On The Set Of 'Inspector Rebus'
By Ian Rankin
As the car travelled through chilled winter streets, I tried to invent a phrase for what I was about to do. Everyone knows about 'meeting your maker', but I was about to meet someone I'd created, someone who'd lived in my head since 1985. I was about to shake hands with Detective Inspector John Rebus.
I'd been invited onto the set of The Hanging Garden, the second of my books to be filmed for Scottish Television. It wasn't my first encounter with the crew. Despite stringent security, the producers had found that Edinburgh really is a village masquerading as a capital city. Friends and acquaintances would call me to say they knew where the next day's shooting was taking place. A drinking companion called Joe Rebus spent half of one Sunday following street-signs with his name on, only to find himself at the latest location. Then, one Monday lunchtime, I walked out of Waverley Station and found myself face to face with security personnel and barriers.
Market Street was closed. I asked why.
'Filming an explosion.'
'Is that for the Rebus series?' I inquired.
It was. But I'd missed the apparently spectacular stunt: flames shooting out of a lock-up garage and engulfing a car. By the time I got there, firemen were finishing with the wreck. Bits of wood smouldered on the road.
John Hannah was present, but manifestly himself rather than John Rebus. I told him I'd been collecting some rail tickets and hadn't heard the bang.
The producer, Murray Ferguson, started to look worried.
'Maybe,' he said, 'it wasn't as loud as we thought.'
Later on that day, I found out that at least one shop on Jeffrey Street had had its windows blown out by the force of the blast. Probably loud enough then.
Today, however, was different. I'd been asked to attend the morning's filming. Breakfast had been mooted, and I'd nodded enthusiastically until informed that proceedings kicked off at seven-thirty. I told them I'd see what I could do.
The night before the shoot, a fax arrived at my home, detailing the locations for the next day. There were pages of travel instructions, maps, and so on. I began to feel like a cross between a spy and a platoon leader.
It was all very hush-hush, and planned with the precision of a military campaign. The sheets were headed 'Movement Order 12'. My wife woke me at seven the following morning.
'Are you heading off then?'
'In a bit,' I mumbled, turning over. Dozing Order had taken sudden precedence over Movement Order.
It was gone nine by the time I arrived at the set, a run-down warehouse off Gorgie Road, an area referred to in my books as 'Edinburgh's Wild West-end'. The first thing I saw was a Jaguar saloon with the number-plate WZL 1. Everything clicked into place. The car belonged to the Weasel. The Weasel was a villain who was going to lead Rebus to the book's climactic confrontation with the individual who'd put the detective's daughter in a wheelchair. In my version of The Hanging Garden there was no number plate on the car, but I thought it a clever touch. And here came John Hannah, shabbily dressed, tired-looking but smiling. I'd never really seen Rebus smile. He wasn't smiling now. Something I quickly learned was that when Hannah wasn't in front of the camera, he was totally himself. It was extraordinary to me that he could be joking with cast and crew one moment, yet slip into character as soon as someone called out 'Rolling!'
The crew were working twelve-hour days and anything up to a six-day week. Filming involves a great deal of standing around for all concerned. Some extras, who wouldn't be used until the afternoon, were ready by ten o'clock.
A local schoolboy had been cast as a joyrider. He stood by with his mother and watched proceedings, trying not to touch his face, which boasted a spectacular make-up job of bruises, cuts and blood. We talked football, Hannah joining in between shots. By twelve noon, I'd witnessed several takes of the Jag pulling to a stop in front of the warehouse and Rebus and the Weasel getting out. Then the action moved inside, where more takes showed the two men striding purposefully across a floor strewn with debris. I didn't hear my first line of dialogue until later, when Rebus is confronted with the kid. There were maybe three lines in total. As far as I could make out (I've not seen the scripts), the adaptation had pared away the book's speaking parts. One word that had been retained happened to be of the four-letter variety. The crew shot alternate versions, deleting the expletive from one, playing it safe in case the powers that be thought its use unacceptable.
I found the whole process fascinating, and the crew extremely friendly. Someone would come up and introduce themselves as the 'location manager' or 'gaffer' and I'd get to ask what each job entailed. All those credits at the ends of films - 'best boy', 'key grip' - suddenly made sense.
By this stage, the team already had Black and Blue, in the can. It had been edited down and was just awaiting a soundtrack. Murray Ferguson explained that they'd been unable to retain all the book's plot-lines and locations, for reasons of available screen-time and budget. I knew this already: it was one of the reasons why I hadn't been interested in adapting my own work for the screen. A page of script represents about a minute's screen time. Since each book was being pared down to fit into two hours of television (ad breaks included), my first task would have been to delete about three-hundred pages from my 
four-hundred page original. Which plots and scenes could I bear to lose? It wasn't a question I felt like answering.
So I left it to the professionals. As a result, perhaps, I felt slightly distanced from the scenes unfolding before my eyes. Was the warehouse the way I'd imagined it when I'd put it down on paper? What about a character like the Weasel? He'd been closely described in the book. How did the actor fit my perception? Well, he was perfect actually, right down to the discoloured teeth, just as the joy-rider looked so authentically scared I felt like rescuing him myself. Watching him on the monitor, I started to shiver. John Hannah offered me a pair of gloves. A little later, someone from wardrobe brought me an extra pair of socks, recognising that I hadn't quite dressed for the occasion. Everyone was wrapped in the kind of outdoor wear usually reserved for polar expeditions. They know how cold it can get when you're standing around for four or five hours. Relief came in the form of the crew's Friday pay-packets, handed out the way they would be on any production line.
'I don't get one of those,' Hannah said. 'Maybe I should.'
His last actual pay packet had been when he'd been an electrician, or, in his own phrase, 'a sparky'. I'd last had a pay packet when I'd worked in a chicken factory in Lochore. The conversation turned to sums involved, how it seemed a lot of money when you were young, how you still always managed to be broke again come Monday morning. Somehow I steered the dialogue back towards producers and executive producers. Hannah frowned, looked to Murray Ferguson.
'Remind me again, am I the executive producer on this?'
'Yes, John, you are.'
'That's right.' The actor nodded to himself. 'When there are parties or free drinks, I'm the exec producer. When any decisions need made, I let Murray do the work.' Then a shout from the Assistant Director had him scurrying off again to be Inspector Rebus. More smoke was laid down at floor level to maximise the eerie nature of the interior. I was helping myself to coffee from an urn. As I'd been warned earlier, all the chocolate biscuits in the Assorted Fancies tin had been wolfed down, leaving only the custard creams and a couple of digestives. As I looked up, I noticed it was dark outside. I lowered my head and peered through a broken window. No, it was still light. Ferguson explained that they'd had some workmen cover the entire roof with black cloth, to improve the quality of the interior shots.
That was probably when the immensity of the whole enterprise set in. There were security guards outside. There were lighting technicians, sound engineers, you name it. Make-up and wardrobe were being kept busy, as was continuity. The whole process would go on day in, day out, over a course of several weeks, after which there'd be more work to do on editing, re-recording, dubbing, and so on. A top composer was scoring a theme for the film. PR people were gearing up for the big push (Black and Blue, is to be transmitted in April). I tried counting the number of people on the set, but gave up. More kept arriving, and parked roadside in front of the warehouse were cars, vans, buses and lorries - all linked to the Rebus production. I sat in one bus for a press interview. I was shown photos of some previous scenes: so that's what Gill Templer looks like, I thought. And there's Telford. And Sammy Rebus.
'John really seems to be enjoying himself,' the PR supremo said. She'd just flown up from London. For a moment, I wasn't sure if she meant John Rebus or John Hannah. As she took a call on her mobile phone, I sniffed at the aromas wafting into the bus: lunch was being prepared.
It was hard to believe that this whole exercise had been imagined into existence by hammering away at a keyboard for a few months. Back in 1984 I'd invented the character of John Rebus as a way of exploring my own feelings about Edinburgh. We were both outsiders, both drawn to the city's darker side and bloodstained past. Since then, several hundred thousand readers had gone to the books, perhaps learning something about themselves and the city, too. But the TV adaptations could expect to be watched not by thousands but by millions. It seemed an incredible responsibility, and one shouldered by everyone involved in the production, right down to the most peripheral member - the original author.
Dark Calvinist clouds seemed to be gathering overhead: what if it failed?
Would it be my fault? Was it possible that all this incredible hard work might be for naught? No, I couldn't see it. Everything would be fine, and it would be so because the producers had shown vision, deciding to shoot as much as was physically possible on location in Edinburgh. An expensive business and a logistical nightmare of an undertaking, but I believe the gamble will pay off, because Edinburgh is the essence of the books. It infuses them; it remains the central, shaping character, almost a force of will. The location manager had spoken of his excitement when he was told that he'd have to find lots of useful places to shoot in Edinburgh. He lives there himself, and has never felt that the city has been properly explored and exploited on film - until now.
It was nearing one o'clock, and the warehouse scenes were almost finished. The whole convoy would soon roll eastwards towards a hotel on Royal Terrace, where the rest of the day would be spent. Having just filmed the book's closing chapter, they were about to flick back a hundred pages to a scene where Rebus tries to free a prostitute from the clutches of her pimp.
I asked a couple of the actors how they could retain the chronological continuity in their heads. The question, however, was redundant: drama is seldom filmed in absolute sequence. Any actor who understands his or her character will understand how they would react in any scene. Besides, there were more pressing matters. It was lunchtime.
The menu would have graced a decent restaurant: starters of spicy vegetable soup, chicken legs, pepperoni pizza, spring rolls; main courses including steak pie, baked cod, chilli and vegetable curry. Desserts, cheese and fruit for afters. An army marches on its stomach, so they say, and here was the proof. John Hannah held back a little, watching what everyone else was having. He told me he wanted to see what looked best.
Maybe he chooses his roles the same way. Since the first Rebus novel appeared in 1987, every Scottish actor alive (and the occasional non-Scot, too) has been mooted for the role. If the odd ten or twenty million TV viewers around the world think of John Rebus as John Hannah, well, I've no complaint with that. Detective Inspector John Rebus is part of me now, a tenant in my head for ten months each year. He's something more to me now than words on a page, or images on a screen. I hadn't met my creation here today; just another aspect of him.
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The Hanging Garden