Tina Kakadelis
There’s always a certain amount of pressure that comes with adapting a memoir because of its inherently personal nature. In the case of the upcoming film, The Outrun, director and co-writer Nora Fingscheidt took inspiration from Amy Liptrot’s 2016 memoir of the same name. The film follows Rona (Saoirse Ronan), a character inspired by Liptrot, who has recently finished treatment for alcoholism. Rona returns to her secluded hometown on the Orkney Islands to live with her mother (Saskia Reeves) and father (Stephen Dillane). The Outrun is a story of recovery and finding strength from within to break generational expectations.
In anticipation of The Outrun‘s upcoming release, Nora Fingscheidt sat down with Film Obsessive News Editor Tina Kakadelis to talk about creating a separation between reality and fiction, the beauty of science, and how people can grow from their pasts.
Film Obsessive: How are you doing, Nora?
Nora Fingscheidt: I’m good! How are you?
I’m doing well, thank you. I know that you came to The Outrun a little later and that Saoirse being attached was a huge selling point to you. What about her as an actor makes you really excited as a director to want to sign on?
Well, if you have a project like this where half the film takes place on a tiny remote island with a woman by herself, not speaking with anyone, you’re really like, oh, this could be boring. But then if it’s Saoirse Ronan playing the part, suddenly it gets very exciting because she is so diverse. She has so many shades and nuances. She can transmit so much with just her face that it actually is quite amazing. There are very few actors in the world, I would say, who have this presence where you go, she could brush her teeth and it would be interesting, I kind of would want to watch it. There would be an elegance to it or something larger than life. She’s very talented, committed, and easy to work with. For me, that was the thing where I thought, okay, yeah, we’re safe.
And did you actually shoot The Outrun on the remote island?
Oh, yeah! We shot on the remote islands. I think all the locations that you see in the film, almost all of them, at least the ones in Orkney, are the relocations from Amy’s life. It’s the house of her childhood memories. That is the house she lived in as a kid. The caravan of her father in the movie is his real caravan. When she spends the winter by herself in Rhodes cottage, that is the actual Rhodes Cottage where she wrote the book The Outrun years ago.
Oh, wow. That’s incredible. I love when films, especially narrative films, take archival footage and photos and weave it all together into something that’s greater than itself. That happens in The Outrun. What made you want to blend the archival footage and these photographs? What was the process of finding all of these things to add to the film?
It all starts with Amy’s [Liptrot] book and with Amy’s character. So you could think, okay, yeah, it’s a story about addiction and recovery, but then the book always drifts away because she, as a person, is so interested in what happens around her that sometimes she spends half a page writing about the physiological processes of a wave breaking and you’re like, wow, you’re such a nerd, you know? It’s so interesting, all these scientific facts and the mythology about the island.
Also, she spent two winters by herself in this cottage, in complete isolation on a tiny island on the edge of Europe. And she starts chatting with astronauts. I mean, who would do that? I thought, that’s such a fantastic image for seeking connection but not knowing how, you know, so I wanted to preserve that in the film.
That’s why we created what we call the nerd layer. We have the London layer that’s in the past. We have the Orkney layer, which is the present tense. Then, there is the nerd layer. I think the biggest challenge was to make sure that the nerd layer doesn’t just include the stuff we all find interesting and fascinating, but we had to cut quite a bit and always make sure it was in relation with “where is the character in this very moment.” How does it reflect on her journey throughout the movie?
A lot of fantastic stuff we had to cut. Thankfully, the best fit stayed in. And, because you were asking about the mix of archive and photography and all that, I thought, Amy’s brain or her worldview is so interesting and so broad. Broad and limitless. We needed to make sure that also the audio visual use of this nerd layer always feels surprising, free, and different. Each element can be whatever it wants. It was about finding creative freedom.
One of the things that you added in is this gorgeous animation sequence about the myths of the Orkney Islands and how they were created. I haven’t read the book, unfortunately, but I’ve heard that there are a lot of drawings involved. Did that animation style come from the book itself?
Not from the book. That is the real story about the origin of the Orkney Islands. She mentions it in the book, and I find it quite amazing that this tremor sound is explained by the burning liver. Because, as an alcoholic, you destroy your liver, right? It has this weird connection with her story. We got together with an animation studio and we brainstormed about how we wanted this to look because it is also a childhood story. It needs to have a dark feel to it and be very archaic in a way. It’s a story that’s been told for thousands of years.
Talking about the layers, the London layer and the Orkney layer. One of the ways that you can pick out where you are in time in The Outrun is the hair color of Rona (Ronan). When she’s at the height of her alcoholism, going through all these really heavy things, her hair is blue. Usually that color is used for relief, but when she actually finds that relief toward the end of the film, her hair is red. I was curious if that was a choice that came from Amy Liptrot. I know that you wanted to separate Amy from Rona as a separate character.
That was the first bit that we did. I think, when I came on board, the very first thing I said was, hey, we have to change the name for Amy’s mental health, Saoirse’s mental health, and for mine as well. We need to be able to make a clear creative separation. This is the real Amy and Saoirse doesn’t need to imitate the real Amy. We’re creating a fictional character here that consists of the three of us. The hair is true to Amy’s story, so that’s how we started. The element of the changing hair color comes from the book and from Amy herself.
She used to have all kinds of hair colors and had a sort of turquoise color. She called it mermaid punk. In the book, she writes about a sequence when she was very bad in London. She wasn’t feeling good. It was tough times and she had dyed her eyebrows red and then had this allergic reaction. She went to the club with these red eyebrows. I found that so inspiring. To take this as a character tool and say she is somebody who expresses through hair colors, through fashion, but use it for the story.
We don’t cover all the hair colors that Amy had in her life. We reduced it to say, blue kind of stands for Orkney. It’s the bit of Orkney when she’s in London. London always has another color palette. It’s red, orange, and pink. In the end, when she’s well again, makes peace with the two worlds, and all those extreme forces within her, she gets her London wildness back. In a healthy and sober way.
I love that. I feel like films that are in the dramatic genre focus on, I don’t want to say the drama, but the intense moments of the alcoholism. The heightened fights and everything. Your film is very focused on recovery, and I feel like that is still rare to get to see. Like, the work that goes into changing. Did that make it difficult to get picked up?
Oh, probably. That’s the production question in terms of what the whole process of financing was like. When I came to the project, the BBC was already attached and people were very supportive. Things moved quite quickly, but independent film financing is always a crazy process. Of course, people are like, oh, the stories about alcoholism, we’ve seen that. Yes, we’ve seen that, but exactly like you said, I thought, for me, this isn’t a story about alcoholism. It’s a story about healing and recovery. It’s about connection to a place, to a community. It is about the inheritance of mental illness and how our family history shapes us, you know? How is it possible to break out of these circles as human beings and evolve? There was so much hope, strength, and beauty in this story for me that, yes, it’s graphic and brutal at parts. That’s also the quality of the book, this brutal honesty about how bad things got. It’s amazing she got herself out of that, you know.
Going back to the nerd layer that we were talking about, science rarely gets to be seen as this beautiful, poetic thing. I would argue that your film is kind of science at its most beautiful and poetic. How did you find that balance between romanticizing the world and looking at it very scientifically?
I think it was a lot of trial and error in the editing process. To always keep it nerdy, but not too nerdy, because it always should have the connection to Rona. Amy uses it in a philosophical way, because it’s all the same thing. Her mum’s extreme religiousness, her dad’s manic depression, her alcoholism, and then she switches her extreme use of alcohol and clubbing into immersing herself into the world of seaweed. She finds another substitute that she gets high on with this time, which is scientific knowledge, you know? There is something very fascinating about nature and about how little we as human beings know and understand about the world we live in. Life, death, and all those mysteries. We think we understand a lot and can control it because it gives us comfort, but, you know, let’s face it, we don’t. I find science quite, quite philosophical in the end.
Thank you, Nora, for your time. It’s a beautiful film. I really loved it.
Thank you so much for having me.
