Outrun director Nora Fingsheed on filming in Orkney

It is the oldest stone house in Northern Europe and the shortest flight in the world (90 sec. from Vestre).

It’s one of the last places you’d expect a major movie production to be.

However, Nora Fingscheidt brings Hollywood to the remote island for her adaptation of Amy Liptrot’s best-selling memoir The Outrun.

Rona, fresh from rehab, returns to Orkney after more than a decade in London. As she reconnects with the dramatic landscape where she grew up, her childhood memories merge with challenging events that set her on a path to recovery.

When Fingscheidt first read Liptrott’s memoirs, she was incredibly moved by his brutal honesty of depictions of recovery and recovery.

“She was describing her experience as an alcoholic, but was also very open about the recovery process and how she goes in circles,” the director said. “I want to create empathy and hope for recovery for anyone dealing with addiction, but also for anyone close to people dealing with addiction.

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“Recovery is hard, it’s one day at a time maybe for the rest of your life. I’m so inspired by Amy’s life and how she turned the extremes she grew up into something creative.”

The director said that making a movie about a real person and his family is a “huge responsibility” so wanted to get Liptrott on board for the creative process and work with him as closely as possible to do justice to his story. The author also acted as a tour guide for the cast and crew around Pape, taking them to locations described in his memoirs and introducing them to the local community.

Liptrot did not have any “extremely emotional responses” during the early stages, but Fingscheid said that the writer was incredibly moved after seeing the first cut, so much so that she said how she “started to forget that I had real memories” and that “Some scenes in the film are more vivid than my memories.”

Fingscheidt added: “I think it’s a very crazy and mind-blowing experience for him. She said she doesn’t remember the real things anymore because the scenes and images are so overwhelming. If you see something, it’s hard to forget. Now his life has merged with the movie version.”

Fingshed does an effective job of capturing the beauty of Orkney alongside the brutality of the landscape, as nature becomes one of the film’s central characters.

She said: “It’s very beautiful but it’s also a harsh and very unusual landscape. It is not a paradise with palm trees. We tried to capture it all, the beauty and the roughness.

“We had to adapt our shooting schedule to suit the needs of nature. We wanted to film the birth of the lambs so we had to go to lambing season in April. We wanted to film the bird’s nest in the rocks so we had to go for another pre-shoot in June. We had to be on our toes all the time.

The director jokingly added that her job “depended on having a certain faith in the universe”, that everything was going to work out and just having to be extremely flexible to find other creative solutions to problems.

Only a troop of bones was spared to avoid complete disruption to the lives of local people. It was a unique project for everyone involved as there were no hotels on the island. Instead, the cast and crew were hosted in islanders’ homes for four weeks.

Fingscheidt said: “There is a small hostel that holds about 12 but we had more so people were giving us their homes. It was a lovely experience to wake up in the wonderful little house of my host family Tim and Jennifer, we felt like a family. Grew up together. Waking up every morning to see the ocean and go swimming with the seals was a magical experience.”

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Fingscheidt and Liptrot visited the island several times before the pre-shoot and organized a meeting to answer any questions from the locals. A real “orc spirit” was also infused within the film as the film featured islanders – a no-brainer for Fingscheidt as he wanted the film to feel as authentic as possible.

The movie draws attention to Orcadian traditions and culture, particularly their Muckle Supper, an annual harvest meal with local foods, and the Puppe dance.

The actual Muckle Supper is usually held around November but locals got together with the crew and recreated the event for the movie.

Fingscheidt said: “The locals taught us how to do it, they were basically recreating their own lives for us to film. I was most amazed by the dances. I found out that every island has its own, Some are specific to pupae and some to westre.

“People have been dancing this way for hundreds of years and sometimes it really hits me while filming how beautiful this tradition was.”