Trainspotting writer behind camera

Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh is to direct his first movie.

Soul Crew will be a "high energy, violent drama" about British football hooligans. The Scottish novelist has also written the script for the film, due to start shooting later this year.

His best-selling book Trainspotting became a box-office hit starring Ewan McGregor and Jonny Lee Miller.

But this will be the first time that Welsh, author of Filth, Porno and The Acid House, has gone behind a camera himself.

Meanwhile, Trainspotting actor Robert Carlyle is to take the title role in period epic Jamie McGillivray.

Billed as "Braveheart meets Last of the Mohicans", it centres on a renegade Jacobite soldier who flees the English army after the Battle of Culloden in 1746 and seeks sanctuary in America.

- NZPA