WHEN he was a teenager Dave McLean was desperate to get a job with Michelin in Dundee. "They had really great uniforms," the now 63-year-old recalls. "It looked like you were working for a Formula One team."

McLean wasn't lucky in the end. His mate was and worked for the company for 41 years. McLean, instead, put on discos and then bands, mixed with pop stars and gangsters and travelled the world. He ended up manager of Placebo, based in Bangkok, and living the kind of storied life they make movies about.

In this case, he's the one making the movie. McLean has written, produced and directed Schemers, an account of his teenage years in Dundee as a rookie promoter, all mouth and ignorance, getting on the wrong side of big-name bands (most notably Iron Maiden) and local crooks and somehow coming out on top.

That the film exists at all might be considered something of a miracle. It took two shoots, a year apart, to make it over the finish line.

"Have you ever seen Apollo 13?" McLean asks when I suggest it sounds like it might have been something of a battle to make the movie. "Going round the moon and it's all going tits up and we've got to invent a new air conditioning thing to fly back to Earth. It's similar to that, I would say. Probably a tad more difficult."

So who are you in this scenario, Dave? "I'm Tom Hanks. I get it back safely and splash-land in the Tay."

It's late Monday morning when we speak and in the penthouse of the Edinburgh Grand in St Andrew Square, McLean, his wife, daughter, and the film's star Conor Berry are enjoying the calm before the storm. They are buzzed that their little movie they made is getting its world premiere at the Edinburgh International Film Festival (it's screening tonight and tomorrow).

"It's a dream, an absolute dream," McLean admits. Berry, sitting beside him, nods in agreement.

Berry, who is from Edinburgh and is now in his late twenties, got involved in the movie three years ago when he saw a casting call on Facebook. Part of the reason for wanting to play the younger McLean, he says, is because he could see that his own story wasn't that different.

"When I read the script I thought, 'This could well be me.' Replace music with the acting business and it's the same thing. Growing up wanting to be a footballer player, getting injured and having to rethink your life. That whole wanting to get out from where you're from, I could definitely relate to; trying to avoid that nine-to-five life."

When Berry was cast, McLean met him for a coffee and was suitably impressed. "I thought this guy is obviously good-looking. I used to be no bad back in the day and I thought, 'Yeah, if you're going to have somebody make them good-looking.' He got the part and then we found out that he could act. A natural, I would call him."

"That's sweet,” Berry says, smiling.

McLean's story began in Whitfield in Dundee, playing snooker and watching the football (he's a United fan; "going to see Barcelona getting tanked, Roma getting humped," he remembers happily), and working in terrible jobs. His career started, he says, by organising a disco. And that was all about a girl.

"I used to fancy this girl at the college, but I could never work up the courage to speak to her. My mate John, who is in the film, said, 'Look, we need football strips, we'll organise a disco.' I said, 'How's that going to help?' He said, 'You can sell her a ticket.'

"So, we got the tickets and I went across to sell her tickets. And I went back, and John said, 'Did you sell her a ticket?' 'No, I gave her six, though.'

"That all worked out. I got off with her. And then we were doing discos every month, making a grand every time. It used to cost us 50 quid for a DJ, this guy called Mickey Muppet. A guy who is now a big lawyer in Dundee. I met him a few weeks ago. Hadn't seen him in 40 years.

"So, we were booking him for 50 quid and making loads of money. And we thought, ‘let's book bands.’ The bands cost 500 quid and we ended up losing money. It didn't make any business sense at all. But it was good for getting your name about in the trade."

It also got his name known to the local gangsters. He ended up working with one of them on a tour by Thin Lizzy. "I called him Crazy Green Eyes. Jesus, he was ... But I was very young at the time. Very, very young."

All of this is revisited in Schemers with its recreations of late seventies/early eighties Dundee and gigs by the likes of the Rezillos. It's a small, rather scrappy film but there's a warmth to it and it has winning performances by Berry, Sean Connor as McLean's mate Scot, and Tara Lee as his girlfriend. There also appearances by ex-Danny Wilson multi-instrumentalist Kit Clark as McLean's dad and a cameo from The View's Kyle Falconer.

McLean directed the film but got help from editor and director of additional photography Khaled Spiewak.

"The shoot was chaotic," admits Berry. "The film's sort of made up of two different shoots. Principal photography and then about a year later we shot a lot of additional scenes. The first shoot was very crazy. It was a mad rush but the second time we shot with Khaled who came and wrote new scenes with Dave and it felt a lot more relaxed. Slotting the two together makes the film."

The result catches Dundee at a low point in its history. It is, McLean admits, a different city now. "It's changed a lot. It's got a lot better restaurants, a lot better bars.

“It's still got loads of unemployment. You just think they're getting ahead of the game and then they lose a factory. From what I can see there is a lot of drugs there. But there's a humour there, a hardness, a never give up vibe going on.

"It doesn't matter, all that V&A stuff. Your real Dundee is your Gary Robertsons," he adds referring to the Dundee street poet. "People like that, people like Kyle of the View, grafters who just work away."

McLean fits into that category. Schemers is just the start, he says. He wants to develop a mini-series to tell the next part of the story when he and his friend Scot moved to London and he moved more into the music business, forming Riverman with his partner Alex Weston, representing the cream of the grunge era of American rock.

"Scot went off on a different tangent." What did he do? "Have you Googled his name? He's the guy who lost £400m."

McLean's finances are rather better. He's still busy in the music industry. "It would be useless to get to my age and just think, 'That's it. I'm retiring now. I'll do the allotment.'

"Who wants to retire? There are guys managing huge bands who are 83. All this retirement stuff, playing golf and going on cruises, what a load of rubbish. You've got to keep yourself young or surround yourself with young people," he adds, turning to Berry. "You become a sort of vampire."

The world premiere of Schemers at the Edinburgh International Film Festival takes place tonight at Filmhouse 1 at 6.10pm. It is also on tomorrow afternoon at 1.20pm at Vue Omni.