Belle And Sebastian’s Stuart Murdoch Writes, Directs, & Scores God Help The Girl Movie
In 2009, Belle And Sebastian frontman Stuart Murdoch released an oddball solo project called God Help The Girl, a sort of narrative project about young women in Glasgow, in which all the singers were women. Since then, there’s been talk about a movie version of the project; a couple of years ago, Elle Fanning was in talks to star. She’s not in it, but the movie version is out now, and it’ll be in UK theaters next month. And for this project, Murdoch is in full-blow auteur mode; he wrote and directed it, and he also did the score. The movie stars Emily Browning (Violet Baudelaire from Lemony Snicket’s A Series Of Unfortunate Events), Hannah Murray (Gilly from Game Of Thrones), and Years & Years frontman Olly Alexander. Barry Mendel, the movie’s producer, also worked on movies like Bridesmaids and The Royal Tenenbaums.
Here’s how Murdoch describes the film’s story in a press release:
It happened to a boy and a girl and a girl in a city roughly the same size and population of Glasgow. Perhaps the canals were a bit grimier, the high-rise buildings taller, the streets emptier when you needed them to be, and the beat clubs busier than the ones around here. But on the whole the city was this one.
The movie will air across theaters in the UK 8/16, and it’ll be followed by about half an hour of a Belle And Sebastian show livecast from the Corn Exchange Edinburgh. It’ll start an exclusive engagement at Glasgow Film Theatre 8/22, and it’ll open across the UK 8/29. The movie’s soundtrack album is out 8/16 on Milan Music.