Days after this heart-thumping realisation that her career as a scriptwriter was taking off, Gibb chats with me on the set of Afterlife, directed by Alison Peebles, herself an actress and first-time feature director.

Afterlife revolves around Kenny Brogan, an ambitious young journalist on the verge of landing an anchorman position on US television. Kenny, played by Kevin McKidd is leaving behind small-town life, and his mother and sister Roberta – who has Downs syndrome – are being jettisoned in the wake. But when his mother, played by Lindsay Duncan, becomes ill herself and struggles to look after Roberta, Kenny faces a dilemma.

McKidd and Duncan have just finished filming an intense argument over the daughter’s future and the cast and crew are packed into a bus eating dinner. There’s not much glamour on low-budget films and Afterlife is particularly low-budget. With only £250,000 supporting this New Found Films project – funded by Scottish Screen and SMG – it’s miraculous that the film has been made at all.

What bonds the cast and crew to the project seems to be the strength of Gibb’s script. The actors, in particular, are full of praise. “Primarily I go on writing,” says Duncan, “and this is, without doubt, the best script I’ve read in years. We all feel we have to deliver this for the writer because it is so good.”

On film sets there’s always a fair amount of mutual backslapping for the benefit of journalists, but Duncan speaks with such enthusiasm that’s it’s impossible not to believe her. Everyone I speak to has a similar admiration for the strength of the writing.

Gibb’s own sister has Downs syndrome, but she says the script is far from autobiographical. “I wanted to write something that celebrated who my sister is and what she does,” she says. “I worked from what I knew and fictionalised it out. It is not in any sense based on my own experience, but it is taken from a world that I know.”

The cast assembled by Peebles, Gibb and Gabriel Films producer Catherine Aitken is formidable, given the financial restrictions. “When I was writing it, Kevin was always in my head,” says Gibb. “He was No 1 on our wish-list. And Lindsay Duncan is class.” Gibb is also thankful that Shirley Henderson, who plays Kevin’s girlfriend, was available after much more high-profile roles in such films as Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets.

Henderson suggests that there can be positive aspects to lower-budget film-making. “On a bigger budget set you tend to be more isolated,” she says, “whereas here we are all mixing very well. It helps in certain projects not to have too much fuss around you. It’s a lovely, lovely shoot.”

Gibb, who worked as an actress for 20 years, has a long-standing admiration for Peebles. “I always really wanted to work with Alison. We’ve been friends for a very long time and she’s a fantastic director.”

For her part, Peebles has enjoyed success as an actress and a theatre director – she recently won the Critics’ Award for Theatre in Scotland for best theatre production with Shining Souls at Glasgow’s Tron Theatre.

McKidd is full of praise for her directorial ability. “You really can trust her,” he says. “She’s knows what it’s like to be on both sides of the camera. She knows exactly what she wants and she is getting it. She’s very good at making the truth of each moment come alive.”

Perhaps the key task facing Peebles was casting Roberta. After extensive workshops she opted for Paula Sage. “Paula has such a strong personality,” says Peebles. “She’s similar in some ways to Roberta, but she has built up the character. She’s never acted before and she is a natural. She just understands it. She is frighteningly good, very instinctive and very responsive to the moment.”                            In less sophisticated hands this material could so easily have become sentimental mulch. Yet the finished product has taken a complex tale and turned it into an engaging drama.                          So what does the future hold for Peebles? “I’d be very happy if I could direct a good-quality theatre production every year or two, direct some more features and get some good acting parts. I’m not asking for too much, am I?” On the back of her theatrical success, and certainly on the basis of Afterlife, she’s probably not.

Different class From Rain Man to Forrest Gump, it's always stars who play characters with disabilities. But director Alison Peebles has found a huge new talent in Paula Sage, who has Down's syndrome Liz Hoggard Sunday October 26, 2003 The Observer Why do disabled actors rarely get to play themselves on screen? Are we so shallow that we want to leave the cinema comforted not challenged? Films where Hollywood actors play a character with a disability can so easily become a vehicle for us to feel good about ourselves. 'Didn't he play that well?' we gush. 'He was so real.' Even the best independent films - Daniel Day-Lewis in My Left Foot, Daniel Craig in Some Voices - can feel like an actor's masterclass. Which is why Scottish director Alison Peebles's new film, AfterLife, is so groundbreaking. The antithesis of films that hijack disability as a clever plot mechanism or a bid for pathos, it puts a young woman with Down's syndrome centre stage. More radical still, the character is played by an actress with Down's. AfterLife, which has its London Film Festival premiere on Friday, was shot in five weeks on a budget of £200,000. Everyone, including the leads Kevin McKidd, Lindsay Duncan and Shirley Henderson, worked on reduced fees. Peebles says: 'The cast and crew all had a personal association with Down's or special needs, or some sort of sensitivity towards it. I think it touched a lot of people.' The film follows an ambitious journalist (McKidd) who learns that his mother (Duncan) is dying, leaving him to assume responsibility for his disabled sister Roberta (newcomer Paula Sage). A touching relationship develops between the siblings, forcing McKidd to re-evaluate his priorities. In a week that has seen controversy over mass NHS testing for Down's syndrome, it is heartening to find a movie that celebrates being 'differently abled'. According to Peebles: 'The script is about the journey of the character of Roberta who has Down's syndrome. She has been brought up in a protected, dependent way - and that can happen to a lot of children, whether they have Down's or not. Because of that, she isn't realising her full potential. But through her relationship with her brother, she discovers that she's feisty and she has a spirit.' AfterLife feels authentic, no doubt because Andrea Gibb's script was inspired by her own sister, Sharon, who has Down's. 'It's quite a personal story,' Gibb says. 'Although my family situation is different from the film, I wanted to celebrate my sister and my mum's relationship with her. Sharon is 34 now and I wanted to write something that shows she's a creative individual and not just defined by her disability.' Sharon contributed to the project by creating Roberta's paintings for the film. The director was adamant an actress with Down's should play the part of Roberta. 'Her character is central to the plot; she is not just a cipher or a cute little person who enables the hero to shine. She has a voice of her own; she drives the story.' Peebles is a former actress (best known for her TV role in Psychos) and an acclaimed theatre director. She set up V.amp Productions and this year Shining Souls for Tron Theatre earned her a Scottish Critics Award. Little wonder she coaxes great performances from her actors. The bond between siblings McKidd and Sage is believable, while Duncan is a revelation as a gritty working-class mother. But the most remarkable thing about the film is the purity of Sage's performance. 'Paula was fantastic,' says Gibb. 'I had to rewrite lines only twice, and that was because I'd chosen words that actually she wouldn't have said. She was making choices all the time. There are great moments when Alison's camera is on her face, and someone says something offscreen, and she just smiles, because she's completely taking in what it means for her character. Once I was doing her lines with her and I said: "You won't really need to know that, that's someone else", and she said: "No, I will need to know that, that's my cue." And she was right.' Kevin McKidd had a personal reason for joining the project. His mother is administrator of a theatre company for people with Down's syndrome and other disabilities in his home town of Elgin (McKidd is patron of the company, Out of The Darkness). But suddenly he was offered the lead in Zeffirelli's Absolutely! (perhaps) in the West End. Faced with a real dilemma, McKidd went out to drown his sorrows with Peebles and Gibb. 'But when I woke up the next morning, there was absolutely no doubt. I knew I had to do AfterLife. 'I learnt a lot about real acting from Paula. She's not thinking ahead to the next scene, she takes each beat of the film on its own. She didn't confuse herself with all that rubbish that actors can get caught up in. She plays a sensitive, quiet girl who goes out into the big bad world with her brother. And Paula mapped out that journey brilliantly, even though the film wasn't shot chronologically. Her gift meant that she often kept little things back for the next take.' AfterLife has been compared to Rain Man, but Gibb dismisses this as 'sloppy'. She says: 'The only comparison is our film features a disabled character and they go on a journey. The difference is we are physically presenting a person with that "disability" on the screen. It's not cosy. The actor can't come out of role at the end of it and go off to the Baftas in a dinner suit and be completely independent. We're doing something very different.' In fact, when the film was initially shortlisted for funding, one executive asked: 'Don't you think it would be better to make Roberta autistic?' The implication was this would be more camera-friendly, or Peebles would then have to bring in an established actor to play the part. There are significant differences between Paula Sage and her character. While Roberta is often confused by her dealings with the outside world, Paula has achieved an impressive degree of independence and attends college. Nobody knew how she would handle the nine-to-five demands of filming, but she proved a natural. According to Gibb: 'She was completely acting and adopting a character; she wasn't just "being".' Neither was Sage overawed by her co-stars. 'We were driving through the countryside,' recalls Duncan. 'It was a lovely spring day, all the lambs were bouncing around, and I was doing that irritating thing of going, "Oooh, look at the lambs, aren't they gorgeous?" And Paula just glanced at me and said, "Pull yourself together!", which I thought was brilliant.' To cast Roberta, Peebles and her producer, Catherine Aitken, visited special-needs groups throughout Scotland. 'Paula just shone out,' Aitken says. 'She had never acted before, although she belonged to a group that did drama and music in a very loose way. But she was so good with her lines and interacting with the other actors. Nothing fazed her.' Once on set, Peebles worked on motivation. 'There was one scene in which we needed her to be upset. I asked her to think of something that would make her cry. She said, "I'll just think about Maurice then" because Maurice Gibb of the Bee Gees had died and she just adored him. And the great thing is that process is no different from any other actor.' Sage, 23, has won rave reviews for her performance. Sean Connery welcomed her to the Edinburgh Festival (where the film won the Audience Award in August). And soon she will be whisked off to promote the film in LA. 'She is an instinctive, natural actress who can really go for it,' Peebles says. 'Paula is a real talent and very bright. I can see her doing a lot of different roles on television, and they don't have to be someone with Down's syndrome. I mean, she could be in EastEnders as a character. I'm having lots of meetings with producers, and I've told all of them that she's a real actress.' McKidd is also convinced Sage can make it, but says: 'She hasn't got an agent yet, and my concern is that there are few scripts around that are like this one. In casting terms, she will play someone with Down's all her life, and my worry is that she's not just playing someone with a disability at the back of the shot to pull all the heartstrings. I've told her parents that they should send any scripts to us to vet. Jesus, it would be great if a soap like EastEnders or Coronation Street really wanted to go for it, but soap plotlines can be unreliable - sometimes the character disappears or something ridiculous happens. And the next thing Paula does should be chosen very carefully.' Although AfterLife celebrates being 'differently abled', Gibb is aware of the challenges that having a Down's child can place on a family (she finally decided to write the script when she read about a couple in their seventies who killed their son because they were terrified he would be abandoned after they died). Gibb was 12 when her own sister was diagnosed. 'My brother and I watched my parents walk out of the hospital as completely different people. There was something about their body language that had completely altered. In the 1970s, when my sister was born, there was a coded, veiled thing - "You don't have to... we can make arrangements". Times have changed so radically that I don't think that would be an an issue now. But certainly, as a woman of her generation, my mum threw herself into 24-hour care. And there wasn't necessarily the opportunity for my sister to go to clubs and workshops at that time, whereas now it's very different.' I meet Sage at her parents' home in Cumbernauld in central Scotland. Like any twentysomething, she is fascinated by men, music and clothes - just occasionally there is a delay in the conversation while she takes in my questions. I ask her about playing Roberta. 'She's a bit different from me. She takes tea, not coffee. I'm more independent than her, although she's a lot better at art than I am.' Was she intimidated by auditioning for the film? 'It was like Pop Idol. It came down to two of us in the end, but I won. I was Will Young!' In fact, Sage appears to take everything in her stride, even the trip to America, which is being sponsored by the Glasgow Herald. 'No problem there,' laughs Duncan. 'She will have a ball. She'll be queen of the chat show.' One of the best things about AfterLife is that Roberta is portrayed as an individual: sometimes the camera makes her look beautiful, at other times she looks angry, plain - just like everyone else. In the most moving scene of the film, she sees photographs of herself for the first time and declares: 'I don't like my face.' I suspect every woman can relate to that moment, but did Gibb feel uneasy having a Down's actress say the words? 'That's a very interesting one,' the writer acknowledges. 'I feel that, providing you are coming from an honest place about material, and you have a knowledge that perhaps other people don't have, then you are in the best place to explore it in a much more complex way than being purely PC. I think there are things that should be said about disability that aren't a shocking thing to say, providing they're coming from an informed place, because then you can always redress the balance. I think it's interesting to have a character that speaks the unspeakable, so another character can offer the counter view.' Gibb is tipped as a screenwriter to watch - her next film, Dear Frankie, stars Emily Mortimer. Meanwhile, she is adapting Louise Welch's cult thriller The Cutting Room, with Robert Carlyle in the lead. But AfterLife holds a special place in her heart. I ask if her sister has seen the film. 'Not yet. I kind of wanted to introduce it to my family gently. I didn't know how my sister was going to take it, seeing a presentation of Down's on the screen. So I sat with my mum and my sister and we fast-forwarded through the rough-cuts. They were really funny. My mum kept reassuring my sister, "That's not you." But my sister was really sorted. "It's just a film," she kept saying. "I know it's just a film."' · AfterLife is screened on 31 October, 6.30pm, Odeon, Leicester Square, and 2 November, 6.30pm, Ritzy, Brixton. Tickets: 0207 928 3232 or from Lff.org.uk