Trainspotting author to direct film

Irvine Welsh: First time director

Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh is set to direct his first movie.

The Scottish novelist will step behind the camera for a film about British football hooligans.

Soul Crew will be a "high energy, violent drama" based on a book about Cardiff City FC's notorious hooligan element.

Welsh, who has also written the script for the film, is due to start shooting later this year.

Title role

His best-selling book Trainspotting was turned into 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 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.