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| Grant O'Rourke and Gayle Rankin in The Incomer. Louis Paxton: 'I directed the actors from the point of view of the reality of the situation, there wasn’t a huge amount of comedic nudging. A lot of it was in the script and the actors took it really seriously which is the key to all comedy' Photo: Universal Pictures |
The Incomer will open Edinburgh Film Festival tonight in a move that marks a homecoming celebration for Louis Paxton, who before he stepped behind the camera worked as an usher at the city’s Filmhouse in his younger years. The offbeat comedy drama, which won the NEXT prize at Sundance earlier this year, stars Gayle Rankin and Grant O’Rourke as Isla and Sandy a pair of squabbling thirtysomething siblings who live together on an island that is otherwise uninhabited. Raised by their long-dead parents to fear outsiders, they react badly when local council worker Daniel (Domnhall Gleeson) arrives to evict them. Soon, however, the trio form an unexpected bond as more threatening forces come into play.
The film strikes a tricky balance between whimsy and much darker emotions, along with comedy and poignancy. Paxton says that it all came down to “ground rules”.
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| Louis Paxton: 'I’m really committed to continuing to make comedy and genre films in the UK and particularly in Scotland' Photo: Courtesy of Sundance Institute |
“So we tried to shoot it in a way that was much more grounded. We tried not to have too much colour or to have too many washed out pastels. We avoided things like the sort of Wes Anderson or Napoleon Dynamite approach. We limited garish colours to things that were alien on the island. With that kind of grounding it made the extraordinary more ordinary. So by treating the extraordinary as kind of ordinary, it felt to me anyway, like it made it funnier, and that was just kind of my instinct throughout.
“I directed the actors from the point of view of the reality of the situation, there wasn’t a huge amount of comedic nudging. A lot of it was in the script and the actors took it really seriously which is the key to all comedy.”
The cast are uniformly impressive, not least the fact that Paxton managed to sign up big-name star Gleeson as well Rankin, whose CV includes She-Wolf in Glow and who plays healer Alys Rivers in Season 2 of Game Of Thrones prequel House Of The Dragon.
Meanwhile, Paxton’s collaboration with Grant goes back to when he was a teenager and his early shorts. “We’ve worked together a lot and he fed into this script so he's been part of it since the beginning,” says the director. Gayle came on board, a few years before we actually shot. As soon as we found her, she was the right person for the role, she was amazing.
“We almost lost her when her schedule with House Of The Dragon wouldn't work with ours and we sort of retreated and felt, okay, we'll try to find someone else, see what we can do but nobody felt like they owned it the way she did. So we just worked around her commitments to House Of The Dragon. So she was shooting one week with us and then one week House Of The Dragon so it was a bit of a thing to juggle, especially for her.”
When Paxton talks about Gleeson, whose CV includes everything from Richard Curtis’ About Time to Alex Garland’s Ex Machina and Alejandro Iñárritu’s [film id=28800 ]The Revenant[/film], he notes that he has “a tremendous range”.
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| Louis Paxton says Domnhall Gleeson was 'a joy to work with and really smart and he really elevated the character beyond what was on the page' Photo: Universal Pictures |
“I always get a bit nervous working with actors because that’s your kind of core responsibility and you want to do a good job and I really care about giving good direction. But it's nerve-wracking working with someone like Domhnall because he's worked with incredible directors over the years. But he was just a joy to work with and really smart and he really elevated the character beyond what was on the page. He brought so much to it, they all did. I'm really proud of the performances that we got.”
Given that The Incomer is all about sibling relationships, it wouldn’t be right to talk to Louis without asking about his sister Ruth, who is also a filmmaker and made her feature debut in 2021 with [film]The Banquet[/filml].
“We’re incredibly supportive of each other, it’s lovely,” he says. “It’s always been great to have my older sister, who’s done all of this already and to be able to rely on her for advice and support because it can be quite lonely at times, being a director. There’s not a huge amount of people you can talk to but you can talk to your sister.”
However, he adds: “I would say a lot of the fighting in this and the way it can go from zero to 100 so quickly was inspired us when we were younger. We get on really well now but when we were younger, we knew how to push each other's buttons put it that way.
Looking ahead, Paxton says he’s still “developing projects for TV” and adds: “Off the back of The Incomer, I’m getting the chance to push forward some film projects that I’m really excited about which are more ambitious. Some are set in Scotland and some elsewhere.
“I’m really committed to continuing to make comedy and genre films in the UK and particularly in Scotland. I love genre filmmaking and I love mixing genres and I get really excited by the idea of playing with tone and in this film it was very much a comedy drama.
“As I was writing the script, I felt like it was telling me it wanted to be a more accessible, almost family-friendly film. There's not a huge amount of swearing or violence or anything in it. Some of the themes are a bit darker but I'd liken it to the films I loved when I was growing up, like Tim Burton's Beetlejuice or Edward Scissorhands, which were family films, but had a real kind of edge to them and a bit of a twist.
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| Incomer poster |
“I floated the idea of calling this a folk comedy but I don’t think it really caught on. The Wicker Man was a massive inspiration in lots of ways and a lot of the costume ideas and the aesthetics of it came from pagan rituals. If you look at a lot of the designs for it it was quite moody and not necessarily comedic in its leanings. I just found that funnier. It felt like if the threat was more real and a bit more ominous and a bit weirder, it would be funnier and and more compelling as a result.”
Read the first part of our interview with Louis Paxton on isolation, animation and folklore in The Incomer
Watch the trailer:
