Forums.NitroExpress.com

The odd couple: Find out what happened when the big game hunter met the vegan film-maker
MAKING a documentary on a colonial throwback in search of his final kill in South Africa was both challenging - and rewarding - for animal lover David Graham Scott.

ByAnna Burnside
13:06, 30 JUL 2015

TAKE one vegan documentary film-maker. Add an ancient hunter, desperate to give his trusty rifle one last run round the block. Put them together on a game reserve in South Africa.

What happened next could have been a disaster.

Instead David Graham Scott, the steak-dodger with the camera, came away from his trip to the savannah with the raw material for his next feature-length film.

Called The End of the Game, the documentary is a candid look a what happens when an animal rights activist gets up close to a colonial throwback and his game-hunting arsenal.

Guy Wallace, the pensioner with the big rifle, looks like Donald Findlay QC after a week in a hedge.

Guy Wallace was likened to a Victorian gentleman by his new friend David.
He lives in a caravan at the end of a treacherous pot-holed track in the wilds of Sutherland with dogs and a Swahili-speaking parrot for company. He wants to shoot one last Cape buffalo before he hangs up his guns for good.

“He’s done everything,” said David, who encountered Guy on another shoot six years ago and has wanted to make a film about him ever since.

“He was a gaucho in Patagonia. He’s been in Malaysia, Borneo, the Kings African Rifles. Guy’s a product of all of that, one of the last great British eccentrics.”

Guy is also, David admitted, “very right-wing and old-fashioned”.

There was a lot of teasing about tree-loving, bunny hugging liberals. But that is also part of his story.

“He’s a Victorian gentleman from the colonial period. I knew his relic had to be recorded,” he said.

David has been making films since his 20s. He is best known for his BBC documentary Detox or Die, in which he took the controversial anti-addiction drug ibogaine which has helped many people to come off heroin – and killed others.

And while it was a critical success and allowed David to make a follow-up called Iboga Nights, it has also earned him the tag “junkie film-maker”.

Keen to point his camera away from the addict life, he sold his flat in Glasgow and headed home to Sutherland to work on his film about Guy.

“I want to get back to my roots, making films about characters,” he said. “The junkie tag pushes a lot of people away.”

In Guy, he has found the perfect subject for a drug-free documentary.

A film about a creaking Scottish reprobate in a threadbare deerstalker hat going to South Africa to bag his last big trophy would be strong enough.

But the moral and ethical dilemmas faced by the animal lover behind the camera should make End of the Game something more than a cheap laugh about a bonkers pensioner with a taste for tweed.

“I could do a hatchet job on Guy,” said David. “An old racist in South Africa shooting these poor animals. But I’m not going to do that.”

Despite his desire to make a nuanced, personal film, David was dreading the trip.

It was a 10-day stay in a hunting lodge, sharing a room with Guy. A grizzled hunter with fingernails like a coal miner’s would not be many people’s first choice as a travelling companion.

Veteran Guy's outdated views are part of the film's appeal.
Then there was the vexed question of what the vegan would eat. Imagining meat on the menu for every meal, David filled his suitcase with dehydrated vegetables. (When the hotel asked about his dietary requirements, he replied: “Vegan. LOL.”)

In fact, the pair got on famously and the food was some of the best he had ever eaten. Out on the savannah, with the prey in site, David found his attitudes shifting.

He grew up in the farming and fishing heartland of Wick and reckons he was the first vegetarian in Sutherland. These are deeply held beliefs. But, under the unforgiving African sun, there were beliefs he had to challenge in himself.

“This fellow kills things, he’s got no qualms about it,” he said. “But he is hunting and stalking an animal that’s lived a life in the wild and doesn’t know what’s going on until a bullet obliterates it. That is better than some poor hen living in a battery cage or a pig in those horrible pens. Intensive farming is an ugly thin

David Graham Scott holds a bullet - he feels a primitive connection to hunters.
“If I had the choice between eating the animal that Guy had shot and eating something from a factory farm, I’d go for the wild creature.”

Despite his lifelong commitment to animal rights, David found himself getting drawn into the thrill of the chase.

He said: “I was there with the camera, trying to film Guy getting the shot at the buffalo. I’m trying to film the event and I’m wanting the buffalo to get shot because I need my shot.”

David’s mixed emotions became an important part of the film.

“I had a big ethical dilemma going on,” he said. “At a primitive level, I felt part of this group of men. We were all out on the savannah, just thorny bushes and miles of dusty ground, nothing there. Then things appeared out of the bushes. A rhino caused a bit of a scene. We almost got trampled.”

To camouflage themselves in the bush, the hunters had to walk in step with each other. “We were three guys with guns and me with a camera,” he added. “Four men had to walk as if we were one animal, like a rhinoceros, to fool the buffalo into thinking we were one entity.

“In that moment I felt connected to something very primitive and primeval. I knew there was something going on there that was beyond me. Something that is a base instinct that comes out of being with a group of men I actually had a strange respect for.”

Read more about the controversial game-hunting dentist who sparked outrage after killing 13-year-old Cecil the lion.
http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/uk-world-news/walter-palmer-leopard-rhino-bison-6153765

Cecil the lion, allegedly killed by an American tourist on a hunt - even hunter Guy said "I think it stinks".
David is making End of the Game with no clear idea when and where it will be shown.

“I would like to see it going into a prestigious festival and winning first prize. Then I get thousands of commissions to make documentaries about all the oddball characters I meet that I have an affinity with,” he said, with the dry humour that is also visible in his films.

“I don’t like TV documentaries on the whole, they have gone downhill a lot. I made nothing from my last documentary but it won best UK documentary at a prestigious festival. That means something to me. Detox or Die has changed thousands of people’s lives. I know this because I get hundreds of emails saying so.”

But even if he has lost faith in some things, he still believes there is an audience for Guy’s swansong. He said: “I know it will do something, I know it’s got the potential to go somewhere.”

https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/real-life/odd-couple-find-out-what-6164483

--------------------
John aka NitroX

...
Govt get out of our lives NOW!
"I love the smell of cordite in the morning."
"A Sharp spear needs no polish"