Process - what process? The making of Pesce e Patate

I can vividly remember that, when I was about six years old, a Canadian film crew came to our farm and stayed for about a week to make a children's film, Kid From Canada—lights, make-up, make-believe grocer’s van with all the props. My mother was meant to supply the young actor with a bowl of porridge to eat on our windowsill, but she forgot and scraped the porridge out of the dog’s bowl and heated it up for him. I would ask to hear this story again and again as a child, and then as an adult.

At eighteen years old, I was about to go to Hotel School in Birmingham. Six weeks before my start date, I went to see the American feature film Easy Rider at the Edinburgh Film Festival, and listened to Peter Fonda introduce the film. On the following night, I went to see Charlie Bubbles, a British feature film about the suffocation of creativity by fame and money starring Albert Finney. This film was introduced by the producer, Michael Medwyn. Those evenings were my first experiences in the company of film practitioners since the Canadian film board, the porridge and the dog. Having been brought up in the Scottish Highlands of Scotland, there weren’t many film makers walking around the hills. I remember wishing so much that that my father wasn't a farmer. I had always loved going to the cinema but this was the first time that I had seen and heard people talking about their films with such love and pride. Better than peeling potatoes at Hotel school I thought!

‘I'm going to London to get into the movie business!’, I declared to my mother. With my long red hair and hippy fur coat, I got a bus to the top of the A1 motorway and hitchhiked to London where I stayed with a friend on the floor of his bedsit in Holland Park. Next, I went to a job agency, stating with innocent directness that I wanted to get into the film industry. This was the start of a love affair with London. I ended up at a film processing laboratory, got my union ticket -- number 32619 still takes pride of place in my wallet.

Since then I have made, quite literally, hundreds of hours of television and worked in many genres including documentary, drama, music shows, chat shows. Some of my work is bad, some is indifferent and some of it is quite good. Out of the good, the bad and the ugly, I have rarely thought about why some productions worked well and why others didn't. In short, I have never previously dwelt on the ‘process’ of film-making. With no academic training, my approach is more intuitive. I work with a crew: cameraman, sound recordist and researcher.  I parachute into different spaces, forming a connection with my subjects; I hoover up material and then return to a cutting room to make sense of this material.

The best programmes are ones that seem to elicit an emotional reaction from the audience and have also made me feel excited, involved, engaged. But as a freelancer, I often have no choice about whether to work on something that really engages me, or something that has been offered to me by a commissioner. My small team is being eroded, though, and we often have to fight budget restrictions. When I was twenty-five years old, I had a crew of eight: a driver, an electrician, a cameraman and assistant, a sound man and assistant, a production assistant and me. Now many programmes are made by skeletal crews, or sometimes by only one person.

Pesce e Patate is a documentary shown on the BBC in 1993 that I still feel proud of. May Millar, an executive producer at BBC Scotland with whom I have always had a productive creative relationship, called to explain that there was a Scots-Italian journalist at BBC Scotland, Sergio Casci, who was going to the small hilltop town of Barga in Italy to make a news piece about a footballer called Johnny Moscardini, a Scots-Italian whose parents had emigrated to Glasgow from Barga in the 1870s. Moscardini played with various Italian clubs in the 1920s. Although he was a national hero in Barga—the football stadium is named after him—few Scottish people knew that the shy cafe owner of ‘The Lake’ had been a footballing star. Sergio was making his first reporter-led piece to coincide with an Italy versus Scotland football match in the autumn of 1993. As a young schoolboy, I loved Capaldi’s cafe in Kingussie, which was the nearest small town to my Highland home. I loved the noise of the coffee machine and was mesmerised by the juke box and the general mayhem of the café, its warmth, sustenance, and welcoming atmosphere. Capaldi’s also kindled a lifelong love of home-made Italian ice cream. Apparently, Sergio had said the same thing to his BBC colleagues.

I had mentioned to May in a prior conversation that I wanted to make a documentary about Scots-Italians and their unique contribution to Scotland's culture. I met up with Sergio in the BBC canteen to chat about it. Sergio is an instantly warm and entertaining human being, witty, bright, yet self-effacing and we have remained firm friends and co-workers since. We had much in common, including our shared love of film and pasta. We agreed that we would find a clutch of interesting ‘Tallies’ (a sometimes pejorative Scots slang word for Italians) and talk to them in both Italy and Scotland.  

A large Italian-Scots community in Glasgow and near the west coast are descended from Barghese families. Many of these early immigrants emigrated to Scotland, became entrepreneurs in the burgeoning industry of fish and chip shops, and later, ice-cream cafes, and invited relatives to staff them. Many families now have properties back in Barga which they enjoy as holiday houses, rental investments or retirement homes. At that time not much had been written about Italians-Scots and Sergio filled me in on the history of the Italian diaspora in Scotland. We planned to encounter Italian-Scots in their ‘adopted’ land and on holiday in Barga. The whole experience of emigration and immigration had left many folk restless; neither fish nor fowl was an expression one of our interviewees repeated.  

I often think of material for a documentary as being similar to a good recipe for a meal. The ingredients should be as good as you can afford, fresh and authentic. The ingredients might be visual, or audio, or both together. I like people; I love talking and listening. If I have any skills at all, it is to relax people and allow them to be as natural as it is possible while there is a camera recording them. One of the most satisfying parts of my job is spending a few hours with an interviewee, knowing that they are proud to share their tale, and that we can use their story as a backbone on which to hang pictures and music.

I am also a tad cheeky so sometimes pop in a question that should not always be asked. This often provides a source of humour and there's nothing more infectious in a film than laughter. While interviewing on camera, I often have a sense of which material I will eventually use. As news editor previously, I am used to making quick intuitive decisions. That knack has carried me through my career. It means you don't waste people's time filming too much, and you don't annoy camera crews who are often told by new directors to film everything that moves, for hours at a time. For there is nothing more soul-destroying for a good cameraman to be filming and filming, knowing that only a small percentage of what they do is going to reach the screen in the finished programme. The more material you gather, the more material has to be gone through and edited. This may not matter for an auteur-type film where the director is going to spend months and months honing material to create their perfect vision; but if, like me, you earn your living by making programmes on a tight budget which are transmitted on a network, then there tends to be a set amount of time in which to get the material shaped into something viewable.

We shot the Barga documentary on film, and each time you finish a roll of film (ie. after ten minutes), you are aware of the mortality of the interview. Each roll of film costs a certain amount to buy, to process and to copy onto video. Now you can spend literally hours talking on video tape, or card, or hard drive, but shooting on film always made me think through what I wanted to get out of an interview. Then you can be much more relaxed about time because the actual recording process is so much cheaper. Ironically, of course, this maybe makes us lazier, and certainly less disciplined. Pesce e Patate is the last programme I made on film rolls. We shot on an 8mm camera, and the film has a lovely grainy quality about it.

Barga sits on a hilltop, off the main road to Lucca and about forty minutes up the valley from that lovely, chestnut- tree-laden town. The road goes steeply up for about three miles. Awash with alleys and lanes, Barga is like a magical secret country that you are allowed into only if you know the password. My password was Sergio Casci. Sergio's dad managed the Del Rio Cafe in Glasgow all his life, but the family had owned a bungalow in Barga for many years. Sergio knew everyone, which made filming a documentary in a strange place much easier. I went out to meet Sergio who was already there; Marty Singleton (cameraman), Andy Ford (assistant) and Alan ‘Pee Wee’ Young (sound recordist) were going to join us a few days later. This allowed Sergio and I to get to know each other, and for me to absorb the sounds and smells. Sergio and I spent a few lovely days meeting people and walking around the town. I fell in love with Barga and have returned since. I feel a kinship to the place that is difficult to explain, but is bound up with the familiarity of the Glaswegian voices and Scottish humour mixed with the otherness of the sun, the heat, the strangeness.

Left to right. Alan Pee Wee (sound recordist), Sergio Casci (Researcher/Writer), Donald Coutts (Producer/Director), Martin Singleton (Camera) and Andy Ford ( Assistant Camera) in Barga

After a preliminary stock take, we agreed as a crew that we would be flexible and react to what happened. I like working like that; I leave myself open to my feelings and the laughs that can happen, and things will develop organically. This attitude is the complete opposite of Sergio's who is very well-organised and likes to know what is going to happen. Such creative tension in our relationship worked well. I often think a film crew is something between an army and a circus. You do need to be efficient with time and schedules, yet it’s also important to be flexible when you are parachuting yourself into other people’s lives.  

We stayed in a charming hotel up in the trees overlooking Barga. The light was extraordinary and every day I was trying to find time for Marty to film the exquisite landscape as well as filming the interviews. When you are making a film, you are always aware of the need for visuals to bring your material to life. While people's stories and conversations might be the film’s main subject, you also worry about when you can free the cameraman to just suck up images. That tension between practicality and emotionality is always present in a film shoot.

Ennio and Hilda Pieri was a couple who had retired to Barga from Scotland. They had run a cafe in Paisley all their lives before retiring to a little flat in Barga town centre near a bar for Ennio's drams and cigarettes. Their daughter Rosanna had trained as a teacher in Scotland and had returned to Barga with her wee boy to try and make a go of a relationship with the boy's dad. When we interviewed her she was at the crux of making the decision. That indecision and vulnerability made her story work. We have to treat the gifts of stories and conversations with respect, use them to help tell the story with eloquence without making our interviewees feel used and abused. When someone is going through a private dilemma, it is possible to suggest this on camera without being unethical, with some gentle questioning and judicious editing. It is a huge responsibility to be allowed to represent someone’s feelings, hopes and desires.

We found an individual who had remained in Scotland but was in love with Barga in Loreno Rinaldi. He was emotional about his Italian heritage, down-to- earth and charming. A cafe owner from Dumfries, he found it hard to reconcile many of the contradictions of Italian-Scots identity. He certainly found it difficult to adapt to working in wet ‘dreich’ Scotland after visits to Barga where he felt the warmth of the sun on his back. He owned a house in Barga with his brothers which they divided into three flats. They came to Barga as often as possible and like many Scots Italians bought cheap airline tickets in bulk. 

We also met people in the town square and did some interviews in the sweltering heat just before it started to rain. Fleeting, unplanned moments captured other aspects of the dichotomy that is being Scots and Italian. One of the lines from the film, which was shot in the square fairly late in the evening, is from a former cafe owner, saying ‘......we are in the nineties and the hundreds now, we pray for rain and I miss having a half and a beer.’

The other person we met and decided to film was painter, teacher and singer-songwriter, Peter Nardini. The son of a cafe owner from Strathaven, near Glasgow, Peter owned a flat just outside Barga. He had recently buried his parents in a cemetery near the city and his grief enabled us to explore darker aspects of memory, family and absence. We eventually filmed him in the graveyard visiting his parents’ grave. The sun was low at the end of the day. By using a track to move the camera silently through the graveyard, and augmenting the sounds of the yard with music, some of the connections between Scotland and Italy, and the passing of time and life is hinted at. We used one of Peter's own songs as it seemed fitting to create a mood around the material that he created. Music is always a way of creating emotional resonance; it becomes a portal that allows the audience to travel with their own emotions.

Coutts and Singleton on location

One of the reasons that we went to film in August was that we wanted to film the annual Sagra del Pesce e Patate, the Barga Fish and Chips Festival, which takes place in the football stadium to celebrate the strange and wonderful cuisine of fish and chips. Retired fish and chip fryers from Scotland cooking on a make-shift kitchen with tressle tables, and the whole town comes out to eat and dance! The chat about the art of frying fish that we used in the documentary was brilliantly funny. As retired cafe owners who were now released from the need to earn a living, they could laugh about their skills and abilities. Wine and companionship were more important than competition or income. We learnt that a ‘splasher’ was a fryer who, when he drops in the battered fish into the hot oil, splashes too much of the oil everywhere. The blue plastic tablecloths, laughing Scots-Italians, red wine and pasta, little dance floor, the smell, the heat… the atmosphere will stay with me forever.

A recent poster of the Sagra del Pesce e Patate festival

We worked long hours and then sat together at the end of the day eating and drinking. It was one of those jobs that you will always remember. On our last day there, we met a man in the street whom I asked to sing, ‘I Belong to Glasgow’. It seemed a very poignant way to end the film. Somehow the light, the heat, the non- Scottishness of the images, overlayed with the Scottishness of the words, conveyed what was wanted. Yet without accompaniment it felt rather bald so we thought the addition of an Italian-type accordion could enhance the mood. I rang up a friend of a friend, Phil Cunningham, Scotland's most famous accordion player. Would he come in and help us out. Of course! He popped in for ten minutes and knocked off a little Italian refrain. Those last thirty seconds of the film summed it all: an Italian singing a Glasgow ditty, and a Scot playing an Italian accordion.

When we got back, we just had to think of a place to start the film and introduce our characters. A small restaurant in Glasgow to watch the Italy versus Scotland football game perhaps? On the 13th October 1993, we filmed our new-found friends watching Italy beat Scotland 3-1 whilst eating a bowl of pasta and drinking wine on a dreich autumn evening. There was laughter and nervousness. Between Scotland and Italy, nobody wins or loses.

We went to Strathaven to watch Peter Nardini painting, and to the Doonhamer café in Dumfries and to Cafe Gandolfi in the Merchant City district of Glasgow owned by Ian MacEnzie. Ian was a keen amateur photographer and he had taken black and white photographs of many famous Glasgow cafés, many of which are no longer open. I had always enjoyed looking at these photographs; they were simple shots that evoked an era which was already passing out of existence. So, I asked Ian if we could take these photos out of their frames and film them.

As usual, the editing was a sobering experience. The editor had not been to Barga in the summer sunshine. She had not met the interviewees in person and she didn’t care that it took two hours waiting for this or that person, or that the pasta with wild nettles and cream was delicious. She only cared, quite rightly, about the rushes that tell the story. We looked at the rushes, listened to all the interviews and clipped out what we considered to be the best. We strung these together and then slowly put together the jigsaw that is the film. Music, slow motion, quickly cut sequences or languid one, whatever helped shaped and represent the story. Had I told this person’s story well enough, through little shorthand phrases and visual nuances? I needed my audience to feel something for the characters, to care where they have been and where they were going. In the editing process, you rely both on the editor’s technical skills and on your own antennae to enable empathetic responses to the scene.

Pesce e Patate was an important film for me. I have been back to Barga at least four times since and Sergio and I have remained friends. Since working together on Pesce e Patate, we have made an award-winning short film called Dead Sea Reels, two BBC dramas and a feature film on Italo-Glaswegian life, American Cousins. We included a scene of a chip frying competition which was undoubtedly influenced by the Barga fish and chip festival! Over the years, I have often used the process of making this documentary as a yardstick for fun and creativity. Was it as good as working in Barga?

The answer is usually… no!

Don Coutts is best known as the director of the 2003 feature film American Cousins (2003) and for directing the  (2013-15) TV series, Katie Morag. The TV series won nine awards, including three BAFTAs, a Royal Television Society Scotland Children's Award, and a Scottish BAFTA. A documentary filmmaker and music filmmaker whose most recent production is about the Scottish ‘acid croft’ band, Heading West, Coutts has also worked on numerous current affairs and entertainment productions, including the Channel 4 late night discussion programme, After Dark.