Like the many who made it a bestseller, Marianne Elliott read The Salt Path when it first came out in 2018. Raynor “Ray” Winn’s story was about how she and her farmer husband, Moth, had dealt with financial ruin, homelessness and a devastating medical diagnosis – by walking the 1000km coastal trail around England’s South West Peninsula, first battling then embracing both nature and poverty.
The book came to Elliott’s mind a few years later during the UK pandemic lockdowns, which allowed people outdoors for an hour. She was sitting in a local park lamenting that her high-flying theatre directing career might be over. Her latest Broadway production – a gender-switched update of Stephen Sondheim’s Company – had been cancelled before opening night.
“I had come home and thought, ‘Oh, my god, this is it. I’m never going to work in theatre again, because theatre is just never going to happen again. So, I was in quite a bad place.
“But it was the most beautiful summer, and I remember looking at this gorgeous greenery and this incredible nature and we just seemed to be having a wonderful time despite everybody else going through hell. And I thought, ‘The Salt Path. Maybe I could do that as a film.’”
She had some possible qualifications. She’d run a few marathons. She’d also become one of Britain’s most acclaimed and influential theatre directors with her debut productions of War Horse and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, spurring those plays to become global hits. They and many other Elliott productions showed she had a gift for the visual.
But she’d never directed a film before, and The Salt Path is a book that doesn’t automatically suggest itself as an easy movie.
“You’re absolutely right, but I seem to have that knack. I just seem to kind of do things that everybody says are impossible – how to do a story that is narrated by a horse on stage, or how to show autism physically,” she says in reference to both War Horse and Curious Incident.
“The most important thing was it was very uplifting, and it was about a couple who were going through some serious adversity, and who had come out the other side. That was really important to me at the time, because of the pandemic.”
“I also loved the fact that there wasn’t much dialogue in it. In the theatre, it’s all about the word and the word is God and if I was going to do a film, I wanted to do a film that was very cinematic.”
It certainly is that, as well as being a funny, heartbreaking and foot-blistering love story. One that is impressively acted by Gillian Anderson, adding another English accent to her collection, and Jason Isaacs, who, like his character in the most recent The White Lotus series, is a man facing financial failure and his own mortality.
Elliott is speaking from the London home she shares with husband Nick Sidi, an actor and partner in the production company they founded as she left the National Theatre. She’d been at the National a decade, and was associate director under Nicholas Hytner. Born in London but raised in Manchester, Elliott was also born into the business. Her late theatre director father Michael Elliott was co-founder of the city’s Royal Exchange Theatre. Her mother Rosalind Knight, who died in 2020, was a stage and screen actor who appeared in everything from Carry On movies to The Crown (as Prince Philip’s mother). If her daughter’s Mancunian accent recalls Coronation Street to Antipodean ears, well, her mum appeared briefly in that, too.
Given Elliott’s family background and brilliant career in the theatre, which has earned her Tony and Olivier awards as well as an OBE, she might seem quite distant from the real-life plight of the Winns. They were left bankrupt after an investment with a friend went pear-shaped and an ensuing court battle. As the bailiffs came knocking, Moth Winn was diagnosed with corticobasal degeneration, a terminal neurological disease. Even people in Mike Leigh movies don’t have this much bad luck.
“Well,” says Elliott, “what’s interesting about the book is it feels like it could happen to any of us … anyone could get a terminal diagnosis at any time. So, it felt like they were kind of everyman, everywoman, and they were suddenly thrown into this place that they hadn’t seen coming at all, and they were completely desperate, not just destitute but desperate. But they did something about it, which I think is inspiring for anyone.”
Script adaptation duties went to English playwright Rebecca Lenkiewicz whose screen credits included the Oscar-winning Polish film Ida and the #MeToo drama She Said, and with whom Elliott had worked before. When it came to casting the 50-something character of Ray, Elliott initially found it challenging.
“It’s very difficult to know who could play Ray – a lot of actresses at that age who have done well in their careers are quite glamorous. So it was a question of who’s going to not be glamorous, who’s going to be willing to be warts and all.”
Anderson loved the book and really wanted the role. “She was hungry to do it. She’d never done anything like this before. I saw that she was unveiled, not at all vain, and so I took the chance and I’m really glad I did, because she was absolutely sublime to work with. She did really want to find the truth of what it was to be in that situation.”
As for Isaacs: “He has a kind of twinkle in his eye, a bit like Moth.” He also helped carry the equipment for the film’s small crew on a four-week shoot on up to three different Salt Path locations a day.
“Even though it’s England, it’s a very, very difficult walk. The days when I went walking parts of it, I thought, ‘Oh, I’ve got nine miles, I’ve run marathons in my time, nine miles is nothing. Eleven miles is nothing’. And there were days when I thought, ‘I’m not going to make these nine miles. I’m just going to have to sleep on the rock here.’ Some of it’s so hard.”
The film might be a two-hander between its leading couple, but Elliott wanted nature as the film’s third leading role.
“I wanted it to feel like this character, nature, was a bit like a wild cat playing with them and sometimes giving them something nice, a little gift, and then sometimes just really rocking them to their core. I think that was part of the process for them being cured. They were reborn when they came out the other end, and they were able to exorcise the trauma, but also relook at who they were and who the other one was and fall in love with each other.”
One day sticks in her memory ‒ an emotional scene at the stone chapel at Rame Head in Cornwall, which was late in the shoot and in the Winns’ trek, too.
“We filmed it towards the end; by then we had all been through it together. We were really connected. We really knew each other. We really knew the characters. I really knew how to [give notes to] the actors and they were knackered as well ... But what happens when people are tired, sometimes their barriers go down, and that’s what happened on Rame Head.”
So how did the time making a first movie in the great outdoors affect her?
“I’d need about three hours to answer that. My god. I’m really, really proud. You know, I’m in my 50s and I’ve never done a film before. It’s not dissimilar to the characters – suddenly they’re on a massive journey that they’ve never done before, in their 50s, when most people think maybe we should start slowing down.”
The Salt Path is in cinemas now.
