“I’ve never had an experience like it, nor will I ever again, it stays with you forever.”
It was during the 2020 lock-down that Scottish actor Jack Lowden handed a copy of Amy Liptrot’s 2016 memoir The Outrun to his then-girlfriend Saoirse Ronan telling her “This should be your next role”.
The pair had met when filming Mary Queen of Scots (2018) with the Bronx-born Dubliner began playing Mary opposite Margot Robbie as Queen Elizabeth I and Lowden as Mary’s villainous second husband Lord Darnley. After forming Arcade Pictures and becoming co-producers to bring their vision of the book to life, production began two years ago.
Much like the lives of the earliest monks and St Magnus whose story dominates the Orkney Islands, bringing the film into existence has been a mission for the pair. Lowden has spoken widely of his desire for more Celtic stories, accents, words, language and less-seen lives to be considered while critics have suggested Ronan has delivered the performance of a lifetime. The couple married in July and for one of her first public appearances since then Ronan enters the Edinburgh International Film Festival flicking a blonde bob, looking elegant with a sparkling dress and wedding ring.
The tiny Orkney island, Papa Westray also known as Papay in Scotland is an essential character adding to the film’s other-worldly and ethereal atmosphere. Once away from the crowd, I ask Rohan what had drawn her to make the essential first step in lifting the veil on a location such as Papa Westray. “The interest came from building a personal story and a location,” says Ronan.
One key line in the book gives a clue to a prevailing mentality; that the character’s “real live is in London” while home is somewhere to be left behind.
“I think there is such a romance to Scotland and I don’t mean the shortbread and tartan version. Historically going back much further there’s a darkness and beauty as well as a connection to the land like in Ireland. Mystery is also part of that, it’s in the people. Jack and I want that to be explored more and more, there is such a rich storytelling culture. If we can help bring that out then we want to. So many incredible and talented people feel they need to move down south to have a career, especially in the arts and if there’s a world where that can come back home then we would love to be a part of that.”
With the closure of Edinburgh’s independent cinema The Filmhouse in October 2022 – a government grant means it will reopen – doubt was cast over the future of its associated film festival. “It was important that the film came here first; it’s the perfect place”, she explains. “The festival is something I try to attend every year if I can so to be able to premiere this story in Edinburgh of a film that is so Scottish was very important. It’s also very Orcadian in its identity and so it’s special to share that with Scottish folk”.
Amy Liptrot’s nocturnal life in the Hackney area of London is a cycle of alcohol-fueled hedonism and confusion around the area’s clubs and pubs, mayhem soon descends into life-threatening danger. It’s contrasted with life on an island where she takes a job working for the RSPCA finding calm among oyster catchers and corncrakes or stargazing in a sky free from light pollution. It’s also the power of the erratic elements, hurricane winds, breaking waves, meteoric showers, and the aurora borealis (merry dancers) in an ancient place that helps deliver her from the edge and towards recovery, redemption and as the book suggests becoming “re-born.”
Ronan, now 30 is moving into different kinds of roles, also released later this year she will play a mother (Rita) in Steve McQueen’s historical World War II drama Blitz and with the role of Rona she admits to drawing on some experience “everyone’s been either directly or indirectly affected by this (alcoholism) disease.” Lowden, the film’s producer and her husband as we speak is playing an alcohol-addicted young working-class Scottish man in The Fifth Step by Northern-Irish playwright David Ireland down the road at The Lyceum.
How difficult was it to play a living character as opposed to one that was already written such as her role of Eilis Lacey in the much-loved Brooklyn? “Eilis is a fictional character and with this I sort of agreed with Amy (Liptrot) and Nora (Fingscheidt, director) it was important for me to creatively and emotionally have a separation from the character, it had to be its own entity from the beginning which allows the film a separate creative dialogue which partly comes from me”.
The film captures the pain of repetition, especially for Rona’s long-suffering boyfriend who leaves after one too many blazing rows and trips to the hospital. The blood of a self-inflicted wound from a broken glass is soon traded for blood during the lambing season on her father’s farm. The simple fact that the island doesn’t offer a 24-hour off-licence means hard drinking is no longer an option. “There are also parts which needed to honour Amy in terms of the recovery and rehabilitation, that information was just invaluable, that’s something you can’t bring if you haven’t had those kinds of conversations. It’s more scary because you are very aware of the responsibility to realize the character who is the representation of this real person and their real life, it’s also a very painful period in this person’s life so it has to be as authentic and as layered as you can make it. You owe your performance to someone in particular and I don’t think that’s a bad thing”.
Before filming began, Ronan had visited Papa Westray where the Westray to Papay flight is the shortest scheduled passenger flight in the world clocking in at around one minute. I explain that I stayed on the island with my wife and children back in the summer of 2017 around the time when Liptrot’s book was first being passed around the island. The author recently returned there with her own family.
“It’s a place I’d want to take my children and much more than a filming location” adds Ronan. “In the final leg of the journey we created this micro-crew, we lived together, worked together, ate together and had days off together”.
There were challenges shooting in summer where it never gets dark for the mostly winter set film, the cold months are long and bleak so community and the associated events of suppers and social gatherings of people, many who have often left city life behind, become essential. ”
The community on the island could not have been more important and as cheesy as it sounds to say it this film couldn’t have been made without them, and their knowledge of the place. I’ve never had an experience like it, nor will I ever again, it stays with you forever as I’m sure it did for you”.
Ronan hopes that The Outrun will kick-start “a new wave of Scottish cinema” while redirecting stories and talent in Scotland and Ireland.” While narratives concerning alcoholism among Celts are in wide circulation, the sense of place is exotic, the dialect of locals is almost unheard in film and the epic sweep in which the main character envelopes herself in this esoteric place full of mythology and natural history offers a beautiful and wild cinematic alternative. It’s while driving at dawn listening to happy hardcore that Liptrott suggests she “feels like the Queen of Orkney”. It appears Saoirse Ronan has a knack for playing celebrated Scottish monarchs.
Leave a Reply