‘A PIECE ABOUT AN ARTIST WHO HAS NO LIMITS’: CLEMENTS DOC ON McNEIL TO PREMIERE AT VANCOUVER FILM FEST

Marie Clements is a noted film director and “ex-wife” of Vancouver actor Niall McNeil, subject of her documentary Lay Down Your Heart. She has been his ex-wife since they first met years ago.

“When I met Niall, he just told me I was his ex-wife. I didn’t get the romance. I went straight to ex,” she said. That is, she is an adopted ex-wife, the same way that McNeil considers theatre director Steven Hill, older by several decades, to be their son.

Lay Down Your Heart, which premieres at the Vancouver International Film Festival on Oct. 6, is an investigation of McNeil’s creative processes produced by the National Film Board of Canada.

McNeil, known as the star of Peter Panties and King Arthur’s Night, is a stage performer, writer and visual artist. He also has a day job stocking shelves at a Vancouver grocery store. McNeil has Down syndrome, and the film reveals his idiosyncratic approach to artistic relationships.

“It’s a wonderful piece about a creative artist who has Down syndrome,” McNeil said in the same interview.

(He was in the East Vancouver home he shares with his mother; Clements was participating remotely from Halifax where she was promoting her other new film, Bones of Crows, a historical drama that opens VIFF on Thursday.)

“When people’s parents die … I become their father,” he explained. “I want to be a father; I want to have my creative family so I can look after them.”

McNeil began working in theatre as a child at B.C.’s Caravan Farm Theatre and never suffers stage fright.

Now, he has a creative family that includes not only Clements and Hill but also theatre director Peter Hinton and actors Martin Julien and Lois Anderson, who all appear in the film.

Meanwhile, fantasy sequences feature his stories about how he met Clements – in wartime, he was a wounded commander she took in – and how they broke up arguing over household chores.

“I was just following Niall to see where he would take me,” Clements said.

“Niall has a unique way of working. It’s a piece about an artist who has no limits.”