Alan Cumming and Filmmaker Jono McLeod Talk My Old School

My Old School, out in limited theatrical release this week, is a strange hybrid kind of film. A documentary that features a blend of contemporary interviews and flashback animations performed by voice actors, the movie centers on a strange transfer student whose hidden inner life shocked a middle-class Scottish school in the 1990s. Once the truth about “Brandon Lee” was exposed, it became a worldwide news story and attracted the attention of filmmakers, including beloved Scottish actor Alan Cumming. At the time, Cumming was going to play Lee in a narrative film, but that fell apart, and the story went untold for years.

When the documentary finally came together, it was helmed by Scottish filmmaker Jono McLeod. McLeod, who had known Brandon in school, took it upon himself to make sure a movie actually happened this time, and actually secured an interview with his old classmate…but with a catch. Brandon would not appear on camera. Instead, McLeod managed to convince Cumming appear onscreen, lip-synching to the audio of his interview.

“Myself and my classmates were always aware that there had been various attempts to tell this story on film over the years,” McLeod told ComicBook.com. “No one had mounted it successfully. It kind of fell to me, becuase I was the only one of us who grew up to be a filmmaker. So basically it was the case of assembling together to do one last job, and that job was to tell the story of Brandon Lee. And we were aware that back in the ’90s, one of the people who tried to tell this story on film was an actor, Alan Cumming….We were sad that that hadn’t come about, and we kmnew that time was ticking by, and if we didn’t tell this story now, then nobody was going to do it. So it was time for both a movie and for our high school reunion to happen.”

Cumming, who still remembered the story and regretted that a movie had never been made, was a bit surprised by the unique way he was being asked to participate, but immediately keen to jump on board.

“It was sort of a blur, actually; I remember thinking, ‘Oh, I was going to play this character,’” recalled Cumming. “Of course, I didn’t realize that he was so involved with this story, and I go, ‘I had this connection, too,’ and he said, ‘Yes, I know, I did some research.’ So I didn’t quite grasp the whole lip-synching part for a while. I was just so taken with ‘Oh, it’s so exciting, I get to play this character that I was going to play a quarter of a century ago.’ But the more we talked about it, the more I understood. I guess I just sort of thought, ‘Well, I’m going to do this.’ Then I got the tapes, and I listened to it, and you know how when you’ve got something really scary to do, you sort of pretend it’s not happening until you actually have to do it? It was like that. All of a sudden, there I was in that terrible wig, which is actually my own hair, actually doing it in real life.”

Cumming said that the two things that appealed to him in the 1990s were the things that still resonate today: the idea of going back and getting a “do-over” at your young life, and the idea of deception, and hiding one’s true self. 

The film is currently in limited theatrical release, with a wider release planned for July 27th. Expect it to be streaming in late summer or early fall.