The Outrun is in UK cinemas now and Festivals Editor Dallas King spoke to the cast and crew of the film at the UK premiere and Opening Gala screening at this year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival.
Based on the memoir by Amy Liptrot, the film follows the character of Rona, who attempts to come to terms with her troubled past after living life on the edge in London. She returns to the wild beauty of Scotland’s Orkney Islands where she grew up, hoping to heal.
Saoirse Ronan delivers a “tour-de-force performance” in the lead role of Rona, but also acts as producer. She became interested in the project when her partner (and fellow actor) Jack Lowden read Amy’s book during lockdown and told Saoirse that she had to do this.
So they set out to option the rights to the book, which had already been picked up by producer Sarah Brocklehearst:
“When I read the book, it really spoke to me quite personally to be honest. I was thinking a lot about my own drinking, and having that conversation with myself every so often, and I found Amy’s writing so poetic, so profound, so unusual. I could hear, and see, a film there, but that wasn’t why I picked up the book. I picked it up because I was personally interested, but as I read it and fell in love with it, I started to dream of what the film could become. All of us who have been involved with the film, came to it through a love of the book.”
Allowing your book to be optioned can be an exciting moment for an author, yet simultaneously a potentially daunting one. Especially for a writer like Amy Liptrot whose memoir is an incredibly personal story of addiction and rehabilitation. Is there a fear in letting someone else tell their version of your story?
Thankfully for Amy, the decision was easy:
“I think the reason that I decided to work with (the producer) Sarah, was that we decided very early on that I would be highly involved with the process. A lot of books get optioned and then never get made into a film, but when Saoirse came on board it became more likely that it would happen and I am totally thrilled to have such an amazing actress and star take an interest in my book.”
Even with a multiple Academy Award nominee like Ronan attached, it was not going to be an easy road to the cinema, as Brocklehearst explained:
“[The Outrun] doesn’t lend itself easily to adaptation. It’s very internal, it’s sort of non-fiction in many respects (nature writing, the mythology and folklore of the island). A lot of the challenge was to find the right creative team, and as soon as we met Nora [Fingscheidt] we knew. She brought a vision to it from her background in documentaries as well as her dramatic fiction work. It was really true to the spirit of the book but in a really cinematic way.”
For Saoirse Ronan, the final film that audiences see on the big screen is very much the result of a truly open and collaborative process:
“We were all guided by each other. Cause it was the three of us [Saoirse, Nora and Amy] that kind of created what this next stage of what The Outrun would be. What sat well with all of us creatively was that it was important to have separation in terms of the character and the name. So that I felt that I had a bit of creative licence to include some of my own personality into the character, and also for Amy as well to feel that it wasn’t just me trying to recreate her own experience. So it was a very fulfilling creative process because we took something that was very real, very true, and authentic, and sort of add our own experiences to it.”
The Outrun premiered in Edinburgh at a time when funding for the arts in Scotland felt like it was hitting a crisis point. For the whole team, it was important to launch the film in UK in Scotland, given how much the country had supported the project.
“This film was backed, the whole way through, by Scottish public funding. In fact the book, Amy wrote it with a grant from Creative Scotland. The early development of the film was funded by Screen Scotland, they funded the production, we shot in Edinburgh and on Papay [in the Orkney Islands], and for it to open the Edinburgh Film Festival, it made perfect sense.”
The Outrun is in cinemas now. Read our full review from the Edinburgh International Film Festival here.
