VIDEO EXCLUSIVE: Jack Lowden On The ‘Shorthand’ Of Working With His Wife Saoirse Ronan On ‘The Outrun’
Actor and producer Jack Lowden sat down to discuss his new film The Outrun, starring his wife Saoirse Ronan, in his new uInterview.
The Outrun follows biology student Rona, who lives in London and she finds her life spiraling out of control as she grapples with alcohol abuse. The movie is based on the 2016 memoir of the same name by Amy Liptrot.
Lowden recalled his and Ronan’s initial attraction to the story. “It was very coincidental,” he told uInterview founder Erik Meers. “It was a book that I read that then [Ronan] read, and we both thought, ‘We should try and do something with this.'”
He explained, “We weren’t looking to make something together at that point, it was born of pure circumstance; we both fell in love with the book so much and heavily questioned whether it could be made into a film because it was so perfect as a book, but I’m glad that we gave it a go.”
The Outrun was Lowden’s first film serving as a producer. Asked about the pros and cons of working with Ronan, Lowden shared that he couldn’t think of any disadvantages.
“The overwhelming advantage was because her and I have such similar tastes,” he said. “We talk about, you know, what we watch and what we read anyway a lot, and we have opinions, like most actors do, about everything we watch, and so it was great to go home at the end of each daytime shooting and not just talk about something that we’ve watched together or binged together, it was quite nice to talk about a scene we made together or she made – it was wonderful.”
He reflected, “There’s a shorthand to working with people that you know so well.”
Lowden explained the process of adapting Liptrot’s memoir for the screen. “The way that the book is written is that it’s moments and its a lot of feeling to feeling, or season to season,” he observed. “It goes back and forth, that was quite a difficult thing…when it’s a film that sort of goes back and forth in time, the great challenge is getting everybody on board at once knowing where we are at every moment. Sometimes, it’s not something that you know works until you’re in the edit, and you can move it around. So it was encouraging everybody as we were making the film to really move it moment by moment and live it there and then.”
He reflected on his experience of filmmaking from the producing end, in contrast to his acting career.
“I loved it,” he said. “I love actors. Actors are my passion really – watching good actors work so on this, in a purely selfish point of view, I just got to watch some of my favorite actors work. And I would do that all day every day. It’s almost irrelevant how the film turns up because I got to watch…some of my favorite actors in the world, so that was my favorite thing about it.”
>WATCH: JACK LOWDEN’s uINTERVIEW ON ‘TOMMY’S HONOUR‘
He added, “But also learning how much I cared if the director was happy or not. And I really was happy when she was happy and miserable when she was not happy. You’re basically willing them to be happy, so I know that now.”
The Outrun was released in theaters on Oct. 4.
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