PLAY ME SOMETHING

“A few years ago some peasants and their children in the village where I live decided that they would like to go to Venice, which isn’t very far by road. They hired a bus and asked me to come also. We got home after two sleepless nights. I had a marvellous time with my friends, who were seeing Venice for the first time. Quite a long time afterwards, I began to think about how I might write a story out of this experience.”

An admirer of Neat’s documentary films on MacDiarmid and Sorley MacLean, Berger wondered if his friend wanted to try his hand at directing a fiction film. ‘’The crucial idea arrived; maybe for the first time, let’s try to make a film about a story in which we don’t see the protagonists as actors. When you’re lying in bed as a child and your parents are telling you a story you see all these creatures inside your head, not out there. We thought: let’s see if we can do that in the cinema.’’

(Excerpt from the interview “Listening to llamas’ Toenails” by Lorn Macintyre, Herald Scotland, 14 January 1989)