Isle of Fight: Louis Paxton on EIFF opener The Incomer

Filmmaking siblings are ten a penny in Hollywood. These brothers and sisters tend to work together (think the Coens, the Wachowskis, the Safdies) but there are plenty examples, too, of filmmaking kin choosing to plough their own furrow (Martin and John Michael McDonagh, Tony and Ridley Scott, Garry and Penny Marshall). Edinburgh siblings Louis and Ruth Paxton belong to the latter camp. Both have been hugely exciting voices on Scotland’s short film scene over the last decade, and despite being related, they’ve distinctly different sensibilities. Ruth’s work is dark, surreal, feral, while Louis’ is comedic, colourful, compassionate. Ruth beat her brother in the feature debut race, releasing the disquieting coming-of-age horror A Banquet in 2022. Four years later, Louis matches her with his gently absurdist comedy The Incomer, which had its world premiere at Sundance back in January and will open Edinburgh International Film Festival this month. 

“We were total VHS kids, me and my sister,” Paxton tells me over Zoom a few weeks before the EIFF screening. A trio of Tim Burton flicks (Batman Returns, Edward Scissorhands and Beetlejuice) were among their favourites, which perhaps explains how Paxton’s sister was guided down the gothic horror route, and he opted for whimsical comedy; if they ever direct together, expect something positively Burtonesque. “We used to rent them from a place called Fast Forward in Marchmont,” Paxton continues. “By the time they closed, they told us we had the highest number of video rentals of anyone else in Edinburgh, which we're still really proud of.”

Paxton’s other formative film education came from trying, with his pals, to emulate the death-defying antics of the boys from Jackass. “The first stuff we made was from borrowing cameras off skaters that were mates of ours and filming stunts,” he recalls of his homages to Johnny Knoxville et al. “We had our own version called Cunts Doing Stunts, which we thought was hilarious. Nothing we did was ever quite as dangerous as the stuff they were doing in Jackass or Dirty Sanchez, who were big at the time, but it was a great way to learn how to edit and how to pull a film together.”

Paxton’s journey from juvenile skits to debut feature is a winding one, taking him via Edinburgh's Telford College, the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in Glasgow and the National Film and Television School in London. He graduated from the latter in 2013, but it took a while until he found a foothold in the industry. “I spent a lot of time just working part-time jobs, struggling to make ends meet in London,” he says. It was around this time he started writing early drafts of what would become The Incomer. The initial development funding was from Film London, but when Paxton moved back to Edinburgh, he turned to Screen Scotland. “I think I’ve been through three or four administrations of Screen Scotland over the past 12 years with this one film. At points they supported it, and others they didn't. When they said at one point they were not going to fund this any longer, that was a real blow. It felt like, ‘All right, you have to move on to something else now.’ But I kept coming back to it. I just really loved the idea.”

The turning point was Neville Is Dead, a short he made for a lark with actor Gavin O’Rourke, who also appeared in Paxton's NFTS graduate film, Coriomania. “We just decided to make something for ourselves,” he recalls. “We weren’t like, ‘This has to take us to the next stage in our career or win a Scottish BAFTA’ or anything. It was just, ‘Let's just make something that we really enjoy.’” The film is a pleasing mix of the sweet and the macabre. It concerns a young boy who discovers one day that his imaginary friend, Neville (played by O’Rourke), seems impervious to harm. The boy goes on to test that theory in numerous ways (by drowning him, setting fire to him, poisoning him with drain cleaner, etc), much to Neville’s chagrin. 

Neville Is Dead isn’t related to The Incomer in any way; nevertheless, it acted as a kind of proof of concept. “It was really absurd and fun, but had a lot of heart to it,” Paxton says of that short. “As a debut filmmaker, the biggest challenge is getting people to trust that you're not going to completely fuck it up. And that's really tough, but it's a lot easier if you have those references.” Another thing that happened was Paxton started landing TV directing gigs, including on the long-running crime drama Shetland. “That was quite a departure, making a Scandinoir for BBC One, but while it doesn't seem in any way close to The Incomer, I think it showed the funders I could handle a budget of a certain size, and big crews, and just, you know, shoot out in the wild on cliffs and make it work.” 

The Incomer.

It was O’Rourke who stoked The Incomer's initial embers. “We were in a pub chatting, and Grant was like, ‘What about doing something with two characters who were in arrested development?’” From that premise, Paxton spun a story of two adult siblings, Isla (Gayle Rankin) and Sandy (O’Rourke), who've been living by themselves since childhood on an abandoned Scottish island, sustaining themselves on sea birds they catch in a net. By day, they train in the art of killing incomers, and by night, Isla recites her self-made folk tales, which are visualised in the film using beautiful black and white animations, to her credulous brother. Their isolation is interrupted, however, when Daniel, a nerdy council worker from the mainland (Domhnall Gleeson), arrives on shore to serve their eviction papers.

While Isla and Sandy aren’t based on Paxton and his sister, their combustible dynamic shares parallels. “They’re childlike, so when I was writing those characters I was thinking about Ruth and me as children, and how we could just go from zero to 100 so quick; we knew how to push each other's buttons. So I think that those moments where they're arguing and then they start fighting out of nowhere, that’s a bit of me and Ruth.” Other sources of inspiration include Paxton’s interest in maritime history (“all my tattoos are nautical, basically”), Scottish folklore and his love of Orkney. “My grandad was from St Margaret's Hope, so we grew up going up to Orkney every summer. It's such an evocative, romantic, very mystical place, you know?”

Orkney was originally where Paxton hoped to film. “I scouted every location there, and we found everything we needed. I was really excited about it. But then with flights and ferries and accommodation, we couldn't make it happen financially.” Production shifted instead to the very north of the mainland in Caithness, which was similarly barren and windswept. The location was perfect, apart from the fact locals kept confusing them for another production. “Christopher Nolan was shooting The Odyssey down in the Moray Firth, so we had a lot of people coming up and being really excited and saying, ‘Is Matt Damon here?’ And we were like, ‘No, but we've got Domhnall.’ They were less impressed with us, but it was pretty cool to be shooting in the Highlands at the same time as Christopher Nolan.”

Those Matt Damon fans should have been more excited: Gleeson is excellent in The Incomer, playing the dorky straight man to Rankin and O’Rourke’s untamed goofballs. His commitment to the bit brings many of The Incomer’s best laughs. And while he’s perhaps not quite at Damon’s level of fame, it is useful to have an actor who’s known to fans of the Harry Potter and Star Wars franchises in your cast. “I've seen films come and go that don't necessarily have recognisable names in them,” says Paxton. “You can occasionally break through, but it just gives you a much better chance, especially as a comedy.”

The filmmaker does seem a bit sheepish, though, that he has an Irishman as the lead in his very Scottish film. So much so, that he follows up by email to explain his casting. “Domhnall is obviously not Scottish,” he writes, “but I was still really pleased to have four of the six leads be Scottish actors.” As well as the brilliant Rankin and O’Rourke, there’s Michelle Gomez and Emun Elliott as Daniel’s less ethical colleagues, and John Hannah as a sinister finman trying to convince Isla to join him in the drink. His email continues to explain that it’s not easy to cast our homegrown stars. “So many of the established Scottish actors who can help sell a film are just constantly busy… Anyway, thankfully Domhnall did a great accent, so that helped!”

Gleeson also starred in Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s brutal, snow-bound western The Revenant, which must have been good training for the wind-blasted cliffs of Caithness, or so you’d think. But Paxton’s description of the shoot sounds more like a holiday than production hell. “It was incredible being out there in all these amazing locations,” he says. “We were having barbecues and fishing, and we’d go swimming at the weekends. I think partly because we were in the middle of nowhere, we really bonded as a group.” Paxton appears to have been as focused on everyone having a good time as he was on them making a good movie. “I just think that, you know, making a film like this, which is so sincere and so heartfelt in so many ways, it would be such a shame if people were having a shit time on set. It would feel like it undermined it all. So luckily we had a lovely time.”

The resulting film is so silly and warm and pleasingly oddball that I’m sure those who watch it on opening night of EIFF will have a similar experience.

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The Incomer opens EIFF on 13 Aug, with additional screenings on 14&15 Aug, and is released across the UK 4 Sep by Universal