00:00I'm turning 30 this year. Dirty 30! There's a lot of celebrations happening
00:05this year. I'm playing a girl called Rona in the film version of the Outrun and
00:15Rona is based on Amy Liptrot and Amy's real life and I got involved pretty
00:25early on Sarah Brocklehurst had acquired the rights to the book and myself Jack
00:34Loudon and Dominic Norris completely fell in love with the book independently of
00:38that and found that it was already sort of in very early development and we
00:44really wanted to get involved so initially it was sort of it was the
00:48whole project that was very enticing to me and and I guess you know being able
00:56to play a character that you it spans over ten years and you get to see this
01:01incredible arc and is always very attractive to an actor. The reason why we
01:11decided to produce as it were is because we wanted to help develop it we wanted to
01:16help shape it and then find the right filmmaker to come on board to to make it
01:23with us and you know for Jack in particular and for myself Scotland is his
01:31home my second home so we're always looking to bring work back to Scotland and
01:38Ireland anyway and so yeah so it just it felt very personal it felt like there was a
01:44lot of them hearts but those sort of in it for us from the very beginning and we
01:50were really lucky that Nora came on board come soon after that. So when the
01:55project came to me it was Amy's book it's a memoir by Amy Leptrod about her life
02:00and her experiences and it was clear that search who would star in the film so
02:05when I read the book I already had search in mind and that was quite an amazing
02:09experience because for for a filmmaker that's a dream coming true it also
02:14takes place at the edge of the world sort of you know in a very tiny tiny place
02:19with many islands at the north of Scotland so the combination was really very
02:23intriguing. When it came to me it was still Amy's book so we hadn't written the
02:28screenplay yet and it was very clear that to adapt something that's so internal it's
02:34almost like a collection of journal essays into a movie would be quite a challenge
02:39so it was clear the film would need to be sort of very nerdy in parts and
02:44experimental in order to keep this because it is also what makes the book so
02:48special her inner life. Yeah it's sort of it's it's non-linear as well and it's sort
02:54of weirdly sort of structure lists in terms of how we would translate that to a movie so I
03:03I think there were a lot of filmmakers that were very scared to take something
03:07like this on because if you read the book you'll see what Amy does so
03:12brilliantly is that she will see something in the present day that will
03:17remind her of something that happened to her when she was a child and then
03:22you'll sort of go into that memory for a few pages and then you'll come out of it
03:25again and suddenly you're someplace else. So to take something like that on and
03:31sort of recalibrated almost for film form is is a real challenge and we kind of
03:39didn't know where to start either and but we did know that the life of this
03:44person and the environment that she ends up in which is the Orkney Islands was
03:50going to be incredibly cinematic and so we knew that there was a movie in there but
03:57trying to sort of reshape that for for the screen was was really difficult. I knew
04:03about it through Jack. Jack had been up there with a friend a few years before
04:07and he he's a massive history buff and so him and his friend Andy were really
04:14obsessed with this Arctic explorer called John Ray who was this incredible man who
04:19came from the Orkney Islands and so they had gone up there kind of around the time
04:24that we were doing Mary Queen of Scots they had gone up there and he would show me you
04:29know beautiful photographs of the scenery and it like it rained the whole time and
04:34you could hardly see anything and it was windy and but the one thing he said is that
04:37everyone was so incredible and sort of the Orkney Islands they wouldn't even call
04:42themselves Scottish they're Arcadian first and foremost and you'd find that with
04:47people from the Shetland Islands as well it's almost more Nordic and in terms of
04:52their culture and their their accent is very different and the slang words that
04:58they use are sort of very individual and so it is Scottish but it's also sort of not
05:04so yeah that was my introduction to it and the first time I went up there was
05:09when we were delivering lamps in April May yeah there was definitely an energy on this that was
05:18incredibly calm and very it felt very very safe and you know there's so many situations that
05:27Rona finds herself in and as the actor to play it were incredibly vulnerable places to put yourself in
05:35and and I think Nora set a tone for myself and the crew and that was just I don't know it was it was
05:45just calm all the time it was peaceful it was we felt very protected and you know this was an
05:52environment that we were all putting ourselves into where we were all sort of having to face
05:56and probably very difficult memories and events that we've personally gone through ourselves so it
06:02needed to be a real sort of safe environment I think having that female energy really did
06:08help the whole process really I have to figure out sort of what does the actor need because some
06:16people need a lot of space and others need a lot of conversation everybody's different so my job is
06:21finding out what does my you know partner opposite me need exactly and then I can do my job where do you
06:31want to see yourself this year I'm turning 30 this year everyone's like I don't know when I turn 30
06:37everything changed and I just sort of like settled into who I am in my life and then a year later you
06:45see them and I'm sort of like is that true um so I yeah I don't know there seems to be a lot of
06:53expectation when it comes to turning 30 but I don't really think about it I've never been a big
06:59it's not that I'm not a big birthday person but I'm just sort of like yeah I'm 30 now I'm gonna be on set
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