Filming on a small remote island and hoping for a storm: Nora Fingscheidt on her Saoirse Ronan-starring Sundance alcoholism drama, The Outrun

When writer-director Nora Fingscheidt first encountered Amy Liptrott’s 2016 memoir, The Outrun, and read the story of Liptrot’s journey through alcoholism and her eventual healing on a remote Scottish island, living in Los Angeles and feeling somewhat disoriented. “I was a bit lost in this huge city,” she says Film producer Recently in Park City, where her film, The Outrun, Premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. “I missed Europe a lot. Reading this brutally honest story set on this small remote island, at the edge of the world, gave me a great longing to go and film there.

So she did just that with her formally ambitious screen adaptation (co-written by Liptrott), ultimately telling a story about the destructive nature of addiction that ends on a positive note about hope and healing. Knowing that Saoirse Ronan would play the lead role (besides acting, Ronan is also a producer under his new Arcade Pictures company), was a big draw for the filmmaker. “Half the film just happens with her on this little island, so you need an actress who can carry that,” she reflects. “And who better than Saoirse?”

This is Fingscheidt’s first time premiering a movie at Sundance where both she and Ronan are receiving rave reviews. “It’s a dream come true,” she says of the experience. “Sundance buzzes with this creative energy, with cinephiles and film lovers everywhere. And meeting both veteran and young directors is very inspiring.”

Below, Fingscheidt discusses his intentions with the venture’s creation The OutrunWorking with Ronan and how she had to adapt to the demands of nature in shooting her film.

Filmmaker: This is Ronan’s first producing credit. Do you know why she wanted to take on this role specifically for this project?

Fingscheidt: As far as I can tell from the interviews we did together, she wanted to explore the production to have more influence and influence about storytelling choices and (their) development. Be more on the creative side and influence the HoDs (Heads of Departments). She has worked with many people over the years. She was an amazing creative partner to work with from start to final mix. She is very clear in her views about the role, but then she allows for a lot of freedom. It took me a lot of support to find my own voice in this.

Filmmaker: Because addiction is such a sensitive subject, and in this case, the real life of your co-author Amy Liptrot, I’m wondering what kind of responsibility you felt to tell this true story. How did you collaborate with him on the page and elsewhere? How did you approach his story?

Fingscheidt: It’s a very challenging book to translate into film because it’s so personal and visceral; Most of it is about memory. But what makes it so beautiful is Amy’s thought process about the world. And I thought the film needed to be really nerdy in a way (especially when it comes to its environmental pursuits). So I took this approach for both Amy and our producer. And then I actually went into retreat with the book by myself for a few months. I have color-coded each page into different areas. There are facts about childhood, music, London, Orkney, sound elements, the world… and then I went through it again and put all the little moments that I felt in the film on different cards and arranged them. Then I wrote the treatment.

And from that moment, we started collaborating really closely. Amy read every version, and we spent hours on Zoom. She is not a celebrity who is used to portraying her life. And his parents are in the story. So I felt I had to include it and protect it at the same time. Every decision we made to change, fictionalize or dramatize things, we made together. One of the first things we did to keep a healthy creative distance was to rename it. Amy suggested Ronan, the name of a Scottish island. Saoirse loved it – it’s almost like Ronan. And Nora is in it too. And that’s the island beyond the horizon when Amy sat on the outrun. So the name of the character was a combination of all three of us.

Filmmaker: Did Saoirse spend time crafting her performance with Amy, or did she approach it more freely so as not to pretend?

Fingscheidt: Very early on she asked me, “Do you want me to sound like Amy?” Because Saoirse is Irish, we knew she would have to take on another accent. And we said, please don’t sound like Amy. Find your own voice, your own interpretation of Rona. It gave her a lot of freedom. She is a very physical actor, so she took a lot of time to prepare with a London choreographer, Wayne McGregor, with whom she has worked before. They worked a lot on how Rona behaves: when she’s with her parents, when she’s happy-drunk or messy-drunk or trying to hide it; When she is in a good mood or when she loses control. She also worked with a dialogue coach to get into this discussion process. That physicality, the voice, and then the experiences like helping deliver the sheep in the field that we did in pre-shoot helped her get into the bones and guts of Rona’s character.

I found her so natural that I really enjoyed watching her. And I told him to work freely with the language. The script I wrote was mostly in indirect speech. She asked me at one point, “When do you write dialogue?” And I said I don’t intend to, because if I write the dialogue in English, every character will sound the same because I’m not a native speaker. And so we found the right tone for each character during rehearsals, and it was amazing. And I think she really enjoyed it.

Film producer: I’m glad you mentioned the sheep scene. Saoirse looks like a pro in it. How did she train for that?

Fingscheidt: She had just arrived for our pre-shoot from Australia where she was shooting another film, and she wasn’t in the role yet. And she was really thrown into this kind of documentary shoot where we worked closely with a farmer named Kyle. He was 23 years old, exploring three different farms. He coached him, I think for five days. We were all there, waiting for the lamb to be born. And she had to look like she’d been doing it all her life. By the time she looked like a pro, we had seven lambs. It was amazing because it helped prepare her for the character. And when the lambs are born, they’re white, they’re bloody, (sometimes) they die, you know? It is not only beautiful and romantic. It is very hard work. And it was a blessing that she could take him with her.

Filmmaker: I want to talk about the meticulous editing of this movie – you can see the purpose behind all your choices. It has a very purposeful chaos that sometimes throws you into its pace, and then slows down again. It felt like you were reflecting the character’s experience throughout London, Orkney and that obscure segment you mentioned.

Fingscheidt: Our editor, Stephen Bachinger, who I’ve been working with since we both went to film school, is one of the most amazing editors I know. I am so blessed to have been the organizer of this endless chaos of wonderful options. Three layers – the Orkney layer, the London layer and the nerd layer – were already linked in the script. But we tried to put it in the script order, it didn’t work as we thought, which always happens. It was very important not to miss Rona’s journey: if you spend too much time in London, it will take you away from Orkney. If you spend too much time with her in rehab, you will lose the connection with her and her boyfriend. It was a delicate balancing act to find a story that made sense, but still took you more emotionally than logically.

In the first half of the film, you’re really thrown from A to B on the nerd lair, and it takes a while to get into the film and orient yourself, even though it’s completely directionless. And then when it comes to Pape, things slow down and find their sequence, and you spend more time in a story. We conclude by way of clarification. And her changing hair colors (there were) help you navigate where you are. But having said that, you can also watch the film from an emotional perspective and not think about (the timeline).

Film producer: You seem to have found the rhythm and structure of the film equally well both on the page and in editing.

Fingscheidt: absolutely. It took us eight months until we thought we couldn’t change it anymore.

Film producer: What were some of the unique challenges of shooting on Orkney in these majestic and windswept landscapes and harsh elements?

Fingscheidt: Filming on a small remote island and getting crew and equipment there and then hoping for storms is quite an experience. But not too stormy, because then you can’t go near the rocks – it’s too dangerous. We knew that nature would be a character in the film, so it was always clear that we had to adapt the shooting schedule to the needs of nature. We went to shoot on Orkney three or four times. Lambing was pre-shot during the season – lambs were born only in April. Then we had to go back to film the nesting birds – they only nest in June. And the main shoot was in September when the seals are still around before they go and breed. And then come back in the winter for some snow pickup. When we were at Papay, we had different versions of, “Will it rain tomorrow? Is it stormy or sunny? We will shoot different things depending on what the weather is like. So everyone had to be on their toes all the time.

Film producer: You have different visual aesthetics. There’s an almost documentary sensibility to what you might call the nerd layer. And sound is also an important layer – you hear the harshness of everything, from its addition to the sounds of nature.

Fingscheidt: Yes, we shot on two different cameras with our amazing DP, Yunus Roy Emer. We had the documentary camera and then the main camera. We shot on ARI Alexa for the main story. And then for the nerd layers, we used archive footage, cell phone footage, animation, everything.

As for sound, I’ve worked with this sound design team as well as musicians on many projects now. We usually start with an idea for the sound when writing the script, because otherwise it can become random too easily. And sound is so important in a film like this, where you have to go through a delirious experience with it that’s devastating. And then we have this extreme, very loud nature experience when you’re on a cliff in Orkney. And then comes the beautiful bird calls. So we played a lot with nature sounds and then city sounds to counter that. The music also makes a lot of use of natural elements such as wind pipes; Old instruments on Orkney for centuries.