Happy ever Bafta

Indeed, there's nothing of the Bafta luvvie about Glenaan. Born in Helensburgh and brought up in Garelochhead, he gave up a career as a joiner to become an actor, at first playing bit parts in the likes of Taggart and working with 7:84 Theatre Company. More recently, his career has taken him behind the camera. Television series such as Spooks and Wired provide bread-and-butter directorial work, but it's his feature films - Gas Attack (2001), Yasmin (2004) and Summer (2008) - that have been attracting attention and winning awards across Europe.

Gas Attack (winner of the Michael Powell Award for best British film at the Edinburgh International Film Festival) concerns a community of asylum-seekers who suddenly, and suspiciously, grow sick. Yasmin follows a young, non-devout Muslim woman who finds that attitudes towards her change after the September 11 attacks. Summer, which stars Robert Carlyle, is set in an English town devastated by the death of the mining industry. All three films wear their social conscience on their sleeve, but contain strong emotional undercurrents that stop them from simply climbing up on a political soapbox.

"The important thing about Summer is there's no -ist' or -ism' attached to the film," Glenaan says. "It doesn't blame anyone. It doesn't say Margaret Thatcher is terrible because she closed the mines down and that Ian MacGregor was her puppet. It's not even interested in that. For me, it's like Chekhov in working-class accents. You're looking at men dealing with emotions and masculinity, a wee dysfunctional family that's made up of men."

Carlyle plays the guilt-ridden Shaun, who looks after his wheelchair-bound friend Daz (Steve Evets). Daz is dying from years of alcohol abuse and his son, Daniel (Michael Socha), is in danger of continuing the downward spiral by drinking and getting into trouble at school. In flashback, we see Shaun and Daz in their childhood and teenage years, in particular the one bittersweet summer they shared with local girl Katy (played, in her grown-up incarnation, by Rachael Blake). As the story progresses, we witness how the spark of promise within the teenage Shaun is snuffed out and how ultimately this leads to the heavy burden of responsibility that he believes he owes to Daz.

"Shaun is Daz's best pal, his dad, his brother, his slave," Glenaan explains. "He wipes his backside, he does the cooking, he cleans the house and he doesn't get much in return. I suppose he gets the benefit of Daz's disability allowance, which probably pays the rent and there's a wee bit extra for a few pints. It's a love/hate relationship, a marriage between two guys. Daz is a bit weaker than Shaun; he abdicates responsibility and hides himself in alcohol. On one level, there's more dysfunctionality in this story than there is in Hamlet. But if you're looking for a genre to put this film in, then maybe you could say it's a tragedy with a happy ending - a hard-fought-for ending."

Glenaan needed a great actor to pull off the mix of strength, anger, disappointment, fear and love that bubbles inside of Shaun, and that's where Robert Carlyle steps in. Stop anyone in the street and ask them to name Carlyle's best roles, and they'll probably say Begbie in Trainspotting, Gaz in The Full Monty and maybe that scarred baddie in the James Bond film. These commercial hits required Carlyle to be showy on the outside, but his best work in recent years - TV series The Last Enemy and the most poignant moments in 28 Weeks Later - has come from deep inside. Another of his powerfully internalised performances forms the basis of Summer.

"Shaun is the fulcrum around which the whole story takes place," explains Glenaan. "In a way, all of the scenes and events are running like a long-playing film in Shaun's head. Shaun is fairly emotionally raw and I needed Bobby to expose himself for me a wee bit. And he went at it, day in, day out, in order to do that.

"There are three timescales in the film and nine actors playing three characters, which is a bit of an emotional Rubik's Cube. I needed somebody at the centre who is capable of encompassing the whole film and making it feel like it's coming out of his experience. Shaun in the present day doesn't really say or do that much, so you also have to find somebody who is able to animate his journey emotionally. The dialogue in the film is the wee bit of the iceberg that you see above the water. The bit that we wanted to make the film about is the two-thirds underneath - the bit that sank the Titanic. It was imperative for us to get somebody who could do that."

The failures of the education system in coming to grips with a boy like Shaun are central to screenwriter Hugh Ellis's take on the character. It's not that Shaun acts the way he does because of his dyslexia; it's more that his teenage self goes off the rails because of the lack of compassion and understanding from the adults around him. At one point, his head teacher tags him as "borderline special needs"; at another, a doctor asks Shaun's mother if he has any psychological problems. The experts have no answers; or, if they do, they can't be bothered to give them.

"The truth of the matter is, for a lot of working-class kids, you're thick'; and for a lot of middle-class kids, you're dyslexic'," says Glenaan, giving a class spin to Shaun's problem. "That's exactly Hugh's stance on it. Hugh is a school governor and sees it all the time, even now."

However, Ellis - who grew up in the area in which the story is set - and Glenaan don't simply see Shaun as a one-off case: he's representative of a wider social attitude of dejection that hit this and many other working-class regions from the mid-1980s onwards.

"There's a low expectation across everyone," says Glenaan. "The teachers have low expectations because it used to be that the boys would go to the pits and the girls would go to hairdressing college in Mansfield. My observation of this community when I went there was well, it's south of Sheffield and north of Nottingham, and I call it the land that time forgot'. It's like a wee Bermuda Triangle, all these villages and towns where the pit was the main employer and, since the mining industries closed, they've been left to stagnate. It's like growing up in a village next to the Somme 10 years after the event. You know something major happened just over there - a war went on, and there's a weight and oppression - but it's nothing really to do with you. That's the environment these guys are growing up in. Their whole life is shaped by what has gone before."

Glenaan illustrates his point with a specific example. "We went to one high school of 1100 pupils, right in the epicentre of this place, and told the headmaster we were making a feature film, that Robert Carlyle was in it and it would be a great opportunity for the kids. And he said, no, nobody would want to audition. There's such an incredible deflation and lack of self-esteem, it's almost as if the community has been told they're rubbish - and now what's worrying is they partly believe it. I think the challenge that Hugh is laying down to the community in this script - and it's done through the character of Shaun - is that, in order to move into the future, you need to let go of the past. You need to let go of the bad stuff or it will gnarl you up like it has Daz. And you also need to let go of some good stuff, if you're being honest. You need to let it all go."

Glenaan is not dwelling on the past at the moment - he already has both eyes on the future. He is currently working with author James Kelman on two projects: one, an original screenplay, Into The Music, that's structured around a road trip through America; the other, an adaptation of Kelman's last novel, Kieron Smith, Boy. The latter, in its essence, retains some of the central themes that intrigued the director about Summer.

"We're writing a film script, not a literary script that will then be adapted to be made into a film," Glenaan stresses. "The story is at once an interior monologue and an external story. It's a book which is all about education and conditioning and how we're formed. It's set in the past but it's about who we are in the present day. It's about our DNA. At the centre of it you've got this wee boy, Kieron, who is like a sponge. Before he knows it, he's got certain guidelines that he's working round, where he accepts that the Queen is the head of the state, and that we should support her just because of that - he doesn't question it. And then fast-forward to 2008: when we talk about bigotry in Scotland, what do we mean by that? Kelman, with a kind of forensic example, is taking us right back to the very beginning and saying, Well, let's go right to the core of this and see how this happens'. He doesn't blame anyone, he just explores it."

It's at this point, as the interview draws to a close, that I realise only one of the Baftas that Glenaan picked up for Summer is currently on display. What happened to the one for Best Film?

"I'll tell you the best thing about winning a Bafta," he says. "Part of Summer comes out of a school in Bramley Vale, which is a small village that was devastated after the miners strike. We filmed in Bramley Vale School, and the Bafta for Best Film is sitting in that school.

"It's an encouragement to the young folk there to do their stuff, because Hugh Ellis is a guy who went to that school, wrote a screenplay and won a Best Film award for it. You can't get any prouder than that: it's a badge of honour, really."

That should be the perfect, positive note to end on but, as a postscript, Glenaan calls me at work the following day.

"You asked what perks there were to winning a Bafta," he says. "Well I've just been asked to switch on the Christmas lights in Helensburgh." The admiration of your peers is one thing but, for a local lad made good, this truly is fame's reward.

Summer opens in UK cinemas on Friday