“Why are British period films all just so British?”: John Maclean and Robbie Ryan on Tornado at Picturehouse Create 2025
As part of the inaugural Picturehouse Create, director John Maclean and cinematographer Robbie Ryan took to the stage to discuss Tornado – their long-awaited second collaboration, arriving a decade after the success of Slow West (2015). A genre-defying blend of British period drama and samurai Western, the film challenges the conventional make up of period cinema with an ensemble cast of unexpected personas.
“I think with Slow West, it was travelling America myself as a young Scottish boy,” Maclean recalled, “And realising that cowboys were probably not American.” The same epiphany informs and inspires Tornado, but this time, the myth-making turns inward to his own roots, as he questions, “Why are British period films all just so British? Why can’t there be a Japanese samurai, an African guy, and a French guy?”
If Tornado has a message, it’s that Britain’s past – like the American frontier – was populated by more than just the familiar faces of empire. The feature is a fantasia of the marginalised and the wandering – the stark opposite of the landed gentry of Jane Austen – its research not rooted in dusty archives, but in cinematic dreams and imaginative freedom. “There are less drawings of how people looked,” Maclean said of his on-screen outsiders, citing that he used influences from unexpected places for it, noting, “So in the end, that’s quite fun.”
That boldness extends to the casting, which was, in Maclean’s words, “very difficult.” Financing proved elusive, and actors were “coming and going, being hot and not.” But eventually, it clicked, with Jack Lowden climbing aboard early, after a brief encounter at the Edinburgh Film Festival. Noting that Joanne Whalley was cast because he wanted her familiar face to bring a sense of maternal gravitas, Maclean revealed that she was immediately taken with the script and offered to pay for her own flight from Los Angeles.
Shot over 25 days in Scotland, Tornado was filmed on 35mm – a choice that gives the film its tactile, cinematic texture. “You kind of have to go prepared, storyboard and just shoot one take,” Maclean admitted. The original script – once set entirely in snow – had to be reimagined after weather delays. “Never write scripts in the snow,” Ryan deadpanned, revealing that they had to make certain changes after the lake froze a week before shooting began, just as Maclean had cut the snowbound sequence.
Influences run deep and eclectic – from Ingmar Bergman to Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter (1955) – but Kurosawa looms largest. “I watched all 32 of his films, in order,” Maclean said. “I’ve become a bit of a Kurosawa expert.”
Speaking on his rigorous writing process, Maclean revealed that he writes characters from “life to death”, beginning with no dialogue, with just thoughts and lists, adding, “So when the dialogue is put in, it’s not exposition; it’s subtext.” On the film’s financial limitations, he expressed that it became part of its aesthetic. The original gang of 15 bandits was whittled down, but as Maclean noted, films with limitless budgets often leave nothing to the imagination. Tornado, instead, invites the viewer to imagine for themselves.
Christina Yang
Tornado is released nationwide on 13th June 2025. For more information on Picturehouse Create, visit the website here.
Watch the trailer for Tornado here:
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