Creation Stories and the Birth of Brit Pop: A Q&A With Ewen Bremner, Jason Isaacs and Nick Moran

Ewen Bremner knows what it takes for any big dream to come true: belief.

The actor stars in Creation Stories, a film about the rise and fall of Creation Records and its founder, Glaswegian music executive Alan McGee, the man largely responsible for the Brit Pop surge of the 1990s. Directed by Nick Moran, it also stars Jason Isaacs (Harry Potter), Suki Waterhouse (Seance), and Leo Flanagan (Dr. Who).

“This film reaffirmed for me, just stick to your guns and believe. A film doesn’t happen without belief,” Bremner told MovieMaker‘s Micah Khan in a Zoom interview with Moran and Isaacs, which you can watch above. “It doesn’t happen without people having some confidence in it.”

He says playing McGee in Creation Stories also taught him how important it is to take a leap of faith — and follow through.

“Making independent films is really tough, and we had so much really fortunate support from some really extraordinary people who believed in us. And I feel like this is a film about sticking to your guns. Alan sticks to his guns — he doesn’t do things the way that other people do. He does it his way. He doesn’t change himself to be something that he thinks the music business, you know, expects of him,” he says. “You have to take that leap. We don’t know if we’re hitting the right pitch with the size of what we’re trying to do. There’s no going back once you want to take that leap. You’ve just got to believe and keep walking through the air. It’s like Roadrunner and Wiley Coyote, you know? You’ve got to make it across the canyon.”

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The film was released in February in the UK and is coming soon to the United States.

Isaacs — who plays a brief but mighty role as a man named Ralph who takes McGee along on a bender through Los Angeles full of partying, drugs, and drinking — says he’s met many a person like Ralph in his day.

“It seems grotesque, and obviously it’s there to represent when Alan’s world is at its most chaotic and kind of imploding. But actually, I know a million Ralphs,” he says. “There are these people who were always at every party, and I kept on thinking, what do they do? How do they have the money? How do they get invited to everything?… and they’re always the people with the big bags of drugs. They clearly have got a trust fund or it’s someone else’s money, or whatever. And so it just felt very familiar to me. … I’ve spent a lot of time in Los Angeles when I was younger, and woke up a lot of times when the sun came up in houses [when] I didn’t know where I was or what happened the night before, and it was always around the Ralphs of this world.”

One main takeaway from Creation Stories, Isaacs says, is to always be aware of who is pulling the strings.

“There’s always a person at the center of all great enterprises. And at the center of this giant dysfunctional enterprise was an enormously dysfunctional man,” he says. “When you’re looking at the world, there’s someone at the center. There’s some person who’s the driving force.”

Creation Stories will be out soon — stay tuned! Main Image: Ewen Bremner and Suki Waterhouse in Creation Stories.