00:00 I'm turning 30 this year. Dirty 30! There's a lot of celebrations happening this year.
00:06 I'm playing a girl called Rona in the film version of The Outrun and Rona is
00:16 based on Amy Liptrot and Amy's real life and I got involved pretty early on.
00:27 Sarah Brocklehurst had acquired the rights to the book and myself, Jack
00:34 Loudon and Dominic Norris completely fell in love with the book independently
00:38 of that and found that it was already sort of in very early development and we
00:44 really wanted to get involved. So initially it was sort of, it was the
00:48 whole project that was very enticing to me and I guess you know being able
00:56 to play a character that spans over 10 years and you get to see this
01:01 incredible arc is always very attractive to an actor. The reason why we
01:11 decided to produce as it were is because we wanted to help develop it, we wanted
01:16 to help shape it and find the right filmmaker to come on board to make
01:22 it with us and you know for Jack in particular and for myself, Scotland is
01:30 his home, my second home so we're always looking to bring work back to Scotland
01:37 and Ireland anyway. So yeah, so it just it felt very personal, it felt like
01:44 there was a lot of heart that was sort of in it for us from the very
01:49 beginning and we were really lucky that Nora came on board soon after that.
01:54 So when the project came to me it was Amy's book, it's a memoir by Amy Leptret
01:59 about her life and her experiences and it was clear that Saoirse would star in
02:04 the film so when I read the book I already had Saoirse in mind and that was
02:08 quite an amazing experience because for a filmmaker that's a dream coming true.
02:13 It also takes place at the edge of the world sort of you know in a very tiny
02:18 tiny place with many islands at the north of Scotland so the combination was
02:22 really very intriguing. When it came to me it was still Amy's book so we hadn't
02:28 written the screenplay yet and it was very clear that to adapt something that's
02:33 so internal, it's almost like a collection of journal essays into a
02:37 movie would be quite a challenge so it was clear the film would need to be sort
02:42 of very nerdy in parts and experimental in order to keep this because it is also
02:47 what makes the book so special, her inner life.
02:50 Yeah it's sort of, it's nonlinear as well and it's sort of weirdly sort of
02:57 structure-less in terms of how you would translate that to a movie so I think
03:04 there were a lot of filmmakers that were very scared to take something like this
03:07 on because if you read the book you'll see what Amy does so brilliantly is that
03:13 she will see something in the present day that will remind her of something
03:19 that happened to her when she was a child and then you'll sort of go into
03:22 that memory for a few pages and then you'll come out of it again and suddenly
03:26 you're someplace else so to take something like that on and sort of
03:32 recalibrate it almost for film form is is a real challenge and we kind of
03:39 didn't know where to start either but we did know that the life of this person
03:45 and the environment that she ends up in which is the Orkney Islands was going to
03:51 be incredibly cinematic and so we knew that there was a movie in there but
03:57 trying to sort of reshape that for for the screen was was really difficult.
04:02 I knew about it through Jack. Jack had been up there with a friend a few years
04:07 before and he he's a massive history buff and so him and his friend Andy were
04:13 really obsessed with this Arctic explorer called John Ray who was this
04:18 incredible man who came from the Orkney Islands and so they had gone up there
04:23 kind of around the time that we were doing Mary Queen of Scots they had gone
04:27 up there and he would show me you know beautiful photographs of the scenery and
04:32 it like it rains the whole time and you could hardly see anything and it was
04:35 windy and but the one thing he said is that everyone was so incredible and sort
04:39 of the Orkney Islands they wouldn't even call themselves Scottish they're
04:44 Orcadian first and foremost and you'd find that with people from the Shetland
04:48 Islands as well it's almost more Nordic and in terms of their culture and their
04:53 their accent is very different and the slang words that they use are sort of
04:59 very individual and so it is Scottish but it's also sort of not so yeah that
05:05 was my introduction to it and the first time I went up there was when we were
05:09 delivering lambs in April, May, yeah. There was definitely an energy on this that
05:18 was incredibly calm and very it felt very very safe and you know there's so
05:26 many situations that Rona finds herself in and as the actor to play it were
05:31 incredibly vulnerable places to put yourself in and I think Nora set a
05:38 tone for myself and the crew and that was just I don't know it was it was just
05:45 calm all the time it was peaceful it was we felt very protected and you know this
05:51 was an environment that we were all putting ourselves into where we were all
05:54 sort of having to face and probably very difficult memories and events that we've
06:00 personally gone through ourselves so it needed to be a real sort of safe
06:04 environment I think having that female energy really did help the whole process
06:10 really. I have to figure out sort of what does the actor need because some people
06:16 need a lot of space and others need a lot of conversation everybody's
06:20 different so my job is finding out what does my you know partner opposite me
06:27 need exactly and then I can do my job. Where do you want to see yourself this
06:32 year? I'm turning 30 this year. Everyone's like I don't know when I turn 30
06:37 everything changed and I just sort of like settled into who I am in my life
06:44 and then a year later you see them and I'm sort of like does that true? So I
06:50 yeah I don't know but there seems to be a lot of expectation when it comes to
06:54 turning 30 but I don't really think about it I've never been a big it's not
07:00 that I'm not a big birthday person but I'm just sort of like yeah I'm 30 now
07:04 I'm gonna be on set
07:06 [BLANK_AUDIO]
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