Where is trainspotting based

What a fuckin scene; two guys stand in the doorway ay the toilet, just pishing intae the place, which has a good inch ay stagnant, spunky urine covering the flair. A council regeneration programme has seen the demolition of much of the social housing in the area, in practice fragmenting the community as families are temporarily re-housed elsewhere and leaving local businesses without custom.

As well as selling low-priced basics — customers can buy a single egg here if that is all they need — it serves as a hub for the local food bank, holds fortnightly cook-in days and organises second-hand goods swaps. A Muirhouse resident for the past decade, Blythe says she has witnessed the slow erosion of community spirit in the area. In an early chapter, he describes a stand-off over the order of play at the pool table, noting that one of his companions was too drunk to hold a cue, despite it being before midday.

Bartender Sam Hall insists the response from locals since the launch has been welcoming. The appearance of the occasional hipster pub is part of a gentler and more coherent wave of change, argues Peter Matthews, a lecturer in social policy at the University of Stirling, who lives at the end of Leith Walk.

The old pubs at the bottom of tenements have closed down as their older working-class clientele die out, and they are replaced by a younger clientele who want a different kind of place to drink. We pay for your stories! Do you have a story for The Scottish Sun Online. Email us at scottishsundigital news. Jump directly to the content. A little further up the road on the left is Queen Margaret Drive.

A few minutes down the road you can find the galleried bar where Begbie Robert Carlyle entertains the crowd with his pool story and demonstrates how not to dispose of a beermug.

The nightclub has since been demolished. The railway station where Tommy tries vainly to whip up some enthusiasm for the Scottish countryside is on Rannoch Moor , at the northern tip of Loch Ossian up toward Fort William.

Empty and dilapidated at the time of filming, the five grand Victorian houses which make up the hotel have been totally renovated and spruced up into quite a classy establishment. The original finale, which allows for a kinder, more optimistic denouement, is reinstated, and the final draft of the finished text is delivered just before filming starts.

Rehearsals begin the second week in May, in a rented flat at the top of a Glasgow tower block. We try to get the leads, but you don't need all the actors for rehearsals because quite a lot of them are only doing one or two days' filming. Also, ironically, a lot of the top film crews in Britain live here. But we're doing a couple of days in Edinburgh and also pick-ups scene-setting, dialogue-free snatches shot to pad out the action.

Meanwhile, a crew has been assembled, and consists mostly of people who worked on Shallow Grave. Led by Boyle, they are midway through a recce, hunting for suitable locations in which to film exterior scenes.

The activity on this particular day involves darting around Glasgow. Having completed a trip to a crematorium in the morning, everybody reconvenes for lunch at the Brewhouse in the town centre. Coincidentally, this bar, complete with ample balcony area and quiet coves aplenty is also the next stop on the location list.

Courtrooms tend to be reluctant to let film crews in because, I don't know, Taggart misbehaved or something. Tomorrow it's off to Edinburgh to explore the possibilities of filming a shoplifting scene in John Menzies, in the city's Princes Street.

The Scottish newsagents stepped into the breach after another major retailer pulled out due to the subject matter of the scene in question. However, today, MacDonald is not feeling too well, suffering from a decidedly dicky stomach that he blames on a sausage roll of dubious origin.

So he heads back to the production office, based at the disused Wills cigarette factory on the outskirts of central Glasgow, while Boyle and his cohorts suss out the bar. While a recce, to the outsider, appears to be little more than a load of people standing around looking at their surroundings, the technicalities go a lot deeper.

In the Brewhouse, for instance, the prospective location for Day 14's scene in which Begbie starts a major bar-room brawl, the initial concerns are that the lightbulbs are too bright and that an unstrategically placed spotlight could hamper filming. With the bar already equipped with booths, Boyle and production designer Kave Quinn conclude that the bar can be refitted with a long table and bench, as well as a balsawood chair needed for the fight scene.

It is also decided that around 90 extras will be needed for the scene, ten of them for the punch-up. To keep costs down, only one section of the bar will be used, filled with tables to give the impression that it is more thickly populated. The lightbulbs will be replaced. You have to balance up the colour of the place, the temperature, and then brief the location manager about things you need. The Brewhouse, for example, is the only pub we could find with the necessary balcony.

We had difficulty finding a crematorium and especially a courtroom. Courtrooms tend to be reluctant to let film crews in because I don't know, Taggart misbehaved or something. With the bar fully examined, everybody piles into the waiting bus to make the minute trip to the next prospective location: the Volcano nightclub. The club turns out to be locked, leaving everybody to stand around for 20 minutes. Someone with a key is eventually unearthed, and once inside, Boyle explains the set-up to everybody.

And Renton manages to land Diane. It's basically a pick-up joint. This time, it's fluorescent light that is required. The club's name will be retained, but muslin and canvas drapes will be hung to curtain off the section where Tommy and Spud are having their conversation.

Meanwhile, concern about dialogue being drowned out by loud music will be dealt with by recording speech as normal then adding subtitles. All parties satisfied, the club, and its adjoining car park - for the scene where Renton and Diane first meet - are booked for filming on Tuesday, May 30, Then it's into the ladies' loos to work out co-ordinates for the sex talk between the two girlfriends.

Happily, the facilities prove to be the right size, the purple walls ideal. But again, lightbulbs are a problem. Covering them with black tape or removing them altogether seems to be the best option. A constant stream of extras moving in and out will add the finishing touch. As for interior filming, the Wills factory, currently playing host to a hive of production office activity, has more than enough room within its 15, square feet for the sets needed for the allotted three weeks of interior filming.

Not only will it double for squalid Edinburgh squats, it will also accommodate the film's more cosy, suburban aspects, and even' a couple of London sets. Exterior filming will entail a three-and-a-half day trip down south at the end of the seven-week shoot. At the moment location scouts are busily scouring London. In addition, the winding corridors of the former cigarette factory, now decorated with an assortment of recent film posters, are housing the costume and art departments.

Art is filled with storyboards detailing a frame-by-frame analysis of how each scene should look, set designs "reference ideas and general junkie stuff," says MacDonald and photos of "interesting" street corners in London that might make appropriate locations. The look of the project comes courtesy of Kave Quinn.

Having been responsible for the primary coloured veneer that made Shallow Grave so memorable, Quinn has once again been drafted in to work similar miracles with Trainspotting , although there's more to her job than slapping on a coat of paint.

The look of Trainspotting is drawn from real life but very much exaggerated. And it's quite stylised, which makes it more interesting than just documentary style.

He in turn passes information back to us and it's all put together. You have firm ideas about how you think things should be and hope he'll like them.

Similarly, he has ideas about how he thinks it should be. It's a constant production line. Having already worked on the storyboards - scene-by-scene sketches of how each scene will look on screen - Quinn turns her attentions to props and locations.

Then, about six weeks before production, I start buying things that would make good props.