When is it set?
It's hard to tell what year it's set in going on the trailer?... 80's?
I think it's just present day really.
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I told him not to mention the elephant...
MovieChat Forums > The Legend of Barney Thomson (2015) Discussion > When is it set?
DEfinitely not modern day. No mobile phones for one thing. And smoking inside pubs has long been abolished. I'd say late 70s/ early 80s.
shareContrary to one of the above posts, Glasgow is a very modern city. Some parts have a foot in the past, but that's part of its charm. With regards to this movie, it's set in what's almost a Glasgow Never Never Land. It feels like the 1980s and looks like the 1980s in some ways, but there's contemporary aspects in the geography and art direction. Whilst there's an obvious lack if some modern technology. Robert Carlisle has one foot in the land of Tarantino, where dumb luck, oddball characters and the unusual are commonplace. And it works. Until the final act, at least.
NOW TARZAN MAKE WAR!
Its definitely set some time between the mid/late 1990s and the present day. There was a poster in that more modern flat for the band "Kasabian". Also, The car that Ray Winstone was driving around in was modern (in fact I think VERY modern but wouldn't swear to it).
I only saw it last night and it was one of the first things that my friends and I discussed. Neither of them had noticed the brief flickers of modern-ness and thought it had been set in the 70's/80's.
why live in the world when you can live in your head?
In addition to the Kasabian poster, Chris puts on the radio in barber's and it plays their song "Eez-eh" which was released in 2014.
shareThe grey Nissan Barney drives was first registered in February 1990, so it has to be after that.
shareHere's what RC said
Q And it’s got a real timeless quality about it, it could be set in any time, and he is a timeless character isn’t he?
Robert: Thank you that’s what I deliberately tried to do in terms of the production values. It came across to me the more work I did on the script with Colin Mclaren that it’s kind of timeless, it’s old-fashioned really, almost 50s or 60s style, and it was important to me to capture that. The shots are straight on, rather than shots set up slightly to the left or the right or the camera moving. I didn’t want any of that, I just wanted to let the actors tell this story the way things kind of used to be. Actors were given the platform to really express themselves in the 50s and 60s, and I thought well let’s try that. So equally you don’t see any mobile phones, any modern cars, and the barbers’ set in particular, that’s such a timeless place. It’s one of my images of my childhood going to those barbers with my father, boxing pictures everywhere and it could have been 1920, 1930, 1940, 1960, it didn’t matter it could have been anytime, so that’s what I endeavoured to do.
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One of the postmarks on the padded envelopes shown in the beginning shows as 2015.
The police uniforms are contemporary.