Nora Fingscheidt on the Outrun

Nora Fingscheidt's adaptation of Amy Liptrot’s The Outrun will open Edinburgh International Film Festival 2024. The German writer-director talks about turning Liptrot’s prose into cinema, shooting on Orkney and the talent of her lead actor, Saoirse Ronan

Feature by Carmen Paddock | 01 Aug 2024
  • The Outrun

Since its publication in 2016, Amy Liptrot’s memoir The Outrun has won readers’ hearts along with plenty of critical acclaim. Her unflinching, poetic book covers her early years in Orkney as the child of English incomers; alcoholism and drug abuse during her university and graduate years in London; and her return to Orkney to anchor herself in sobriety. It's a life story interwoven with so much Orcadian history, geology and community, and you'll be hearing a lot about it over the next few weeks thanks to two major adaptations coming to Edinburgh this August. There's a stage adaptation by Olivier Award-winning playwright Stef Smith, which is premiering as part of the Edinburgh International Festival, and a film adaptation, which will open this year's Edinburgh International Film Festival. In this screen version, Irish actor Saoirse Ronan gives a bravura performance as Rona (Liptrot’s stand-in), while German filmmaker Nora Fingscheidt – best known for System Crasher and The Unforgivable – directs and has co-written the script with Liptrot. 

Fingscheidt signed onto the project after Ronan was attached, and her first step was figuring out how to turn Liptrot’s nonlinear narrative – interweaving memories, reflections, nature writing, and mythology – into cinema. “It's almost like journal writing, very personal,” she explains, “but the narrative is unusual – it goes back and forth and jumps in time.” Fingscheidt went on what she describes as a “solitude retreat” to Los Angeles where she read, re-read, and colour-coded the book’s sections. At the end of this months-long process, she had a guide of where events happened in time (childhood, teenage years, the book’s present), space (London, Orkney), and outwith both (science, folktales). 

Next, Fingscheidt wrote the parts she wanted to include in the adaptation on index cards. “After a couple of weeks, I started arranging them into a structure,” she says. This index card structure turned into a ten-page beat sheet condensing each scene into a couple of lines. This document was sent to Liptrot for input, after which the pair began to collaborate. “I wanted to work closely with Amy,” Fingscheidt says, “but I also knew, in order to have a clear vision for the film, I had to make it my own while respecting her life. I spent hours and hours on the phone with Amy. She was the biggest inspiration and the biggest guidance.

“A feature film is like a short story, not a novel,” Fingscheidt continues, explaining that many of the book’s events and characters have been condensed for the screen, although its jumbled chronology, jumping between past and present, remains. “I wanted Amy to be in line with every creative decision.” 

Fingscheidt hadn't been to Orkney before signing on to The Outrun, but she went to the islands before production and then five times – one research trip and four shoots – while filming. “For me, it was something very new,” she says. “I started to listen to Radio Orkney to get a sense of the language, the rhythm and the melody. I started to read books about Orkney and fiction from Orkney, to zone into Orcadian culture. But I learned the most when we were there. Nature is such a big character.” There was an April trip to capture lambing season, a June trip for nesting birds, an August-September trip to see the seals swimming, and a February trip with a mini-unit for winter weather.

The archipelago's changeable weather challenged Fingscheidt’s team – but for unexpected reasons. “During the summer, we had the opposite problem,” Fingscheidt explains when I ask about the filming conditions on-location. “We needed roughness and harshness and had a very mild and sunny summer. We had days where there was no wind at all. But it couldn't be too stormy, because it’d be too dangerous to go near a cliff and tricky for the equipment. So that was a balance for our first assistant director [Andi Coldwell] to juggle, to be flexible and adapt our shooting schedule to nature.” 


The Outrun.

Fingscheidt sees the film’s themes as relatable, even if one does not share Rona’s experiences. “Everybody knows somebody who struggles with alcohol,” she says. “There are lots of stereotypes and clichés, and a lot of people feel safe – they see alcoholism as a problem for other people that would never happen to them. The reality is more complex, and alcoholism of young women isn't taken seriously.”

After screenings, many young women have shared their experiences of alcoholism with Fingscheidt: they are commonly told alcoholism is a man’s disease, they just like to drink, and the phase will pass. “It's such a fine line when one person cannot handle something others can," says Fingscheidt, "and for a young person, it's tricky not to drink if you want a social life. It’s a drug that is everywhere, yet its potential danger isn't fully processed, because it is such a part of life. Amy's book is brutally honest: it can happen to you... life can get out of control. You can be very young when you hit rock bottom.” Other aspects of The Outrun also strike familiar chords, including familial mental illness and the sense of always being from somewhere else – or as Fingscheidt describes it, “belonging and not belonging.” 

The director has nothing but praise for her lead actor and her magnificent performance. “I read the book for the first time with Saoirse in mind,” Fingscheidt says. “She's a fantastic actress and has this magical presence where you can watch her by herself. She can brush her teeth and it's fascinating and interesting. It was a relief knowing Saoirse was going to play a character who spends almost half the film by herself on a remote island.”

Fingscheidt’s previous work prominently features stories about difficult women: System Crasher is about a boisterous, troubled girl in an inadequate care system and The Unforgivable is about a woman released from prison after serving a murder sentence. Like Rona, they are uncompromising and sometimes hard to love. Fingscheidt is fascinated by these protagonists, but their gender is not a factor. “I would do such a story in a heartbeat about a man,” she says. “What's interesting to me is to tell a story about characters’ inner demons.” 

She notes that stories of good versus evil are important for children “to give the illusion of a moral system in the world” but human nature is far more complex. “We all have this reality inside us, and that can be scary,” Fingscheidt says. “I don't know why I'm drawn to these troubled characters, but I feel for them. I want the audience to like them and love them. It gets interesting when you force the audience to identify to a certain point with a character who behaves in a certain way.” 

To her, the medium of cinema is especially powerful at communicating this empathy. “You can’t just say, ‘Oh, I don't want to watch it.’ You have to endure it,” she explains. Books can be set down, television shows unfinished, but a film is an event – especially in a communal cinema environment.

Fingscheidt notes that, despite Rona’s struggles, The Outrun is about healing: “You go through hell with her, but you also go through heaven. If you know Amy’s story, she's 12 years sober, has a family, and travels with her children, including to Papa Westray. She hasn't become nice and neat. She is still drawn to certain extremes but transforms the destructiveness into constructiveness. That's what's inspiring.” Like the real lives at its heart, The Outrun cannot be simplified into genres or messages.


The Outrun (the film) opens EIFF on 15 Aug, with additional screenings on 16 Aug, and is released 27 Sep by StudioCanal
The Outrun (the play) runs 31 Jul- 24 Aug at Church Hill Theatre