Waterloo (196?)

"My mind was heavily engrossed in this idea of what cinema could be; if it could only be torn away from this narrative human-drama bondage that had kind of captured it very early on. Waterloo was a human story that wasn't told in dramatic narrative but in a psychological monologue. There was lots of talking in it, incident, bits of poetry, information and what you were supposed to get from it was a sense of human loss and distance; emotional, physical and temporal distance. Some of the monologue came from a science-fiction film about someone who had just woken up in a space ship from a state of suspended animation. He and the crew had been asleep for sixty years or so, [and] when he woke up, he had the opportunity to reflect on the fact that everyone he knew on earth was dead. That was a jumping-off point to use other images and pieces of monologue to discuss that kind of distancing and loneliness."

Waterloo begins in Forsyth's mother's home with his grandfather reading from a book, The Marines Were Here, and ends in a Glasgow bowling green following a human chain of events as the game unfolds. The idea was to create something hypnotic and poetic. When it was screened at the Edinburgh Film Festival, it cleared the George Square Theatre almost as quickly as a fire alarm. The film exists today in pieces, gathering dust under Forsyth's bed. He concedes that it is probably dreadful but derived a strange satisfaction from the public reaction twenty years ago.

"It was a Sunday afternoon in Edinburgh and there was a Tam O'Shanter cartoon on before and someone else had made a film about St. Kilda bird life. It was actually more thrilling than disappointing or painful to have that kind of effect on an audience than to have them sit there and not know what they were feeling. I think most of them just left because it was boring. I suppose that was the first moment I felt like a filmmaker because I had actually moved an audience. If not emotionally or anything else I had actually moved them out of their seats."