While filming The Outrun on Scotland’s secluded Orkney islands, German director Nora Fingscheidt spent a lot of time thinking about seals.

The film is based on the Amy Liptrot book of the same name that follows her addiction recovery journey from her hard-partying days in London to her first bouts with sobriety on the small island where she grew up. During one of the film’s climactic scenes, actress Saoirse Ronan is seen swimming with seals in the cold water surrounding the island.

“We had been discussing so much in pre-production, asking, ‘Should we create digital seals? But can we afford that? Will it look realistic?’ And then we were thinking about filming seals in captivity and trying to edit so it works. And then we were discussing rubber seals,” Fingscheidt recalls. The island’s locals insisted there was no need for any of that and said the seals would join the shoot once Ronan entered the water. “We were like, ‘OK, but it’s a pretty big story point!’ ” Sure enough, during their first attempt at filming the scene, the seals surrounded Ronan.

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Much of The Outrun, which will screen at the Berlin Film Festival on Saturday, Feb. 17, is about the tumult of the natural world, both internal and external, and how — like the seals showing up for their scheduled call time — sometimes things fall into place. 

Ahead of its Berlin bow, Fingscheidt, whose System Crasher won the Berlin Silver Bear in 2017, talked to THR about The Outrun’s origins, addiction narratives, and filming on an island with a population of 60.

How did you come to this project?

I fell in love with both the book and also the idea of making a film with Saoirse in the lead. Saoirse and I had a couple of conversations, and I pitched my approach to how I would direct the film, because the book is very internal. It’s like a memory collection or journal writing. I really tried to find an audio-visual translation that keeps the “nerdiness” that Amy has. This is not just a woman in nature for two winters; it’s a woman who thinks about physical structures of a wave crashing. I thought about how we keep that chaotic, internal processing of memories.

What did you pitch about how you would accomplish that?

I pitched them that we need to think of the film in different layers. There is the Orkney layer and there is the London layer, but we also need the nerd layer. We need the film to go totally nuts sometimes and explore different genres and different styles, like archival and documentary, and animation, because that is how Amy’s brain works. It’s sort of limitless in how she thinks.

How did you translate those layers onto the physical page for the screenplay?

I sat down with a book and I color-coded the different layers, not just those three but many more. There was childhood, teenagedom, London, Orkney, folklore, scientific facts, and even acoustics. So it had different colors for all of that and went through the book. Then I wrote the scenes that I thought needed to be in the film on colored cards and created piles for the different sections. I spent a couple of days arranging them by myself because I needed to do the very first rough draft. When I had it all spread out in an order that sort of made sense for me, I wrote a beat sheet and that is what I shared with Amy and the producers, and Saoirse. From there, I did the writing and they provided feedback, and Amy was my closest collaborator on that. We spent hours on the phone going through everything, because it’s her life. I wanted her to be 100 percent on board with every creative decision.

You filmed on location in the Orkney Islands in Scotland. What did that entail?

We had to go up several times because we were on nature’s schedule. The lambs are born in April, so we had to go in April to film lambing season, and then the birds are nesting in June, so we had to go again in June. Then we needed some snow in order to show the passage of time, so we had to go in February. The main shoot on Orkney was in September, and even then we had to be very flexible. If there is sunshine tomorrow, we cannot film the scene of her in the storm on the cliff, so we need to check the weather report every other hour to see when will be the stormiest time tomorrow. On the island of Papa Westray, there are 60 people. They don’t have a big hotel, there’s a hostel with 12 beds. So, we had to live in people’s private houses, and they took us in as part of the island. They also helped us re-create all the events that we needed to film, like the Muckle Supper [a harvest celebration]. These things usually happen in November, so we relied on them helping us re-create their events, which is a totally crazy merging of reality and fiction. I ended up filming a fictional scene set up by people who have had the real-life experience. We almost filmed it as a documentary in a fictional setting.

Had anything you worked on previously helped you prepare for capturing the nature of the Orkney islands?

The DOP, Yunus Roy Imer, and I had done a feature documentary in the north of Argentina a couple of years ago where we were living in a fundamentalist Christian sect. They live like in the 18th century, with no music and no telephones allowed, and almost no electricity. They’re called Old Colonial Mennonites, and we lived with them for two and a half months. You are in the north of Argentina where it gets hot and dry, your life is based on when the sun rises and when it sets. I do think that experience helped us to capture the balance between humans and nature in this film. On Orkney, you have to adapt to the wind. When it’s too windy, you can’t have little kids outside. We also worked together with a wildlife photographer and DOP on Orkney, and we relied a lot on the locals telling us where to find the seals, which beach to find white sand, and where to find the stones so that we could show the variety of nature.

There have been many stories about addiction and recovery onscreen, but less centering on the recovery of a young woman. Was that something you were thinking about when making The Outrun?

Because it is based on Amy’s real-life experience, it inherently is the story of a young woman in recovery. There wasn’t any other way to make this film. We just needed it to be as truthful as possible. Her book is brutally honest and there’s so much warmth and love in it, but she’s also very frank about her experiences and how tough it is to be sober. For people who haven’t suffered addiction, it’s very hard to understand why a person in recovery, even after 17 years, is still counting days. You think: “Now you’re sober, get on with your life!” But when you are sober, then the really tough work begins, like finding happiness in sobriety.