EXCLUSIVE: Movie producers in Hollywood and London would court three-time Tony-winning director Marianne Elliott and ask her what she wanted to do. She’d reply that what she really wanted to do was to film a story about an older woman who’s a protagonist. “They’d smile at me, and then I’d never hear from them again,” she says with a mischievous grin.
Let’s mark, then, The Salt Path — her film directorial debut, which was screened to press today at the Toronto Film Festival and will have it’s world premiere September 12 — as a win and a sock to those who rebuffed her efforts to tell stories about women who no longer are ingenues but something much more interesting: They’ve experienced and lived life.
The Salt Path stars Gillian Anderson, at the height of her powers, as Raynor “Ray” Winn, who learns two things in quick succession that will upend the life she shares with Moth (Jason Isaacs), her husband of over three decades.
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Doctors tell her Moth is terminally ill, and a few days later — due to a ruinous business deal with someone they thought of as a friend — their home is taken away, and they lose their livelihood.
With nothing more to lose, Ray and Moth impulsively decide to walk the 634 sea-swept miles of South West Coast Path from Somerset to Dorset via the rugged coast of Devon and Cornwall.
Ray kept a diary of their adventures, which was turned into The Salt Path, a memoir that spent two years on bestseller lists.
During the pandemic, fearing that theaters wouldn’t reopen, Elliott read the book and remembers thinking, “Wow, that would make a great film because it’s so visual.”
She’d met Number 9 Films’ Elizabeth Karlsen and Stephen Woolley and decided to ring Karlsen up. “I said, ‘What about making this book into a film?’”
Karlsen looked into the rights and discovered that Beatriz Levin and Lloyd Levin already had snapped them up, via their production company Shadowplay Features.
The Levins were willing to share the rights only if Elliott directed it.
“And that was it,” says Elliott as we meet on a recent sunny afternoon for a cuppa tea and a snack at the Dean Street Townhouse in Soho. “It took four years of my life,” she says, listing the dates from March 2020, when she took the idea to Karlsen, to when the movie was filmed over several weeks in the spring of 2023.
Elliott allows that she was drawn to the story because “this was a woman who was really in dire straits. She was in her 50s, and she lost everything, including her looks. The love of her life was going to die,” she explains.
“Everything that she knew of herself as a woman had gone, but she does something really amazing. So I think it was that. And I think also I wanted to do a film which was nothing like theater, because in theater you can get somebody to walk on the stage and say, ‘Oh, we’re in the Forest of Arden.’ And the audience go, ‘Oh, we’re in the Forest of Arden.’ And, OK, it’s all about the word. And I wanted to do a film that it wasn’t because I’ve seen so many theater directors transfer into film, and I can see that that is a tricky bridge to cross. And I thought, ‘I want to do something that’s really visual with not many words,’” she says.
It’s rare that I’ve seen a stage director leap so, seemingly, effortlessly into a medium that’s new to them.
Elliott met with Anderson because she knew of her interest in the book. “So I met her, and we know what we know Gillian is — she’s very glamorous and very sexy and alluring. Those are the things that we’ve seen her play. So I’ve never seen her play this sort of part before. So we really talked and we talked about the book, and I just thought, oh, there’s something there that I can connect to and I think she can connect to this part. And so I asked her to do it, and she said yes quite early.
“And then Jason was casting director’s idea,” Elliott adds. “I met him, and he seemed to have all the qualities that Moth has. Moth is somebody that you just fall in love with when you meet him. He’s so positive. He’s got the brightest blue eyes. He’s so charming, and he’s always got a joke. Even though he’s got this terminal illness, he always sees the funny side of things. And Jason has a kind of ebullience, an ADHD of ebullience, which is quite electric compared to Gillian. And so I thought, OK, they might be a good match to play the couple.
What’s brilliant about the performances, combined with Elliott’s direction, Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s script and Hélèn Louvart’s cinematography, is that they are able to convey, often without words, the elements that underpin the story: a woman in her 50s who’s the driving force in her family, the social attitudes toward the homeless, and the healing powers of the natural world.
Rocket Science is handing worldwide sales in Toronto.
Elliott went with Anderson, Isaacs and Karlsen to meet Ray and Moth. And then there was a week of rehearsal before they started filming. She and Anderson explored the tale’s underlying issues.
The director says she “loved” working with Anderson, and her enthusiasm for the actor wasn’t a filmmaker’s usual blather about how wonderfully perfect a star was. This was heartfelt.
It was clear, when I visited them in spring 2023 at the stunningly picturesque beach cove at Holywell Bay just outside Newquay, Cornwall, one could tell that the two women had formed a tight bond.
Elliott says that Anderson, particularly, “is so receptive to notes. I mean, I would just talk to her secretly, quietly in between shots. And she would listen and she’d go away. And then she sort of processed it in her way. And it was so beautiful to watch because she just took a note and just ran with it. She loved the note, but because there’s so much inner life going on and because the characters don’t talk about the trauma — they never talk about the trauma. It never really is ever talked about. It’s just walked out of them. But they’re carrying it all the time.”
And actually, Elliott says, the real-life Ray is a lot steelier than the Ray in the book.
“Ray wrote the book as a gift to Moth and as a birthday present to help him remember the story. She wasn’t planning on publishing it. So it’s basically a love gift, that book. But in life, she’s really steely. She’s quite tough, as you can imagine, because she had to deal with so much. And so [Gillian and I] were trying to find that steeliness, which enabled her to carry all that sh*t,” in her backpack on her back. That’s a metaphor.
Her collaboration with Louvart was vital in aiding Elliott to shape the film’s visual language, allowing The Salt Path to visually speak for itself while also enabling them to incorporate the metaphors and symbolisms that underpinned the story.
They worked for many hours way ahead of pre-production, often on Zoom because Louvart was away shooting Karim Aïnouz’s Firebrand and Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera. They’d spend three hours a session covering 10 pages of script. “And we would talk about what the scene was about and why did I think it was important, and why did I want Rebecca to write it and why was it positioned there? And then we would talk about where it would be, and she would then talk about, ‘Well, what kind of shots do you want?’ … And we’d go into great detail and because Helen is such an artist, I’ve admired her for so long, we just worked together very intensively” about every facet of the shoot, looking at what each location represented and how the cinema format would change when they went up a hill.
There’s a bit in the book where Ray talks about becoming one with nature, Elliott continues, “and she feels like she’s totally at one with what’s around her, and how were we going to depict that? I mean, I didn’t want anyone to say it. I didn’t want it to be an obvious shot with her hands open. It had to be an incremental thing. That nature comes more and more and more and more something that they see. Whereas initially, when they set off, they’re looking down at those lines, and their feet, at the start of the walk and then they start to see more and more and more. Then the format changes to make the screen go bigger.”
During the set visit, I often saw them huddled together discussing the next setup. They talked in the hard rain.
The farther Ray and Moth walked, the more the camera would start to take notice of nature as they became more into it. A peregrine would fly by, or they’d pick berries and a passer-by would explain to Ray and Moth that the fruit was so tasty because it had been salted by nature.
I’ve reckon I’ve been salted by the movie. That’s a good thing.
“It’s a love story, really,” Elliott surmises. The couple had been together for years. “They’ve fallen in love with each other, haven’t they?’
She laughs as she remembers that day Deadline pitched up on Holywell Bay and the heavens opened.
“It was meant to be boiling, boiling, boiling hot. So the idea was, and it’s in the book, when you see the place that she talks about, they’re walking for ages, they’ve run out of water. There’s no food. It’s entirely exposed the cliff from miles to miles. There’s not a tree to shelter them.
“It was tipping down, tipping down with rain,” and the ice-cream truck they’d hired — full of delicious rhubarb ice lollies — for a scene, got stuck in the sand.”
She shudders at the memory.
”It was hellishly tricky for us. Maybe that’s the adrenaline that directors talk about,” Elliott adds. “You have to fly with the wind of it and work it out on the day. Especially if you are outside — you can’t control certain things.”
What was that like, I wondered, because when directing a scene with actors on stage or in a rehearsal room, there’s no concern about what the weather outside might be doing.
“It’s a different world. It’s a different planet. But there are transferable skills, I think, in that you kind of know how to tell a story and you know how to speak to actors. And those are helpful things,” she reasons.
“But often it feels like sometimes it’s a bit arse over tit in that you are starting with the tech, and then you work out with the actors. Whereas in theater, of course, you are working very slowly layering and layering and layering of the performance. And then you go to the technical side, and I suppose you’ve got the edit, which allows you to be very controlling about what you look at. As long as you’ve got the coverage, you have to have the coverage. Right?”
Did she know what coverage and stuff was going in, I wondered?
She roars with laughter and says: “No, I learned. I learned it actually. I learned it on the way, because it is all about what the camera takes in. It sounds so obvious. But when the camera’s rolling, that’s the most important thing. So you can see a wonderful thing going on, but if it’s not in the camera, you haven’t got it. Which sounds so obvious, but it doesn’t to a theater director. And as a theater director, you’re going, ‘OK, I can see this is all working out really, really well.’ But if the camera hasn’t got it — and they can be doing wonderful work, the actor is going to be doing wonderful work, or the props can be doing brilliant work or the location can be doing brilliant work — if the camera hasn’t got the proper shot that you need it to have, with the right lens in the right angle, and you haven’t got it.”
She had a monitor, and sometimes she’d look down the camera that Louvart was looking down. “So we got very close. I mean, I dunno how directors work without getting on with their cinematographer,” she muses.
“We would sometimes play back. But I learned as I went along, actually. And there would be things like the scene where Gillian is handling money and I knew we had to make sure we get a detail of how much money is in her hands.”
One of the things I love about The Salt Path is how it makes us feel and reflect: we, all of us, when we’re younger, encounter money problems. But it’s an altogether different kettle of fish if folk are forced into a penurious situation when they’re older, usually a time when we think those kind of troubles are well behind us.
Elliott nods her head. “I think I felt so passionately about the story. It felt like it could happen to any of us. It felt like it was around the corner for any of us. It was surprising to them, and it could be surprising to us. And how did they cope with it? How would we cope with it?”
Nancy Pelosi writes in The Art of Power about the necessity of having the ability to act. The need to make a decision, and make it now, and I’m fascinated by the psychology of having to act. To do it now.
“Yes, yes,“ Elliott agrees. “They could have just stayed still. They know they have to do something.”
She continues: “And they weren’t really aware of what they were going to do. It was a crazy idea because they knew they had to physically do something, they couldn’t say still. And so they just started walking and they didn’t know where that was going to take them. And it was just one step after another. And then he gets better. And he’s still alive now. He is amazing. When you meet him, you can’t believe it because the doctor literally did say to him, you should go to bed. Don’t move around much. Be careful going up and down the stairs. And there he is, walking 634 miles, the equivalent of doing Everest three times, and he gets better. And Ray always says that she, I mean, who knows why, but she thinks because he spent so much time living in and of nature.”
The earth has resources to heal us, we just have to know how.
“Well, and these are the days of climate change. That’s quite an important story, isn’t it?” she posits.
Elliott doesn’t whack us over the head with the climate change stuff; it kinda evolves organically.
“I am a walker. I like walking. And I suppose that’s why I like it the film’s story. I did the South West Coast Path on my own for a week. I didn’t do the whole thing, but I did bits of it late on in the pandemic. And I just remembered this thing about it is because when you are walking, everything slows down. You can only do this pace, so your brain slows, everything slows and calms down. And so I wanted a way to try and make the audience calm down, go with the pace a bit. Just go with it because it’s an amazing part of the country. So beautiful. It’s quite dramatic as well, because you think you’re going down one road and it’s easy. You just follow a path, surely. Because the sea’s there, it’s easy to get lost. And then you turn a corner and you think, ‘Oh my God, this is entirely different. Where am I now?’ You turn another corner and you can see that the path goes on for 20 miles. You think, ‘I’m never going to make it.’“
As Elliott speaks, my mind recalls a moment in the film where Ray and Moth are walking too close to the edge of a cliff, and one becomes so absorbed watching the film in a Soho screening room that a cry involuntarily escapes outta my mouth, ”Don’t slip, don’t fall!”
She smiles, ”I know, it’s crazy.”
So did she retain that sense of calmness during the shoot?
“Probably not,” she shoots back.
“It’s very fast and furious filming. And we had so many locations, sometimes we had three locations in a day. We had quite a small crew, so we were all pitching in and carrying equipment uphill. And I suppose it made us quite, kind of, well bonded.”
And there were a lot of women. “Producer, exec producer, director, writer, original writer, editor, designer, hair, makeup, gaffer, location manager, electricians, second camera, first camera — all women,” she says, elated.
And was that by design? Was that something that she and Karlsen asked for?
She considers the question for a moment.
“I dunno if it was by design, to be fair. I think it was something that we all celebrated. I suppose Hélène [Louvart] was by design, but I suppose people who love the story, love the book, who were willing to do it for not very much money. It was a bit of a passion project for everyone. We’re mainly women. I was quite new, I’d never done a film before, but everyone else who’d done films for years kept looking around going, ‘Oh my God, look how many women.’”
Elliott keeps coming back to adrenaline and how the time goes by very fast. No, adrenaline isn’t the right word, she decides. “But I loved it. I loved it. I loved all of the stuff leading up to the filming. The filming was over in a flash, and then I loved everything after the filming and the sort of careful putting everything together with the edit and seeing how an edit might change things. That was quite a long process — weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks. So that was great.”
The master stroke was in casting Anderson, she says. ”Gillian is just honestly to die for. I would kill to work with her again.
“She’s extremely hardworking. So she comes ready, totally ready. She knows the character really well. She knows the scene really well. She’s quite reserved because she’s taking it all very seriously. But then she works with the director so beautifully and that she just loves that conversation. She loves taking on what you’re saying. You can literally see it bloom in front of the camera. She’s such an artist, I suppose. And I was surprised by the roads that she would sometimes go down. She’s not into fame in any way. She’s such a symbol, and yet she’s willing to be warts and all. Because sometimes when you see those kind of movies and you think, ‘Well, how did they have time to do their eyebrows?’ or whatever. Nothing. No work done,” she says emphatically.
“No makeup, just literally, she didn’t really care what she looked like, which was brilliant,” although Emily Bilverstone, the hair and makeup designer, did create a concoction that protected Anderson’s face from the elements. And some makeup was required to show how over time the elements ravaged her face, but a lot of it was actually all down to Anderson, and we’re watching life as its happening to Anderson and Isaacs and Ray and Moth.
So does Elliott want to make more movies?
“Yeah, I do actually. I mean, I still want to do lots of theater, but I love theater. But yeah, I would love to do movies. I’m not sure if I’d be very good in a massive studio movie where you feel like maybe you have to answer to a big executive group,” she says.
“That was what was so great about working on this. I chose the writer, and Liz [Karlsen] just let me do what I wanted. Really. Nobody said no. Nobody just said no at any point. I mean, there were budget conversations, but no one said, ‘No you can’t do that.’”
It was a massive learning curve, though, she says. “I mean, I did know that when I set out on it, I might be a little bit like Ray, a woman in her 50s, going, ‘F*ck, what the hell am I doing? This could go one of two ways, or it’ll have a bit of both.’ And it did. It was a roller coaster ride. There were some amazing moments and some really tricky moments. But ultimately I learned so much.”
What were the trickiest moments?
She looks me straight in the eye and goes, ”To be honest, it was probably that day you were there.”
So it was my fault, I mockingly protest.
“Yes, it was you,” she says sternly, her mouth slowly forming into a grin.
“Seriously, I think it’s things like, will the script get there? Will we get there in time, or will we get the budget? All of those are kind of pretty normal concerns I suppose. But when you are there and you’re ready to go, you have a very clear idea. It’s the crucial point in the film. Yes. We had no weather cover, so we couldn’t change the days because of the small budget, that was the day when I thought, ‘It’s the turning point in the film — how am I going to show that they’re really up against it.’”
Fortuitously, says Elliott, she’d insisted the day before on filming them walking on the top of the cliff. “We were really lucky to get that shot.”
The film also captures the limits of the planet’s resources, I say.
“Well, it feels like it’s such a relevant story, doesn’t it? Which is maybe why it’s stuck in my head when I was going through what I thought was a moment of adversity, which was: ‘I’m going to lose my career, my livelihood? I can’t do theater anymore.’ We were being told the arts weren’t viable. Do you remember that?
“I thought we’d never see a stage again. It’s my whole family, it’s in their blood. Generations in my family come from the theater,” she says.
“We were all picking up so much anxiety, weren’t we?” she says of the pandemic, which affected two of her shows. The revival of Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s Company starring Patti LuPone was halted amidst previews, and a revival of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman starring Sharon D. Clarke and Wendell Pierce had its transfer from London to Broadway delayed, which stilted its momentum.
Her world, our world, was in abeyance. “We wondered,” she recalls thinking, “what’s going to happen? Who has the answers? Nobody. What are we going to do? And this book The Salt Path is all of those things. When will the water run out? When will the food run out? When will the money run out? When will our lives run out? What do we do when we’re at the edge of the cliff? It encompasses all of those things. But as I say, I didn’t think about it in that way. I didn’t think, oh, that’s why I want to do this story,” she stresses.
“I can see it as a film. So let’s give it a go,” she tells us.
Let’s act, in the Nancy Pelosi way.
“Exactly. Let’s act!”
In her theatre future Elliott is “cooking and brewing big, big things, which I’m really excited about,” and they include, I gather, a major work, and a smaller piece, for London’s National Theatre. The latter is where, until she formed Elliott & Harper Productions with producer Chris Harper and her husband Nick Sidi in 2016, she’d been an associate director for a decade, where she’d directed a string of spectacular productions that included the adaptation of Michael Morpurgo’s novel War Horse, which she co-directed with Tom Morris, and staging Simon Stephens’ adaptation of Mark Haddon’s bestseller The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.
Back in January, Elliott and Sidi mutually agreed with Harper to dissolve their partnership, although both have indicated to me that they intend to collaborate on shows together in the future.
Harper’s the lead producer of new Broadway play The Roommate, by Jen Silverman and directed by Jack O’Brien, starring LuPone and Mia Farrow.
But Elliott does want to make more movies and she realizes that it’s up to her to find a project that she’s passionate about, as was the case with The Salt Path. “I’ve had years of discussions with film projects and it never happened. And it was only when I was able to come up with this idea myself. I thought, I really want to do this. And that sort of catapulted me on, I suppose. I’m really interested in women’s stories, older women’s stories. I’m just really interested in that. There’re really aren’t that many stories out there, so we need to find those stories,” she says.
Elliott & Harper won Tony Awards for Company and the transfer from the NT of the two-part Angels In America.
I asked Elliott for any update on the idea she and Harper have of making a feature based on Company.
“I hope it will happen,” she says. “We’ll see. I think we have to get the rights first, so we have to go to the estate and see. But yeah, I hope so, actually.“
Her father Michael Elliott, who died in 1984, was a national arts figure in the UK who, in his day, directed the likes of Vanessa Redgrave in As You Like It for the Royal Shakespeare Company and Maggie Smith and Albert Finney in Miss Julie. He also directed a television production of King Lear with Laurence Olivier in the title role. Also, he was a co-founder and artistic director of the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester, a title she would later assume some 14 years after her father’s passing.
Elliott did a spot as a casting director at Granada Television early on in her career and has always had a canny instinct about who to cast in her productions.
Just thinking about her Angels In America, which boasted Andrew Garfield and Nathan Lane. And Company had stellar participants in LuPone, Rosalie Craig and Jonathan Bailey.
She bristles slightly as I tick off the star names. ”I wouldn’t say that I look for stars. I look for the right people. I suppose when I worked with Johnny Bailey, he was not a star. And so that’s a relationship that’s gone back a few years anyway. And he’s become an artist. I suppose what I’m looking for always is actors who make really interesting choices. Not the most obvious choices. And I don’t necessarily mean in terms of career, but I mean in terms of when I see them act, I can see the choices that they’re making. I’m a choice provider, I provide choices for them.”
I suggest, rather crassly, that Elliott can offer an actor the choice of going off to make a packet on a movie or a TV show, or to work with her on an electric theatre show for, comparatively speaking, very little financially.
She doesn’t mean just that though. “But also in the scene, you make a choice with every line; everything that you do is a choice. And I love acting so much. I love the craft of acting more than anything in the world. And so I love working with actors who like to work with you, I suppose, and are interested in different choices. All you’re doing, you’re just saying, well, that lines interesting, but try doing it as if you were… Maybe it’s a violent line, but you are doing it as if you were caressing the person. Well, OK, let’s try doing it like you are lambasting them. I mean, just give them different choices all of the time,” she says.
She continues: ”There are so many different directors out there. There are some directors who will allow the actors a freer hand and they do what they want. But I like to get in there. Roll my sleeves up.”
Does she sometimes think that actors need, for want of a better word, to be reined in, I ask her?
“Yeah, definitely. I suppose what I think about actors, it’s a kind of ridiculously exposing craft. It’s so exposing. They have to be so brave. So they sometimes need someone to guide them along the way. I think who will be there with them and be honest and that they can trust. I think you have to be honest. Then you have to be honest about it if they’re going in the wrong direction or if they need to be reined in, or if they need to come out of themselves a bit more. I think you have to be their best mate in a way, or their mother, when you are rehearsing them because you are literally guiding them and helping them.”
As noted earlier, this business that she’s in, is in her blood.
Her mother Rosalind Knight had a long, distinguished career that included being in the original casts of the Carry On and St. Trinian’s film series: Carry On Teacher, Carry on Nurse, and she played a pupil in Blue Murder at St Trinian’s and as a teacher in The Wildcats of St Trinian’s. Knight was also in About a Boy, Prick Up Your Ears and countless TV shows and stage productions. I used to see her at first nights. So glamorous.
Rosalind Elliott’s father was the actor Esmond Knight, and both her mother Frances Clare, and her stepmother Nora Swinburne, were actors.
Marianne’s sister is the actor Susannah Elliott.
Her paternal grandfather, Canon Wallace Elliott, was Percenter of the Chapels Royal and domestic Chaplain to King George VI, so it’s clear to see why the performative arts are very much in her blood.
Her childhood is fascinating. “It became sort of understandable why I would go into the theatre eventually. That took me a long time. But I think more than that, what really got me interested in acting is that when I was really very young, I didn’t speak for a long time. I could speak, but I didn’t speak much to anyone until I was about 5 years of age, and I would sit under the table,” she reveals.
“I would hide under the big table and watch. And there was quite a lot of things going on. There’s quite a lot of drama in the house. But nobody spoke because they were brought up in a particular way. Nobody spoke about anything. But I think that I was picking things up and I was watching and I think that has always made me very interested in psychology because when you are watching for things, you are picking up layers underneath what people are saying or aren’t saying. You’re trying to work out codes. And I think that’s made me really interested in acting and different choices. You can act a line in a very obvious way, but what else is going on? Really interesting subtext. In all my shows, it’s usually about subtext. And the film is all subtext, isn’t it?”
Sunday lunch was always a big deal, with family members joining thespians, directors and designers at table.
“But there was an interesting dynamic between my mum and my dad. Really interesting dynamic. My dad’s family was very weird, interesting dynamic with my mom’s family. There was all sorts of things that never really fully got aired that I was picking up on. And I thought I was very mad. I mean, I must’ve thought I was mad, but it made me look. I really looked. And that’s why I love looking at actors, because I love working out what else could be going on in the scene?”
What was going on, what were the frissons she was picking up on from under the table, I asked her?
“Domestic stuff and affairs. And my father’s dad was Canon Elliott, who was a very famous cleric in the war. He used to do BBC public service broadcasts after the news on the radio every night [he was known as the Radio Chaplain]. He was very famous. And my dad had a terrible relationship with him, and I think he was kind of quite a dark figure. My dad’s father was very religious. He was a real religious leader of the country. But at home he was a tyrant .And then there was also a death: one of my dad’s brothers’ died. There was all sorts of very British sh*t, I would say, for a particular class. Everything. Very, very, very varied. Everybody very well educated, nobody really talking about anything. And so that’s what my dad was doing in his work. I think he was just finding ways to express things that he could never really express. And I was just sitting under the table looking for clues.”
Her story reminds me of a conversation I had with David Lynch around the time Blue Velvet was released. I wanted to know what he could see from his bedroom window. He told me then that he could see some trees. And he wanted to know what mysteries lay just beyond the tree line.
There are so many more questions that I should’ve quizzed Marianne Elliott about that table.
Anyway, it’s all in The Salt Path.
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