For Jason Isaacs, signing on to ‘The Salt Path’ was a natural choice — especially since it's a story where nature plays a starring role.
“Most people, when you ask them about their favorite day from their childhood, it's something outdoors,” says Isaacs. “It's never the day they got that expensive present or went to Disneyland. It's always just something simple.”
Marianne Elliott’s feature directorial debut follows Ray (Gillian Anderson) and Moth (Isaacs), a married couple forced out of their home who then set off on a 630-mile trek along the coast of South West England. As the landscape around them shifts so do their challenges, both outward and inward.
Isaacs notes he was immediately captivated by the story, reading both the book (a 2018 novel by Raynor Winn) and the screenplay quickly. But the character of Moth was also going to be a challenge for the actor, who has stepped into roles like Lucius Malfoy in the ‘Harry Potter’ film series and most recently, in Season 3 of ‘The White Lotus’.
“I don't want to be repeating something I've done before,” Isaacs notes.
“This was such a staggeringly moving and beautiful story without being sentimental. But it starred two of my favorite things — love and nature. They're the two stars of the film. And it was relentlessly positive, even though it chronicles tremendous trauma and fatal disease that Moth has, homelessness, and some of the appalling behavior that happened to people along the way. In the end, it's a story about people who love each other and find that the stuff they had didn't define them.”
Much of the shoot took place in remote, rugged locations, with Isaacs and Anderson often performing on mountainsides or along stretches of coastline. That created a somewhat unconventional experience on set. It was also Marianne Elliott’s first foray into feature film, following a celebrated career directing for the stage.
“We have a brilliant director of photography, Hélène (Louvart) and Marianne is obviously a very bright woman, so she was a very quick learner,” says Isaacs.
“[Directors] talk to you about what you're doing and why you're doing it, and sometimes, [Marianne] would give it in slightly more detail than most film directors. Film directors often don't care so much about the specifics in the script; they're more about feeling and catching the mood of a scene. She comes from the theater, where the playwright's gospel. She would be very specific about saying exactly what was down on the page. So we met somewhere in the middle on that.”
At its heart, 'The Salt Path' is a story about what’s left when everything else has been stripped away. Ray and Moth lose their home, their financial security and, in Moth’s case, their health. For Isaacs, that tension is essential to understanding the film. The story offers a more complicated reflection on what we need, what we take for granted and how quickly circumstances can change. And beneath it all is a message about paying attention to what’s really around us in nature and other human beings.
“It's a really complex adult drama. They lose everything, but they find themselves and they find each other. The film also shows that nature is both a very, very cruel beast and an incredibly welcoming and beautiful healing power.
I know what people have taken from it, you can tell from the reaction to the book. It's sold millions of copies, and actually the film was very, very successful in England and all across Europe. So people felt inspired by it, empowered by it; they felt the beauty of nature," finishes Isaacs.
"It also chronicles the rural homeless. We've all seen the urban homeless, but the rural homeless are much more invisible and they're often much more desperate. Maybe on some level, the film also reminds us not to see through people or past people and to know that we're all two pieces of bad luck away from sleeping rough ourselves.
"So it works on a whole bunch of levels... but I hope overall, that it makes you love the people you love more and value the health you've got more. And get outdoors.”
‘The Salt Path’ is now showing in theaters.
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