‘The Outrun’ director Nora Fingscheidt: ‘I hope the film takes us on a weirdly poetic audiovisual journey’
It was “very emotional” for filmmaker Nora Fingscheidt to co-write the screenplay for “The Outrun” with Amy Liptrot, who wrote the memoir on which it’s based. “I feel very honored that she gave me so much trust and creative freedom.” Watch our complete video interview with Fingscheidt above.
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“There is a massive responsibility because I always knew I’m going to move on to the next film. Saoirse [Ronan] is going to move on to the next film. Amy will have to live with this film forever,” Fingscheidt adds. “So do her parents. So I thought the most important thing is that once the movie comes out and they live in a small community, many people will have seen the film. They still need to walk proudly through the streets.” So Liptrot had “access to the rushes every day.” Her parents read the script. “We made sure everybody was onboard with everything.”
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And even though they renamed the character from Amy to Rona to fictionalize her, “We never invented anything that didn’t happen. Everything is inspired from the book. It’s really more to pick and choose which beats do we use and how do we put them in an order that works for a narrative feature film.” The source material was also the source of the film’s nonlinear structure. “The book started off as an internet blog,” Fingscheidt explains. “So it really is this internal experience of journal writing, it jumps sometimes in one sentence in four different times. It covers so much more than the movie … We really had to almost tame this super loose, completely internal construct into something that is easier to follow.”
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They also filmed in the real Orkney Islands where Liptrot grew up. “It was a challenge and a blessing at the same time, because it’s such a hassle to go to a tiny remote island in the very north of Scotland.” While “you can’t even get trucks on the island,” that was balanced by the fact that “we had to work so closely with the community, and they were embracing us and helping us. They are in front of the camera and behind the camera. And so, weirdly, those extreme circumstances become some sort of boot camp for team bonding almost.”
Stories have been told about addiction and recovery before, but “The Outrun” also “takes the audience on sort of a trip, you know. It’s not just, ‘Oh my God, how bad is alcohol!’ It’s really more this reconnecting with a place, with your heritage. It’s about the heritage of mental illness, all that kind. So I hope the film takes us on a weirdly poetic audiovisual journey in a way. But then I hope, long term, that it creates understanding for how tough recovery can be … For some people, then the real tough work starts.”
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