{"id":352312,"date":"2025-08-17T18:55:11","date_gmt":"2025-08-17T18:55:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/352312\/"},"modified":"2025-08-17T18:55:11","modified_gmt":"2025-08-17T18:55:11","slug":"paul-sng-on-his-irvine-welsh-doc-reality-is-not-enough-edinburgh","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/352312\/","title":{"rendered":"Paul Sng On His Irvine Welsh Doc ‘Reality Is Not Enough’ \u2014 Edinburgh"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tThe year\u2019s Edinburgh<\/a> Film Festival will end, just like it did in 2023, with a feature documentary on the cult Scottish writer Irvine Welsh, best known for the Trainspotting novels.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tAs a factoid, that is perhaps unsurprising considering Welsh\u2019s popularity in the Scottish capital, which is also his hometown. Thankfully for audiences in Edinburgh, however, Paul Sng<\/a>\u2019s Reality Is Not Enough, which screens at the Festival on Wednesday, is unlike any previous films on Welsh. Sng\u2019s feature is, in fact, distinct from much of the non-fiction work being made today: there are no sycophantic talking heads or salacious true crime twists. <\/p>\n

\n\tInstead, the doc is built around intimate observational footage, rare archive film clips, and readings from Welsh\u2019s novels narrated by an eclectic cast of voice actors, including Liam Neeson, Maxine Peake, Ruth Negga, Stephen Graham, and musician Nick Cave. The result is an immersive and probing exploration of a profoundly contemporary artist.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI didn\u2019t want to make a film where people were just talking about how much they loved Irvine. I didn\u2019t want to make a hagiography,\u201d Sng says of his approach to the doc.<\/p>\n

\n\tReality Is Not Enough was co-financed and produced by Edinburgh-based production company LS Films, with the support of Screen Scotland. Sarah Drummond serves as Executive Producer and Kaleidoscope will release the film in the UK. <\/p>\n

\n\tAhead of the film\u2019s premiere in Edinburgh, Sng, also known for Tish (2023) and Dispossession: The Great Social Housing Swindle (2017), spoke with us about how he came to profile Welsh,\u00a0finding the film\u2019s unique structure during a psychedelic trip in Toronto, Canada, and navigating the tough production landscape for indie docs. <\/p>\n

\n\tDEADLINE: Paul, are you Scottish? Online people say you\u2019re Scottish.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tPAUL SNG:<\/strong> When you move up here, they claim you. But no, I\u2019m British-Chinese. I was born and raised in London. I don\u2019t consider myself Scottish. I don\u2019t consider myself English. I always say British-Chinese.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tDEADLINE: How did this film come about? Were you a fan of Irvine work?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tSNG:<\/strong> I read Trainspotting in \u201996, just after the film came out. I felt very seen by the story. It didn\u2019t compel me to take Heroin or anything like that. However, I think Trainspotting is a film about friendship and the experience of being young. Drugs are the MacGuffin in the story. Irvin and I have lots of friends in common, but we\u2019d never met. When I moved up here to Edinburgh, we finally met in person at a gig and clicked. We just got on very well. We started going to the cinema, and one Sunday, we met to see Todd Haynes\u2019 Velvet Underground documentary. Afterwards, I asked if he ever considered doing a documentary. I was, of course, fishing. He asked if I would consider directing it. So we were feeling each other out.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tDEADLINE: Can you talk about how you constructed the film\u2019s unique structure?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tSNG: <\/strong>I set myself a rule from the very beginning, which was no talking heads. I didn\u2019t want to make a film where people were just talking about how much they loved Irvine. I didn\u2019t want to make a hagiography. I wanted to make something that would interrogate him. It was tricky figuring out how to do that on screen. It wasn\u2019t until we filmed Irvine taking DMT in Toronto at a book festival that we found the structure. DMT, for people that don\u2019t know, is a drug derived from ayahuasca that releases the same chemical in the body that\u2019s released when you die, so you have a near-death experience without the danger. We filmed all of that and decided the psychedelic trip would be involved in telling his story.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tDEADLINE: Irvine\u2019s wife is an associate producer on the film. What were the editorial rules for the film? Did he have final cut?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tSNG:<\/strong> I showed Irvine several cuts of the film. He loved the first assembly. I look back at that version and I don\u2019t think it\u2019s very good. But he loved it. About nine months ago, we were about 75% of the way to finishing when we showed him another cut. He said he loved it and didn\u2019t need to see any more. He wanted to wait to see it on a big screen. It was a very collaborative process. There was nothing that he vetoed. In fact, there were some scenes and interviews I left out that he wanted to keep because they didn\u2019t advance the story.<\/p>\n

\n\tDEADLINE: You travel around the world with Irvine in the film. I was so surprised that he travels so extensively. I always thought of him as a very Scottish artist.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tSNG:<\/strong> Yeah, he divides his time between Miami, London, and Edinburgh. I thought the same when I met him. I couldn\u2019t imagine this Scottish dude chilling out in Miami. But then, when we went over there and filmed him, we realized he loves hot weather. It worked out that whenever he was going somewhere, he\u2019d contact us, and most of the time we would join him if it was in the budget. We went to Miami, Los Angeles, Toronto, and Ireland.<\/p>\n

\n\tDEADLINE: How was the budget on this? Were you able to raise money easily? It\u2019s become so tough for documentary filmmaking.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tSNG: <\/strong>It was really tough. We were fortunate that LS, the production company, financed a lot of it. They financed over half. And then Screen Scotland, our funder, came in with the rest of the money. We tried to get TV money through a commission, but we were in the tricky position where Irvine was considered not famous enough. It\u2019s tricky getting anything funded right now in docs that doesn\u2019t include a household name, isn\u2019t a true crime show, or considered weird, wacky, and wonderful.<\/p>\n

\n\tDEADLINE: Beyond Irvine<\/strong>\u2018s<\/strong> connection to Edinburgh, why did you decide to debut this film here? Edinburgh Film Festival<\/a> has changed a lot. What does it mean to a filmmaker like yourself now?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tSNG:<\/strong> Edinburgh has been running for 78 years. It\u2019s the longest-running film festival in the world. Some might argue that its glory days are in the past, but I think it\u2019s coming back.\u00a0 It was exciting for us because Irvine and I live here. The production company is based in Edinburgh, but the idea of making a big splash as the closing gala film was important to us to launch the film. And Paul Ridd really just understood the film. He instantly got it. So for us, it was a real honor to have that film here and be part of a resurgent festival.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The year\u2019s Edinburgh Film Festival will end, just like it did in 2023, with a feature documentary on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":352313,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8816],"tags":[748,1102,123512,4884,124417,712,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-352312","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-edinburgh","8":"tag-britain","9":"tag-edinburgh","10":"tag-edinburgh-film-festival","11":"tag-great-britain","12":"tag-paul-sng","13":"tag-scotland","14":"tag-uk","15":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115045632344242082","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/352312","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=352312"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/352312\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/352313"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=352312"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=352312"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=352312"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}