James McAvoy can’t point to a single director whose example he followed with his directorial debut “California Schemin‘.” Rather, it’s been more than a quarter-century of watching various directors ply their craft that gave him the lessons he needed to try out filmmaking himself.
“I quickly started to realize in my 20s, like it’s not as easy as learning from people making mistakes,” McAvoy told TheWrap at TIFF 2025. “That’s not learning. Learning is when you look at people who are great and you can’t even understand what they’re doing.”
Among those great directors McAvoy has worked with over the years include Joe Wright on the 2007 film “Atonement” and Danny Boyle on the heist film “Trance.” He also credited Jamie Lloyd, a British stage director who has earned two Tony nominations and worked with McAvoy on five plays, as having the “most profound” impact on him.
All of that work under those veterans came handy when working on “California Schemin’,” a film about a true story hip-hop hoax. In 2004, a duo called Silibil N’ Brains released a promo single called “Play With Myself” that became a U.K. hit, getting rappers Gavin Bain and Billy Boyd a record deal and an appearance on MTV. There was just one thing: the pair claimed to be from California and sported American accents, when they were really from northern Scotland.
McAvoy’s film digs into how Bain and Boyd were repeatedly rejected, sometimes derisively so, in their attempts to just be Scottish rappers. But they were never taken seriously, and that led them to use their love of American movies to cook up fake identities in pursuit of stardom. It’s something that the pair get called out on in “California Schemin’”
“I think you can understand the reason, but it’s not an excuse, though,” McAvoy said. “All right, you got rejected, you got laughed at, you got pushed out by two people in an audition once, yeah, but what is it then? Is that okay to then suddenly make a drastic decision to abandon your integrity, your authenticity and your identity?”
“California Schemin’” will be released by StudioCanal in the UK and is seeking a U.S. distributor.
