Production
The Director's Story
It was due to a simple error filling in a form in 1992 that Gerard Sampaio ended up studying Film & TV at Glasgow University. It certainly was a happy accident but within two years he was neglecting his academic commitments and making little films instead of studying big ones. His first, Floor 8, was made when he was 19 years old and won the National Student Television Award for Drama, an award he went on to win three years running.
A year after graduation, and another short or two, he took off to London to work in factual television. Within nine months he was directing for the network and within a year producing too.
But it was films he wanted to make and so, after a couple of years, he took the offer of a steady job at a big internet company to be their `broadcasting guy'. The move was designed to leave him with the time and energy to get back to writing. Soon enough he was producing a short film from his desk right under his boss's nose.
There was no doubt now that making films was it. With a nearly finished script sitting under his bed, there was only one place to go, back to Glasgow where it was set. At the same time, he was asked to produce a couple of shorts, in Glasgow, for the Film Council funded Digicult scheme. Sampaio quit the steady job, hired a van and off he went. The plan was to use the shorts to meet a bunch of people who might be up for making the feature for next to nothing. It worked.