IAIN Robertson is compiling a bucket list.

He wants to see the Northern Lights and then he's maybe thinking about a skydive.

He might be new to the idea but then you have to remember the 33-year-old actor was rather busy making films and appearing on stage when others his age were going travelling and ticking things off that list.

After years in London he's happily back living in Glasgow. In Govan, to be exact, surrounded by family and friends and he says he has come full circle since he left home at the tender age of 13 to go to theatre school in London.

Iain might have headed south looking for acting experience but it was on his own doorstep where he landed the role that would make him a household name in the Gilles MacKinnon- directed Small Faces, starring alongside Joe McFadden, Steven Duffy, Laura Fraser and Kevin McKidd.

"I was in digs with the family of a boy at my theatre school. The politest way to put it was that his parents were weird," remembers Iain.

" I was on the phone to my mum and the mother took the phone off me and said, 'He's very unhappy, you've obviously forced him into this (which couldn't have been further from the truth). He leaves every day with a tear in his eye'.

"So I said I needed to go home that weekend and see my mum. I went to the school matron and borrowed money to go home.

"I was really down so when my mum woke me up on the Saturday morning she said, 'Why don't you visit your pals at Toonspeak theatre company? That'll cheer you up.'

" So I schlepped over there and Stephen King, who ran it, said there was a guy coming in that day looking for a 13-year-old.

"And in walked Gilles MacKinnon. We were just improvising and he came up to me and said, 'Can I have your contact details?' I said, 'Actually I've got an agent."

It took two months for Gilles to offer Iain the part of Lex, the young teenager caught up in gang culture in 1960s Glasgow, though he admitted later he knew on day one he had found the perfect actor for the role.

Iain's honest performance was much acclaimed, marking him out as a name to watch.

Now 20 years after the film's release, the cast are gathering at Glasgow Film Theatre on Sunday for a special screening at this year's Glasgow Film Festival.

It won't be so much a reunion for the cast but a catch up with old friends who see each other regularly.

"I was 13 when most kids are making schoolfriends for life. Steven Duffy, who plays Bobby, became the big brother I never had," explains Iain.

" Kevin and Laura, I still speak to all of the time. I just did a play with young Eilidh McCormick, who played my cousin in it. And Joe and I have been playing brothers in Holby City.

"That was weird, all the crew were saying, 'It's amazing how well you pass as brothers and your rapport.' They don't know we did it 20 years ago."

The roots of so much of what Iain has learned about the world of acting and filming, with roles in Sea of Souls and Rab C Nesbitt on television as well as films The Debt Collector, Basic Instinct 2 and Plunkett & Macleane, can be traced back to Small Faces.

He is still close to Martina Gormely, mother of Star Wars associate producer Tommy Gormley, who was his chaperone on the film.

"She was teaching me how film sets worked: decorum, how to behave yourself," he says. "She said Small Faces would never have been made if we had followed the rules of how many hours a child is allowed to work, which are really stringent now.

"She realised I had to be on set all the time and her rule was, as long as I was up for it, it could go ahead. She said she probably broke every rule in the book. But I loved it. When they took me off set to go and rest I didn't want to leave."

Now he is older Iain says he always feels very protective of young people on set and recalls working with Brian Vernal, who recently appeared on television in The Casual Vacancy.

"A lot of people were giving him advice. I was sharing a dressing room with him and his heid was bursting," says Iain.

"I said I wished I was as switched on as him. When I was 21 I was an a***hole and thought I knew best.

"I said, 'I wish I had half the nous you've got, so my advice to you is keep your own counsel because nine times out of 10 you'll make the right choice because you're that smart."

Iain says he doesn't see himself on screen when he watches old films and television programmes he made in his teens. " I look at him and think, I wish I could remember what he knew because I think he's quite good," he jokes.

Advice he would give his younger self is to mellow out and just enjoy himself.

Iain is living in Govan at the moment but says he has his eye on a move to the west end. His drinking days are over and he is embracing coffee culture, he laughs.

One of the projects he has been involved with since coming back to Scotland has been fundraising for the Scottish Cot Death Trust, a charity close to his heart as he lost an elder sister when she was just a few months old.

That's where the skydive comes in, after helping to raise about £20,000 last year.

"I remember when my niece was three months or so and I was round visiting my sister. I went in and checked she was breathing," he says quietly.

" Dawn caught me and said, 'Were you checking she was breathing? You get over it.'

"Obviously it's ingrained in us."

His next project is the film Pale Star, shot in Iceland with director Graeme Maley, who Iain worked with on his stage show Angels. There he will hopefully see the Northern Lights and plan a few more additions to that bucket list.

Small Faces, GFT, March 1, 2.10pm.