan, who was famously in Gregory’s Girl, as the voice of one of our teachers, and we have Lulu playing our headmistress. Lulu also sings our title song in a nod to To Sir, with Love. Alan Cumming would have got this role anyway, but the fact that he is in Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion is an added bonus. Can anyone tell me three Scottish actors who have been in more iconic high school movies than the three actors I have in my film?! If anyone can, they win a prize! I wanted to celebrate the high school movie because I felt that our class of 1993 had the perfect high school movie happen to us.”
As well as being a fascinating yarn skillfully unfurled by McLeod, My Old School is also a poignant meditation on the passing of time and memory. “Having written a couple of memoirs, I’m fascinated by the idea of how something that happened can be perceived so differently by different people”, reflects Cumming. “What’s so great about the film is that you see people having the rug pulled out from under them about what their own recollection of something that they all shared is. The idea that our memories are unreliable and how over time we change our opinions about our memories is absolutely fascinating to me.”
When it came to his lip-sync performance in the film, Cumming said it was unlike anything he’d done before. “It was essentially a vocally-led exercise, a vocally-led performance. Brandon Lee’s voice infused his whole spirit and his whole being, but I only had that to go on. So it was creative. It came from inside, through the voice, whereas normally I would think about it in a much less channeled way. It was nuts! Hopefully it’s just a performance, but the lip-syncing is pretty good as well. I have my bar in in New York, Club Cumming, and we have drag performers there and I’m always like, if you’re a drag queen there are only two things you have to do: look fabulous—or have a look—and know the fucking words! So now I feel absolutely justified in throwing shade at bad lip-syncing in a drag queen. So watch out New York!”
By James Kleinmann
Magnolia Pictures will release MY OLD SCHOOL in theaters on Friday, July 22nd in New York (Film Forum) and July 29th in Los Angeles (Laemmle Monica Film Center), plus other select theaters.
This August, Alan Cumming will star in Burn at the Edinburgh International Festival, a piece of dance theatre exploring the true character of Scotland’s national bard Robert Burns. A co-production between the National Theatre of Scotland, New York City’s The Joyce Theater and EIF.
