MEET YOUR GUIDE
Your guide to Edinburgh’s screen history
I’m Jonathan Melville – film journalist, author and your guide around Edinburgh.
Over the past 20 years, I’ve written hundreds of thousands of words on Scottish film and TV history, whether for my five-year stint as a columnist for the Edinburgh News, online and print articles or my books The Art & Making of Highlander, Local Hero: Making a Scottish Classic, A Kind of Magic: Making the Original Highlander and Hamish Macbeth: The Making of a BBC TV Classic.
With more and more visitors to Scotland coming here thanks to seeing it on TV or at the cinema, I’ve now channelled my experience into Edinburgh Movie Tours.
Why take a private tour?
I’ve been writing about film since 2007 – first reviews, then a weekly newspaper column, and on air for BBC Radio Scotland, interviewing filmmakers and actors about their work. I’m a location obsessive by nature: in 2012 I tracked down the real places behind Pixar’s Brave, the year after that the Côte d’Azur Tourism Board invited me over to document the Riviera’s film and TV connections, and in 2014 I co-wrote an Edinburgh film locations map for the National Library of Scotland.
My first book, Seeking Perfection: The Unofficial Guide to Tremors, arrived in 2015. Five more have followed, along with commentaries and booklet essays for Arrow Video and StudioCanal.
A bit more about me
My scheduled 90-minute walk covers the best-known locations, and it’s a great way to see the city on screen. A private tour offers you the whole morning or afternoon, built around the films you care about, with me to yourself.
That might be a proper deep dive into the films made in Edinburgh. It might be a walk through Sean Connery’s Edinburgh. Or it might be an hour on Highlander or Local Hero for the fan who can only make it to Edinburgh, films shot elsewhere in Scotland, but stories I can tell wherever we happen to be standing.
