James McAvoy Lifts Lid On Directorial Debut ‘California Schemin’: “It Was The Most Stressful Thing I’ve Ever Done In My Life” — Glasgow Film Festival

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James McAvoy touched down in his hometown at the Glasgow Film Festival this weekend where the actor lifted the lid on his experience of directing his first feature film California Schemin’ , which he admitted was “the most stressful thing I’ve ever done in my life.”  Speaking to an audience at the Glasgow Film Theatre for an In Conversation event on Sunday, the Glasgow native said: “I remember waking up one morning feeling like I needed a root canal because my molars were killing me, and I had a toothache because I was clenching my jaw so much in the night.

My face was swelling up and that’s quite problematic because I have to be in the film.” The X-Men actor recently wrapped shooting California Schemin’, based on Gavin Bain’s autobiography of the same name, which was later re-printed as Straight Outta Scotland.

The story was later adapted into the 2013 SXSW doc The Great Hip Hop Hoax. McAvoy’s fiction feature is set in the late 1990s, where Bain and Billy Boyd had their musical ambitions consistently ridiculed for having the “wrong” accents, so they went for broke and reinvented themselves as Californian rappers.

The duo re-recorded their own tracks with fake accents and turned up in London claiming to be an established duo on the California scene as well as childhood friends with Eminem.