The Wrong Way Round to Ewan McGregor

By Nathan Braund

This is the true story of two men becoming forty, one a famous film star, the other an unpublished writer. When Nathan Braund discovered Ewan McGregor was filming up the road from where he was living in Phuket, Thailand, he interpreted it as more than a coincidence. He planned to put his movie script into the hands of the Scottish star, even though he knew it was unprofessional to pester an A-list actor, particularly when they were working on a serious film about the 2004 tsunami. Sceptics would argue he was having a mid-life crisis but he felt it was a calling, the break he needed after all these years. Join him with his wife and two small children on a journey of discovery, as he tries and fails on countless occasions to meet Ewan before finally succeeding in approaching him with script in hand.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jun 4, 2013
• ISBN: 9781483500706

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The Wrong Way Round to Ewan McGregor Nathan Braund

Ewan McGregor was wearing a mustardy green T-shirt, faded yellow and blue Bermuda shorts and brown flipflops but this was not the beach. He looked lean with thick arms and broad shoulders, and was caked in mud. He had cuts all over his arms and legs and across his cheek bones. He walked towards me.

I looked up and he stared straight at me. There was his familiar face, the full nose, the cleft chin and the deep frown. The spikey hair had been flattened and parted to the right. There were his piercing blue eyes looking straight at me. Should I say hello? Should I smile? He stared at me without expression. What did this mean? Was he looking at me or right through me?

TUESDAY OCTOBER 19TH 2010

In the documentary ‘Long Way Round’, Ewan McGregor was trying to do something extraordinary by riding 22,345 miles from London to New York on a motorcycle. Paradoxically, he was also shooting for a kind of normality: he just wanted to be a bloke on a bike. He was hoping for a break from his stardom.

My book is the complete opposite. I’m on a metaphorical clapped-out Vespa trying to pursue fame over hills and down dirt tracks. Being noticed, recognized, celebrated is my ultimate destination. I’ve had forty years of complete obscurity and bad toilets. I know what normality feels like and I’m sick of it. I’m hungry for fame, fortune and excess, anxious to make even the smallest of skid marks on the road to success.

For anyone who doesn’t know me (99.9% of you), my name is Nathan Braund and I’m an aspiring writer. That sounds like an introduction for Alcoholics Anonymous but this addiction is much worse. I’ve been scribbling away for twenty years, titling the axis with fantasies of mega book advances and eight figure film deals, but haven’t broken through yet. Anyway, this isn’t a long-winded whinge about not getting published. It’s far more ridiculous than that. This is my attempt to get my screenplay into the hands of Ewan McGregor while he was filming in Thailand. I guess, the movie pitch would be, ‘Desperate 40 year old writer works as an extra in the vain hope of giving script to A-List actor.’ I’ll leave you to decide if it’s a Thriller, Action, Buddy Comedy or Disaster.

The trouble started on the 19th of October, 2010, your honour. My wife, Kirsten, and I had moved to Phuket, Thailand, on the 13th of September to dedicate eight months to writing and to spend untired time with the kids (cue awkward silence from various relatives at such a plan in terms of the eating up of savings that could be used for a deposit on a house and the unrest in Thailand on the 19th of May when red shirts and yellow shirts had nothing to do with football).

Like so many, we loved the country and had previously visited places like Bangkok, Chang Mai, and Kho Samui, as well as neighbouring Cambodia and Vietnam. Although we would happily backpack to a mountain village in Burma or Laos, we needed somewhere with a decent international hospital and school for the kids so chose Phuket. Our first impressions were not what you’d call electric. We’d just left Oman in the Middle East where the leather-skinned ex-pat, with his four-wheel drive, big villa and even bigger ego, reigned supreme, so were less than happy to encounter similarly ludicrous westerners in Phuket.

The island was cluttered with flatulent, geriatric men married to young, beautiful Thai women. Chalong, where we lived, was overrun with Alf Garnets on scooters bellyaching about the heat and ignoring their young wives until they were in the bedroom. Every time we passed one of them in the car, Kirsten would shout, ‘put a bloody shirt on’ but not, thankfully, out of the window. It was a shock to go to the local supermarket, called Tesco Lotus, and discover there was a whole aisle dedicated to adult diapers.

However, Phuket with its beautiful beaches, Chinese shrines and colourful events like the Vegetarian festival soon charmed us. We found a little villa to rent amongst rubber trees at the bottom of a mountain that had a 45 metre stone Buddha at the top, so were feeling Zen-like about the whole thing.

By the way, our kids are Isabella, four and a half, and Dylan, one and a half. Isabella is a complicated but sweet girly girl and Dylan is best described as a jolly thunderball. According to Kirsten, they had inherited their bad traits from me and their good traits from her, which was probably true. I would write in the morning and Kirsten in the afternoons and both of us would scribble away in the evenings when the kids had gone to bed.

This was bliss except for one thing: even after twenty years, I was not published and was finding it harder and harder to keep going. Did the rejections mean I was crap? It was becoming increasingly difficult to convince myself I was simply misunderstood. I was starting to feel like King Julien, the lemur in the cartoon ‘Madagascar’, who says he wants to be a professional whistler but when he puts his lips together he blows a raspberry.

On the morning of the 19th of October I was having one of these moments of self-doubt while working on my film script, when Kirsten barged in, saying ‘you’ll never guess what?’ I was in our ‘study’ which was a grand name for a room that housed little more than a cheap, wobbly desk and plywood bookcase. She frantically scribbled notes onto a piece of scrap paper before she forgot something. Like a Victorian schoolmaster, I berated her for disturbing me while I was ‘creating’ and she stormed out calling me a ‘fornicating masturbator’, or something similar. It took me about three hours before I could coax the news out of her.

Kirsten is a passionate woman, famous for not suffering fools gladly, except for me that is. I’d survived having a clog thrown at me amongst other things but that was another story. I gauged the level of my OCD and general neurosis by her reactions. If she said, ‘you flipper’ then I knew I was relatively normal. If she lifted her eyebrows and said ‘are you for real?’ then I knew I was moving into obsessive territory. Mind you, we were something of a yin and yang because I could be hesitant about things while she could hate waiting for the kettle to boil. ‘When the tortoise and hare got married’ would be the film title.

Kirsten looked at me and said, ‘I wanted to tell you earlier because you’ll be excited about it.’

She was sat on our bed in the bedroom, pretending to read a book. We only had a double bed in the villa so the four of us shared it, like the grandparents in ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’.

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to get all pompous. What is it?’ I said. As usual, she had taken Isabella to school (five minutes on foot down our street) but the owner, Michael, had flashed a piece of paper under her nose, saying ‘take a look at this’.

‘You’ll never guess what it was?’ said Kirsten, ‘It was an email from a man looking for someone to teach a couple of five year old boys up at Khao Lak at the Orchid Beach Resort.’

‘Where’s that?’

‘It’s about two hours up the road from Phuket.’

At first, Kirsten thought Michael was offering the job to her because he knew we used to teach English as a foreign language. Neither of us particularly liked teaching but it had served as a useful travel ticket for the past twelve years. But Michael quickly whipped the paper away, saying the boys had to be ‘Ewan’s sons’ because they were making a movie up there with Ewan McGregor and Naomi Watts. This was the first we’d heard of it.

We knew one of the members of Culture Club lived in Phuket but that was something of a joke, like spotting the Krankies on the bus. There were genuine celebrities two hours away. They weren’t washed-up actors from ‘Heartbeat’. They were real A-listers that didn’t require added info like ‘played Bob Gooser in Emmerdale Farm’ next to their name. Let’s be truthful, movie stars were the Great Gatsby of the modern world and we all wanted to get near them or, at least, have a peep to check they existed.

We stared at each other and giggled. I did a Tom-Cruise-leaping-off-interview-settee-stunt from our bed but fell to the ground. This could be a fantastic experience that led on to us teaching other film star kids at exotic locations around the world. In our minds, we were already hobnobbing with Brad, Angelina, Johnny and that Julie taxi woman. This was the lifestyle change we needed. I was also thinking it could be a perfect way for me to hand my film script over to someone with a bit of clout. It wasn’t finished but it could be completed within the next two months, two weeks, two hours if Ewan or Naomi asked for it. It was based on a novel I’d written so I already knew the structure, characters, dialogue.

If I got the job, I could develop a rapport with Ewan or Naomi and then ask them to cast an eye over my movie but, if you developed a friendship, should you ruin it by handing over your work? Ah, who gave a toss? It wasn’t like they’d be staying in touch or keeping me on their Christmas card list beyond their time in Thailand, let’s be realistic. Let’s be realistic? I didn’t even have the job but was already imagining quiet sunset chats at the pool with Ewan or pretending to be able to ride a powerful motorbike and hitting the road on our days off (literally hitting the road!).

Kirsten helped me up from the ground and we hurried to the laptop in the study, where we googled for as much information as possible about the movie, which was given the working title ‘The Impossible’. The first thing we found was the official synopsis. Busy ex-pats, Henry (Ewan McGregor) and Maria (Naomi Watts) go on holiday with their three sons, Lucas (Tom Holland), Simon (Oaklee Pendergast) and Thomas (Samuel Joslin) to Thailand but on Boxing Day morning, while they are relaxing at the pool, the tsunami strikes. Henry tries to hold onto Simon and Thomas but the sea smashes into him and dislodges his grip. Maria is thrown underwater and almost crushed to death by the debris. She finally surfaces, worrying that her family have been killed but is soon reunited with Lucas, her eldest son. Henry manages to save Simon and Thomas but cannot find Maria and Lucas. The film is based on the true story of the Belon family who were separated by the 2004 tsunami.

Filming started on the 23rd of August, 2010, at the Ciudad De La Luz studios in Alicante, Spain, where the tsunami’s flooding effects were shot. Naomi Watts and Tom Holland spent six weeks shooting there before moving on to Thailand, where Ewan McGregor joined them. Filming was currently taking place in Khao Lak until February, 2011. ‘The Impossible’ was due to be released in 2012 and the budget was rumoured to be $45 million which was $40 million more than the budget for ‘The Orphanage’, the director’s breakthrough movie. This was the second time Ewan McGregor had starred opposite Naomi Watts (they worked together on ‘Stay’, a psychological thriller, in 2005) but the first time he had played a father.

So Michael, the school owner, was correct. Ewan McGregor and Naomi Watts were making a film, two hours up the road at the Khao Lak Orchid Beach Resort which, according to ‘phuketword.com’, was also providing accommodation for the cast and crew. Who were the children that needed to be tutored? One thing was for sure, they weren’t ‘Ewan’s sons’ because he didn’t have any. He had two biological daughters, Clara and Esther Rose, and an adopted daughter, Jamiyan. (Since writing this, Ewan has adopted another girl, Anouk, who was born in 2011).

Were they Naomi Watts’ lads? She certainly had two sons, Alexander and Samuel. Alexander was born in 2007, and Samuel was born in 2008. Maybe the pupils were her sons but they were only four and three, not five. Also, why would Australian Naomi and American Liev Schreiber want their sons to have a British Curriculum education? Admittedly, Naomi was born and raised in the UK until the age of fourteen but would she be that particular about the style of infant schooling? Our guess was that they were Oaklee Pendergast and Samuel Joslin, the younger child actors, although we couldn’t find their ages on the internet. Tom Holland, who plays Lucas, was in his teens and had recently starred as Billy in the musical version of ‘Billy Elliot’, so it was definitely not him.

‘The Impossible’ looked exciting because of the stars, the director and the subject matter. Yes, it was a long shot but I wanted to give my script to someone working on it. If I gave it to one of the production crew it would be quickly ‘misplaced’ in a fliptop bin. I needed to shin up the tightrope ladder, brave vertigo and toe my way towards the director, Naomi or Ewan.

The director, Juan Antonio Bayona, looked promising because he was new to the scene and full of vim and vigour. He had worked on television commercials and music videos but really turned heads (and stomachs) with the horror movie ‘The Orphanage’. The man was on a roll. The only problem was that the writer of ‘The Orphanage’, Sergio G. Sanchez, was also the writer of ‘The Impossible’. This suggested a working partnership and I doubted he would want to break up the winning formula to take on a new, unknown writer. It would have been like asking Spike Jonze to ditch Charlie Kaufman straight after ‘Being John Malkovich’ and before ‘Adaptation’, or asking Ethan Coen to fire his older brother, Joel.

Maybe I should target Naomi Watts. We were a similar age. She was two years older. She was born in the UK and her parents separated when she was four years old. I was born in the UK and my parents divorced when I was four. She was drawn to the Indie, dark stuff like ‘Mulholland Drive’, ‘21 Grams’ and ‘Eastern Promises’. My film script was a black comedy. No, approaching her wouldn’t work because she was a famous woman and I was a male stranger. She might worry I was a chancer trying to hit on her or, even worse, a peverted stalker hoping to smell her hair. Her defences would be up before I’d even opened my mouth.

I already knew that the person I wanted to approach was Ewan McGregor. It wasn’t really a process of elimination. Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t his most fervent fan, although I’d seen a surprisingly large number of his films (about eighteen). I say ‘surprisingly’ because I’d watched them for their content more than for Ewan, although he delivered great performances. He was an incredibly versatile actor who could happily lead, play support or be part of an ensemble. Some of his performances were fascinating because he was almost unnoticeable, almost blank. He had the confidence to make Andy in ‘Brassed Off’ and Billy in ‘Little Voice’ almost absent because he understood the quietness of those characters. I was drawn to that subtlety because I thought it was the same as approachability. In the documentary ‘Long Way Round’, he seemed grounded and good-humoured, someone who would give you the time of day.

Putting aside the fact that he was a wealthy film star, we had a few things in common. We were both married with kids, we originally came from small towns and, most significantly of all, we were the same age. Well, alright, we weren’t born on exactly the same day if we were going to get the calendar out and be all persnickety. I was eight months older but we were two men turning forty, that horrible milestone age when a man feels elderly and emasculated. And that would clinch the deal. Our similarity in years would cut through all the formality, and make us bond. He would love the script and fly me off to LA first-class. It would be the start of something major and my life would transform into 3D Technicolor. I would become the Susan Boyle of the screenwriting world (I already had the eyebrows) and would be the most popular X Factor fairytale of them all; a nobody who becomes a somebody. Yes, it was a whopping dream but the adrenalin and caffeine that raced through my veins felt very real.

If we got the teaching gig, Family Braund could shuttle up to Khao Lak and hopefully reside rent free at the Orchid Beach Resort which looked very swanky. According to the website, it was ‘an exclusive boutique resort’ that offered an ‘unlimited seaside experience’. I guess nighttime and rain would not necessarily ‘limit’ your seaside experience. They had 78 rooms, 2 pools, 2 restaurants, a gym, a library and a spa. We could find a school up there for Isabella and I could hang out with Ewan, holding weights for him in the gym, guaranteeing novels in the library. This could lead onto a totally different life for the four of us.

We looked at the notes Kirsten had frantically scribbled onto a piece of scrap paper earlier. She had managed to get the person’s name and email address but wanted me to double check them. As we knew, email addresses were short and tidy things but the omission of a letter or hyphen would throw you into the clutches of that nasty mailer-daemon. My mission (if I chose to accept it) was to go down to the school that afternoon to pick up Isabella and find a way of checking the name and email address from Michael’s printout.

Michael had whipped that email away from Kirsten because he wanted to show off but also wanted to look exclusive. He was both generous and offensive, a very odd combination. He pompously thought they had only contacted his school in Phuket and specifically needed a teacher from him. The school was good (Isabella loved it) but it didn’t have a national reputation, let alone an international reputation, and they certainly didn’t need Michael to mediate. My guess was that the busy production manager had sent the same email to all the International schools in Phuket. I doubt he would just send to Michael’s school and wait with baited breath for his reply.

Trying to act like Columbo, I whistled my way down to pick up Isabella at three o’clock and said to Michael that Kirsten had been winding me up by saying he had an email from Ewan McGregor.

Michael, who looked like a chubby Robbie Williams with a blond ponytail, smiled at me and yanked the printout from the top pocket of his denim shirt. I knew he wouldn’t be able to resist showing me it.

‘Don’t go calling them or nothing. I’ve got