When Gillian Berrie first arrived at the old Govan town hall, an incongruous Beaux Arts building behind the empty site of the Glasgow Garden Festival, it was a social work department. The back of the building, the bit she was interested in, was empty. It was the end of the 1990s and Berrie was the casting director on Lynne Ramsay’s film Ratcatcher. The production team moved in behind the methadone clinic and got to work.

More than 10 years later, Berrie still has an office on Govan Road. Her room hasn’t changed much, with scruffy wood panelling and reinforced glass on the windows. But the rest of the decaying civic white elephant has been transformed, by Berrie’s vision and £3.5m of public money, into a thriving movie-making hub called Film City. As well as her own company, Sigma, it houses post-production facilities for film and television, office space for casting directors and independent producers, and temporary tenants — film crews who move in for a few months then leave when they’ve finished. It is also home to Franz Ferdinand’s recording studio.

Film City is an impressive achievement, a mix of 1970s swirly carpets and the highest-spec technical kit to be found anywhere in Europe. It is all go: Black Camel has just finished shooting Legacy, a thriller starring Idris Elba from The Wire. The actor-director Peter Mullan has taken over the production office and is ready to start filming Neds.

Next up is one of Sigma’s own productions, The Last Word, starring Ewan McGregor and directed by Berrie’s business partner David Mackenzie. Straight after them, Kevin Macdonald, who made The Last King of Scotland, starts shooting The Eagle of the Ninth with Jamie Bell.

“There is,” says Berrie with some understatement, “a buzz about the place.”

But nine years after Berrie mooted the idea of Film City, with the building finally up and running, Scottish cinema’s goalposts have been moved. Or, more accurately, they are about to be folded up and put away. Scottish Screen, the quango that supports just about every film made here, is winding up. It will be rolled into the new and controversial body, Creative Scotland. But there is a year-long gap between the demise of one and the birth of the other. Berrie is fearful about what will happen in the interim.

“We need some comfort,” she says. “We are losing our dedicated screen agency, that’s a nasty blow. There is a growing loss of confidence. There is always an exodus, we’re always haemorrhaging talent out of Scotland and we’re going to haemorrhage more. Writers, directors, producers can’t work when the funding body doesn’t know what it’s doing and isn’t up to speed. They have to go to the places where they can work.”

Creative Scotland will split the country’s creative output into 13 sectors. “Film will be one 13th of everything they have to focus on.” This, for Berrie, is unacceptable.

“We need a dedicated film agency, a dedicated team who are in tune with what is going on in the world. We can’t make films in Scotland alone, we’ve got to reach out and co-produce or we can’t survive.”

Berrie has been hugely successful in doing this, pulling in European funding for films such as Hallam Foe and Red Road. She can quote European film subsidy rates as if they were prices in Asda. Scottish Screen’s successors, she insists, must be on top of this game.

“They have to keep an eye on every single fiscal incentive that’s going, every change in policy around the world and how it will affect us. This changes on a daily basis and it’s mental acrobatics trying to keep up with it.”

It is the next tranche of films, the ones that should be keeping the 20-odd companies based in Film City busy for the next 18 months, that will suffer.

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