Interview with Writer/Director Nora Fingscheidt for THE OUTRUN

Most movies aren’t shot on the Orkney Islands. But The Outrun isn’t most movies. Directed by Nora Fingscheidt, who previously made The Unforgivable for Netflix and the German drama System Crasher, the film adapts Amy Liptrot’s memoir about her struggles with alcohol dependency. Saoirse Ronan plays the author in the film, here renamed to Rona, as she retreats from the energetic London nightlife scene to the Orkney Islands, where she grew up. There, she deals with her parents (Saskia Reeves and Stephen Dillane) and tries to find direction in her life.

Over half of the film is set among the craggy windswept moors and cold shores of Scotland’s Orkney Islands, which are located north of the country. Some of the action also takes place on Papa Westray, a tiny island within the Orkney archipelago, where Rona works for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. Several underwater shots explore the islands’ seal population and kelp forest ecosystem. Necessarily, these parts of the film were shot with a minimal crew and in less-than-ideal conditions.

The film has made a big splash on the festival circuit and in awards season, garnering two BAFTA nominations and numerous British Independent Film Award nods. Personally, I won’t shut up about it — it made the number one spot on my Top 10 list for last year, and I wrote about how Ronan was snubbed at the Oscars. Between the film’s theatrical release and its premiere on Netflix, writer-director Nora Fingscheidt kindly made time to speak with Film Inquiry about adapting Liptrot’s memoir, working with Ronan and Dillane, and shooting on the Orkney Islands.

Clement Obropta for Film Inquiry: Congratulations on The Outrun and all of the awards attention the film has received! Did you enjoy making the film?

Nora Fingscheidt: Yeah, it was a truly special experience because we almost spent a year filming. I mean, not consistently — we went back and forth and back and forth, because we had to sort of obey the rules of nature. We had to go [to the Orkney Islands] when the lambs are being born in April, and we had to go back when the birds are nesting in June, and then we had to go back again to film in summer and one more time in winter. And so slowly, slowly, we really grew very familiar with the locals at the Orkney Islands. And the team also grew very close together, like a tiny family. It was a very special experience of making the film.

CO: There are numerous underwater sequences in the film, from the wildlife stuff to a set piece set in a sunken nightclub. Did you personally supervise the underwater photography, or was that shot by a separate unit?

NF: It’s a mix. Some things our [director of photography, Yunus Roy Imer] filmed by himself, then we had an underwater camera person for the wildlife stuff, then we had a unit in a tank where we were filming different scenes. For the nightclub, we used the water tank. And sometimes I was there directly with the monitor, and sometimes we would watch footage later on. Like when [we were shooting in] the wild sea, we couldn’t really be there, and then we watched it later and gave feedback.

CO: I always thought that, in great films, the setting becomes its own character… how would you describe the character of the Orkney Islands?

NF: I think it’s a character that’s very remote and daunting. Seeing it from Rona’s perspective — it’s where she comes from, but she doesn’t want to be there — we see it quite grey and dull and brutal and harsh, maybe oppressive, but not very colorful or inviting. And she wishes to be in London, or she wishes to be back in the past when things were better. But she can’t.

And the more she comes to terms with her past, the more broken London gets and the more the memories fall apart. And through that process, she opens up to Orkney. And then we see Orkney with its magic and with its beauty and with its landscape and with the sort of epicness of the cliffs and the waves. I think it’s a character that also has development.

And it’s a very radical character. It’s extreme up there. It’s always windy, it’s very dark in winter. It’s not like the Caribbean, where you would want to spend a long time. Most of us wouldn’t, but for Amy and Rona, it’s the place that shaped her. And even though she’s running away from it, it’s the place that also heals her.

CO: There’s not a lot of other movies that have been made about the Orkney Islands, so what did you go to as a reference for what this film was going to look like?

NF: We watched some archive stuff. Photography. Paintings. It’s like you said — there’s not many feature films set there. There’s a few abstract art films, but they’re also from the ’80s and ’70s, so they have very different use of camera and style. So we didn’t have that one Orkney reference, but of course we watched movies like Wuthering Heights and Nomadland where nature feels very much alive.

CO: So the Orkney Islands are very secluded. But then the film is also set on Papa Westray, which is even more secluded. How did you find the experience of working with a skeleton crew on that small island?

NF: I loved it. The locals had to take us in their homes, basically, because there is one hostel with 12 beds, and even though we were a very reduced film crew, we were still I think 25 to 30 people, which is all the inhabitants of Papa Westray. So we almost made this tiny island with 60 people on it burst. Everybody [on the crew] had their household that they belonged to, and the houses don’t have numbers — the houses have names. It was like a boot camp for creatives. It really makes you bond with a culture, bond with the locals, and bond as a team.

CO: Do you have a preference for working that way or for shooting in a studio with dozens of crew members around?

NF: I think I slightly prefer the tiny half-documentary unit style! Of course, there are certain things you can only do in a studio. For example, the scene in the night where Rona walks through the Standing Stones, those 5,000-year-old structures. And then she has this weird transition into the nightclub, and we created some of those stones in the studio and we ended the scene in a real location, in a real nightclub. And you do need a bigger crew to pull that off.

CO: Speaking of shooting on location, are the farmers that Saoirse Ronan talks to real farmers or actors?

NF: Actual farmers!

CO: What was the casting for that like?

NF: It’s really how things go on Orkney — somebody knows somebody who knows somebody. The young farmer and his wife, he’s the farmer who now works at Amy’s farm, and he’s the one who coached Saoirse on how to help them with birthing the lamb. We were working with them anyway, and we were like, “Do you want to be part of the movie?” And the older farmer is Amy’s neighbor, and the woman farmer also plays in a theater group, so I think when you’re on such a tiny island, it’s all about the personal connections and recommendations. For some other parts, we also made some local castings, like the young man she talks to in the high street.

CO: What’s your approach to directing actors? Especially on a shoot that’s so bare-bones at points like The Outrun?

NF: The first thing I have to figure out with any actor is what type of personality am I dealing with. What do they need from me in order to feel free? Some people want to rehearse a lot, some people don’t want to rehearse at all. Some people want to talk about their backstories. Others just want to do their own research. Some people want a lot of directing, and others just want to have the first five takes for themselves before I chime in. So there is no one way of directing actors, and I might have methods that work well for me, but I have to find out who I’m dealing with and how I can help them create their magic.

CO: When you were brought onto the film, did Saoirse Ronan already have a pretty developed idea of the character, or did you and Amy Liptrot work with her to create the character of Rona?

NF: The three of us worked together. She had an idea, I think, of the feeling the movie should have and the honesty that she wanted to bring to the part. And then the three of us jumped on a Zoom, and I think the very first thing we did is give the character a different name [from Amy] in order to create some healthy distance for both Amy and Saoirse and for me, in a way, as well. We have somebody we can all contribute to and also make decisions: When do we want to stick to how things really happened, and when do we need to simplify something or dramatize things? In a feature film, you don’t have the amount of time that you have in a novel. It’s more like turning a novel into a short story. It was helpful for us to create this sort of trinity character that contained parts of all of us.

CO: In a few interviews, you talked about how throughout production, Amy and her family had access to what you were working on so they could endorse the way you were telling her story. How do you think filmmakers could approach real-life stories with more empathy and compassion?

NF: I really don’t have this sort of general idea or advice. It was a very particular situation where, for me, it was clear Amy is not a celebrity who’s used to having her private life being thrown out in the public. And we had to be super careful with such a personal story. She chose to publish this book about what happened, but her parents didn’t publish their life story. They sort of went along with it in order to support their daughter, and they’re proud of her, but of course they also have their private lives, too. So I saw this massive responsibility, thinking, “OK, I’m going to move onto the next project. Saoirse’s going to move on. They will have to live with this film forever.” So it was really important for me to be 100% transparent about everything that we’re doing there. Amy had access to every script that we shot, all the time, she got all the rushes the next day, all the editing versions.

That is a way that might not work for everybody — some people might be scared of having the writer or the real-life person so involved, but for me, it was the opposite. It gave me a lot of freedom. I would have been scared creating a version that excluded her and then having to show the film to her. That would have probably brought me a lot of sleepless nights. Of course, it’s painful for her parents to watch, and of course their characters are less dimensional than they are in real life — the mother has only a few scenes, and they’re all from Rona’s perspective. But [Amy’s parents] knew everything we filmed. There were no surprises where they were like, “Oh, gosh, that’s too personal.” They read everything. They approved everything. They saw the cut before it was finished. Though a lot of parts are painful for them to watch, they are proud of her, and they’re totally supporting the film. Her mother has come to several occasions where the film was in the cinema and to the Edinburgh premiere.

CO: I’d love to talk about Stephen Dillane with you. What was it like to work with him to create the character of the father, Andrew? Because he’s big and cuddly but also very tragic.

NF: It is such a challenge to have so few scenes — I think for all the actors, for Saskia Reeves and Paapa Essiedu and Stephen — they have five or six scenes throughout the whole film to create a complete three-dimensional character with a total arc. And the process with Stephen at the beginning is I went to his house and we went for a long, long walk. And we talked about the character. We talked about Amy’s dad. I talked about my experiences meeting Amy’s dad in person. He had lots and lots of questions.

Amy’s dad used to post a lot of music on Facebook, for example, and we created a playlist out of that, and I sent it to him so that he gets an idea of this sort of free-spirited rock-and-roller Manchester guy who, as a young man, moved up to Orkney to become a farmer. So Amy’s dad was a very free-spirited rebel, but he also had a struggle with this mental illness that he couldn’t really handle, and it caused a lot of pain and suffering for his family. But it is a family that truly loves each other. It’s not that he was a bad father or something, it’s just that there was something that really stood in the way of maybe being the healthy, happy family that we all think we know from the book. I think it was a process for Stephen to discover the layers beyond the mental illness. The love and likability of the character.

CO: What would your advice be to the next filmmaker who has to shoot on Orkney?

NF: Wind-proof gear. Lots of wind-proof gear. Swimming every morning — I did that, and it’s such a crazy burst of energy. I totally get it, why Amy switched after being an alcoholic to cold-water swimming, because it really brings you to a crazy high. When I went five to 10 minutes in the cold water, after that you feel like you’ve had 10 coffees. That’s my advice.

The Outrun is currently streaming on Netflix in the U.K. and premieres on Netflix in the U.S. on March 18, 2025.