I don't go on planes. I haven't been on one for 10 years and would be quite happy to see out the next decade in a similar fashion. So, when I accepted the job of directing Anna Karenina for Channel 4, to be filmed entirely on location in Poland and Finland, I knew that getting there would be part of the challenge.
If you'd asked me then how to travel from my home in Dumfriesshire to Helsinki solely by public transport, or, indeed, if it was even possible, I wouldn't have had a clue. Expecting an argument about the perceived eccentricities of my travel arrangements - why the hell should I fly? Dennis Bergkamp doesn't; neither does the hero of TV's The A-Team, B.A. Baracus ('I ain't goin' on no damn plane, fool!') - I was reluctant to completely commit to the job.
'Charlie,' I said to the producer, as we sat discussing the contract. 'Look, there's something we need to talk about...' He cut me off immediately. 'You're leaving on the 12 o'clock from Waterloo. You arrive in Warsaw at 9am the next morning. Your tickets are booked.' So, that was it; no more excuses. I was on my way.
Though we filmed the vast majority of Anna Karenina in Poland, February brought an unexpected thaw to Warsaw and the need to change to a colder location. The -20 C that we'd been told to expect never materialised, and it was simply not cold enough to shoot one vital scene involving two of the main characters, Levin and Kitty, meeting on an ice rink in the street.
The producers decided to move us to Finland. The temperatures were due to be between -3 and -10 ; cold enough for our purposes. We scheduled in two days filming in Helsinki. My flightless journey there would begin at my Scottish home very early on a Monday morning and end 2,000 miles later in the Finnish capital on Wednesday, in time to film the next day. I'm told it took even longer to book. Lisa, my assistant, used seven different travel agents over four days.
It's a 16-mile car journey from my home in Tynron to the railway station in Dumfries. From there, I made my way to Carlisle and then on to London, where I was due to catch the Eurostar from Waterloo to Brussels. It was great to know that all the arrangements had been made for me; that my route was mapped out and that all my tickets were booked and paid for. I could just sit back, relax and enjoy the jour ney. What a job! Remind me to direct more big-budget lavish costume dramas.
From Brussels, my trajectory would take me into and across Germany, to Denmark, on through Sweden and then, finally, across the Baltic Sea to Finland. Some of my changeover times between trains were very tight; only 12 minutes in Brussels and 14 minutes in Cologne. In fact, the train I was meant to get from Cologne to Hamburg was running 25 minutes late, which meant I would have missed my connection at the other end. A nice German lady spotted me scouring the timetable in a bewildered search. She very kindly pointed me in the direction of another train that would actually get me to Hamburg 40 minutes earlier. I found it on the other side of the station.
An amazing beast, the Metropolitan was an exclusive train catering for businessmen. A quarter of each carriage was an office and, once I'd paid my supplement of 30 marks (about £9.20) to ensure a place, I really felt as though I should take my shoes off; it was so clean and comfortable. You wouldn't get this sort of service on the Dumfries to Carlisle route, I can tell you.
Settled into my luxurious surroundings, I was free to admire the stunning sight of Cologne cathedral rising up in front of me at the end of the platform. I think that, of all the many staggering things I saw along a very interesting journey, this is the one that will stay with me most. There is something quite surprising about the way in which this amazing piece of religious architecture looks as though it has just been plonked at the end of a railway platform. For a moment you wonder which, like the chicken and egg, came first: the cathedral or the platform?
Other memories stand out almost dream-like from that long journey across Germany; a collage of feelings and sights garnered through the windows of moving trains. In Düsseldorf, I looked out of the window and saw what seemed to be a block of flats with big square windows and, by the bottom left-hand corner of each window, a number drawn in white paint. Behind the windows, I could just make out rows of women, clad in scanty underwear; prostitutes in a high-rise brothel. Quite a different take on sexual politics from that in Anna Karenina .
One overriding impression I gained as the trains passed through Dortmund, Düsseldorf, Cologne and then on through Bremen, Essen and Duisburg to Hamburg, is that the world has been taken over by McDonald's. That universal yellow 'M' hung in each of these cities, normally close to the stations - one of the first things any traveller would see on arrival. Warsaw too, had one. And I was greeted, upon my return to Dumfries, by a brand new 'M' hanging above a brand new restaurant, like some evil talisman. Nowhere is safe.
I learnt just how thorough the Germans are about their Customs points. No one ever asked to see my passport in Denmark or Sweden, but on entering and leaving Germany I was given the full treatment: roused from sleep by torchlight in my face, a big burly man standing over me, demanding to see my passport. I felt I was in some Steve McQueen movie.
As I moved from country to country, I started to realise just how convenient the euro could be. By the time I got to Helsinki, my pockets were full of Belgian francs, marks, Danish kroner, Swedish krona and Finnish markka. The coins get everywhere, like sand. I'm still finding them, weeks later.
The Metropolitan arrived in Hamburg at about 7.30pm on the Monday. The next leg was across the sea to Copenhagen. Not quite knowing what would happen at this point, I was surprised when the train ran straight on to the boat. There was a long echo throughout the hold of the ship as we hooked onto couplings and then, that was it. Passengers are free to get off and go to one of the ship's many bars and restaurants, or just stay on the train. Looking at the huge tethered locomotive, rolling in the opposite direction to the ship as the water got choppier, I was quite glad I had chosen to get off. The idea of getting seasick on a train was just a bit too surreal for me.
I stayed over in Copenhagen that night. It is a beautiful city, and I could have happily stayed longer, but my thoughts were on arriving for the shoot, so early next morning, I boarded a catamaran for the 45-minute ride to Malmo in Sweden. A lot of people commute from Malmo, which is a fairly small fishing town, over the water to the Danish capital. I was quite struck by the idea of commuting from one country to another, with a different language and different customs. Then I thought about travelling from Dumfries to London, and realised that I do exactly the same.
In Malmo, I boarded a train for Stockholm, whence I would pick up the boat that would take me on the final leg of my journey, across the frozen Baltic to Helsinki. I could feel it getting colder, the further north I went. Everywhere I looked in Sweden, I saw tree felling and realised what an important part wood plays in the lives of Swedes. All along the four-and-a-half-hour journey I kept looking up from the script I was working on to see more lumberjacks.
At about 5.30pm that day, I left Stockholm on board the Silja Princess, a gargantuan passenger ferry, dwarfing any boat I had ever been on. It takes more than two hours to clear all the little inlets around Stockholm; they are, apparently, incredibly tricky waters to negotiate and the going is slow. This is one of the busiest strips of water anywhere in Europe; ships leave Stockholm at intervals of between 12 and 15 minutes, and I was told that 12 major ferries full of people arrive in Helsinki every day.
The Finns, I discovered, are paranoid about drugs. They had no problem with traffickers until they joined the European Union, but now a lot of drugs are flowing into the country, and their Customs are ultra-strict. We ran into problems with them on the way back. The production team were stopped and searched, and a roll of film we had shot was opened by a suspicious officer. Exposed to the light, it was ruined. We lost a lot of shots that had captured the feel of the location.
The ship was so comfortable I felt I could have stayed on her for days. The contents of my cabin's mini-bar were all free of charge. I won't go into the carnage that followed this discovery, but, suffice to say it was a quite hungover Scotsman who woke early next morning to witness the approach into Helsinki. I think my hangover helped to make this incredible experience all the more visceral. On the horizon, I could see another massive ferry, looking almost as though it had been painted onto some beautiful white canvas.
As the alcohol drained out of my system in the freezing morning air, I was filled by a sheer joy to be alive and here, looking out at light glinting off the ice as we cut our path through it. Just hours earlier, smaller ice-breaker boats had been literally cutting through it, making a safe channel for our passage. In Scotland, I'm used to ponds freezing, but to think of the whole Baltic Sea becoming an icy mass was almost beyond my comprehension. It's quite incredible to be in a place where something so seemingly spectacular is the norm. In London, it only takes some heavy rain to bring everything to a grinding halt. Here I was in a part of the world where a foot of snow made no difference to public transport and a whole sea freezing was an everyday occurrence.
The Silja Princess arrived in Helsinki on the Wednesday morning, almost exactly 48 hours after I'd left Tynron. It had been cold in Scotland when I said goodbye to my wife and kids, but that was nothing compared with the temperatures we experienced in Finland. I think the Scots and English have different psychological approaches when it comes to the cold. We have to deal with it so much more and, living out in the Dumfriesshire countryside, I'd say I was pretty hardened to it.
I didn't suffer too much in Helsinki, but there was one night when I had to turn back from a planned walk, actually in pain from the sheer cold. I think the Finns and the Scots do have quite a bit in common; I even found that Helsinki reminded me of Glasgow in certain ways. The stone work and architectural design of many of the buildings are not dissimilar. I often think when I walk through Glasgow that the architecture at the back of buildings is even more interesting than that at the front. You've got to scout round, down the alleys, to see it. I found I was doing the same in Helsinki.
The Finns, like the Scots, enjoy a drink. In fact, the Finnish people seem obsessed with alcohol. It's not only that they drink a lot of it, it also seems to be their main topic of conversation. The ships around Helsinki are full of Finns stocking up on duty-free booze. Some boats don't even land anywhere, they just leave Finnish waters, skirt around for a bit and return to discharge their cargoes of people clinging to trolleys packed full of vodka, wine and beer.
I was viewed as something of a circus act by the people I met in Helsinki. I was the Scotsman who'd travelled all the way to their country by train because he didn't like flying. It wasn't long before I was lured into a good old Scots versus Finns drinking contest, though only once we'd finished filming, I have to state. Mika Karttunen, from the Finnish production crew, took me to a Helsinki nightclub just to get me completely wasted on as many different types of vodka as possible. I lost track of the types of drink that passed my lips that night: treacle-flavoured vodka, strawberry-flavoured vodka, orange-flavoured vodka, perhaps even vodka- flavoured vodka. I can't remember. What I do remember is Mika's father-in-law, a very dapper man who sported a monocle, smuggling out his own brogues to his son-in-law who, although otherwise equally immaculately dressed, was being refused entry because of his trainers. Another surreal moment from an incredible week.
I was exhausted by the time I left Helsinki on the Friday night on the 2,000-mile journey back to London, where I would start editing the film we had shot. All this travelling felt quite in the spirit of the film, really. Anna, Vronsky, Levin, Kitty and company would have had to endure days of travel on trains between Moscow and St Petersburg, and I doubt they would have had a free mini bar to get them through it. Cheers. Here's to not flying.
