In 1996, Trainspotting, Danny Boyle’s seminal junkie classic, was in cinemas and Garry Fraser was back home, living the life of the characters it showed. In fact, he was outdoing them: Fraser, then 19, was so immersed in crime and so far gone on skag, he felt the film was a bit tame.

“After 20 years, I appreciate it more,” he says. “Back then, I was closed-minded. We weren’t injecting, we weren’t trainspotters and I didn’t think it represented my culture. I was also disappointed a lot of it was shot in Glasgow …”

Now 38, Fraser is sitting on the bottom floor of a high-rise on a Leith housing estate. He’s shooting a music video for a young Scottish rapper while the queue for a food bank begins to form nearby. He is also second unit director on the long-awaited Trainspotting sequel.

Fraser grew up in Muirhouse, a scheme in the north of the city where he still lives and where, in 1986, more than 50% of the area’s registered heroin users tested positive for HIV. “I wasn’t born into this world, I was thrown into it. With an alcoholic for a dad and a mum that just didn’t know how to love.” Such are the words Fraser would later use when telling his life story on film. Today, he reports that “for me it was all completely normal. Every winter there were just fewer people. I didn’t know it was because they were dying of Aids.” Alongside the drugs and disease, there was endemic crime, violence and “getting battered by the police every week”.

Fraser smiles; he speaks with a calm, soft voice at odds with his hard-scrub stories. His presence is warm, even tranquil; apiece with a Twitter bio that reads “writer, director, social entrepreneur and all around good cunt”. By 11, he was in gangs and selling hash, weed and LSD. Before he was 18, he went through 36 care homes, sexual abuse at the first one having given him the habit of running away. As a young adult, he peddled heroin for the Turkish mafia before quitting both dealing and dabbling just over a decade ago, after the birth of his first son. “For the first time in my life I had something more important than me.”

He went on prescription alternatives and signed up for a broadcast media course at the local further education college. It was a good choice. “The first film I made was on knife culture in Edinburgh. After that, I knew that’s what I wanted to do with my life. Life never makes more sense to me than when I’m directing on a set.”

And while Fraser’s early experiences had taken their toll on his life and health, at college, his experiences gave him an edge – and a subject. “I’m walking through Muirhouse and people are stealing cars and motorbikes, there’s drug dealing going on, there’s fucking close to gang wars. As an artist, would you rather that, or would you rather walk through Morningside with beautiful houses and nothing happening?

“These areas have a real diversity and life. People survive on the margins. That survival instinct that I got from Muirhouse didn’t just help me survive, it made me excel.”

I told Ewen Bremner that the heroin Trainpotting thing all started here. He gave me the most sincere cuddle Garry Fraser

In 2014, Fraser directed an autobiographical documentary about his life, Everybody’s Child. It is a pitiless immersion in an area steeped in poverty and despondence. There is scant sentimentality, just brutal fear as its subject awaits his HIV results. It won Fraser a Scottish Bafta new talent award and caught the eye of ex-Muirhouse resident Irvine Welsh, whose own experiences of the area gave rise to much of Trainspotting (the area also features in the sequel). Almost 20 years Fraser’s elder, Welsh remembers the area before it soured. The drugs, he thinks, were a symptom of the “bigger disease” of a “mass unemployment epidemic”. “They filled the gap when the jobs and opportunities had been ripped out of the community.”



Welsh was struck by more than just the personal resonance of Fraser’s work. “He hit me as so much more than just somebody who had been through the horrors of drug addiction. I sensed that this guy was a talented, socially aware and committed artist,” he says.

When researching the Trainspotting sequel, Welsh told Boyle it was essential he meet Fraser. “Not just because of his background and work with recovering addicts and community education, but as an emerging film-maker and writer.”

Initially, Boyle was eager Fraser feature onscreen; instead, Fraser invited him to see the community work he was doing with at-risk youth and recovering addicts, showing them the basics of multimedia work (they also made a sci-fi with Welsh’s help).

Two weeks later, Boyle rang back and offered Fraser the second unit job, managing a team and directing shoots solo and under his supervision. “I’ve waited 12 years for that phone call,” says Fraser, beaming. His first day threatened to be overwhelming; in fact, Fraser felt perversely confident. “I stopped and took a deep breath and said: ‘Garry, you’ve lived this, you’ve got an advantage on just about everybody in this car park in terms of your story.’ But directing a scene with Ewen Bremner by myself, that was amazing. Just to be given that amount of responsibility!”

On set, Fraser mimicked Bond – as per the original – with Ewan McGregor and Jonny Lee Miller, but found greatest kinship with Spud. “He’s the one I have most empathy for. When we were shooting in Muirhouse, I took Ewen aside and told him I shot Everybody’s Child here, that there’s been an Aids epidemic here, this heroin Trainpotting thing all started here, that we’re on hallowed ground. And he just pulled me across and gave me the most sincere cuddle I’ve ever had from anyone.”

On Sunday there will be more backslapping, as Fraser joins cast and crew to walk the red carpet for the film’s world premiere. But just as he is achieving tangible professional success, so too he says he is realising that for him, movies are the means to the end, rather than the other way round. Welsh tells me that what struck him most forcibly was Fraser’s commitment to “seeing film as a catalyst for empowerment and education in the community”. And it is this work trying to help others out of the horror he languished in for so long that is the goal, rather than, say, becoming the next Danny Boyle. “You can’t let the past define you,” he says. “I now try and fill my day with – and it sounds a bit hippy-ish – love, compassion and tolerance. Back then, I was running about scared, I was trapped by masculinity.” Is that the key to the Trainspotting films, too? He nods hard. “Anyone that makes a Scottish movie, masculinity tends to be a contributing factor. We seem to excel at fighting and drinking.”

Fraser’s tale can seem extraordinary. To him, there is an inevitability to it. “Soon enough, good people attach themselves,” he says, remembering how he counsels those young men and women who seem to be heading for disaster. “Sometimes you have to go through real hardships in life to get to real blessings.”



T2 Trainspotting is released in the UK on 27 January