Yahoo Lifestyle Sarah Brocklehurst on making 'The Outrun' with Saoirse Ronan
When, eight years ago, the Bafta-nominated producer Sarah Brocklehurst read The Outrun, Amy Liptrot’s memoir about her descent into alcoholism and her journey from London back to her childhood home in Orkney, she found herself enthralled. “I just thought it was incredibly cinematic,” she says of the book, which she had originally picked up in part because of a desire to address her own relationship with drinking. “There was epic landscape, epic emotion, an epically affecting journey.” Brocklehurst wrote an impassioned letter to Liptrot, setting out her ambition for The Outrun to become a big project – “while treating it with the care and respect it deserved” – and won the rights to make it.
Unbeknown to Brocklehurst, the husband-and-wife acting duo Jack Lowden and Saoirse Ronan had also fallen in love with Liptrot’s book and were looking for ways to adapt it. On discovering that Brocklehurst had the rights, they decided to ask her to join forces, with Ronan playing the lead. “Saoirse was already thinking inside the psychology of Amy’s writing,” Brocklehurst remembers. “To have an actress with her ease of emotional complexity and charm, who is so charismatic and cool and committed… we knew it was going to be wonderful.”
When we speak on the eve of Brocklehurst’s 40th birthday, it is almost five years to the day since she first met Ronan, Lowden and the producer Dominic Norris – an encounter that kickstarted a fruitful collaborative relationship. “My role is about orchestrating all the different creatives: a great writer, director, star, composer,” she explains. “You don’t know where one person’s work begins and the other ends. That certainly happened on The Outrun.”
The team brought on board the screenwriter and film-maker Nora Fingscheidt, whose background was in documentary. “Nora tackles edgy stories about excessive females, and brings an enormous amount of compassion and colour,” Brocklehurst says. “We wanted the spirit of non-fiction nature writing, conveying the folklore of the islands.” Fingscheidt and Liptrot co-wrote the script, naming the protagonist “Rona” as a way to maintain a distance between Liptrot and the character. (The name is close to “Ronan”, an anagram of Nora, and an island in Orkney.)
Through a series of vignettes and flashbacks, we piece together the way Rona’s condition affects her personal life: her relationships with her boyfriend Daynin, played by Paapa Essiedu, and her parents – her deeply Christian mother (Slow Horses’ Saskia Reeves) and bipolar father (Stephen Dillane). The movie is also a love letter to the wild and windy island of Papa Westray, affectionately known as Papay, where Liptrot still spends a lot of time.
A deep sense of responsibility was a constant. The crew filmed the community of Orkney in locations from Liptrot’s life, most notably her father’s farm and caravan. They held townhall meetings with the local population (which numbered only 90), and worked closely with the council and tourism board to ensure the project would bring the right sort of attention to the area. “We had to consider its legacy,” says Brocklehurst. “Amy has to live with the film for ever. Her mother still needs to be able to walk down the street.”
In a particularly visceral scene, Rona helps at a difficult lambing. “Nora felt strongly we had to capture this because it’s something the character has been doing her whole life,” says Brocklehurst. So Ronan rolled up her sleeves. “Is there anything more amazing than the fact that she delivered seven lambs?” she says, laughing. “That’s responsibility. Literally life in your hands.”
For Brocklehurst, the process of making The Outrun has parallels with her own professional journey as a producer, including her past reliance on alcohol, which she realises today was more of a hindrance than a help (she is now teetotal). “The achievements both of sobriety and making the film are things I’m enormously proud of,” she says.
Brocklehurst began her career producing theatre at university, followed by stints at the RSC and Sonia Friedman. Then, aged 25, she made the indie production Black Pond with the actor-director Will Sharpe and Tom Kingsley, which was nominated for the Outstanding Debut Bafta. “It was very scrappy, but the critics really loved it,” she recalls. “That just opened up this world, and I thought, ‘I’m going to learn to make films now’.”
Intending to run her own company, she bought the rights to Emma Jane Unsworth’s Animals and produced the film, starring Holliday Grainger. She founded Brock Media in 2022 in partnership with BBC Studios. “It’s about bold storytelling that can be ambitious and intimate, personal and meaningful,” she says. She is currently working on “lots of comedy”, as well as the television adaptation of Caleb Azumah Nelson’s Small Worlds.
While The Outrun is shortlisted for two Baftas, including Outstanding British Film, Brocklehurst is most moved by how it has touched audiences. “We have made ourselves very vulnerable in putting ourselves into it,” she reflects. “It’s incredible when I talk to others who have had their own struggles with addiction, for that to be de-stigmatised, feminised and for these conversations to be warmly shared. That’s why I do my job – to put stories out there that will make people find connection, reflection, recognition, inspiration…”
This piece is originally from the March issue of Harper's Bazaar, on newsstands now.
Sarah Brocklehurst wears wool jacket, £1,150, Wales Bonner. Silk-mix skirt, £122, The Frankie Shop. Pink gold, emerald and diamond necklace; matching bracelet; matching ring; gold and diamond ring (right hand); pink gold, peridot and coral ring (left hand, just seen), all from a selection, Bvlgari High Jewellery.
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