British writer-director Carol Morley (Dreams of a Life, The Falling) has adapted her moving semi-autobiographical novel 7 Miles Out, about her adolescence in Stockport, near Manchester, during the 1970s and 1980s, into a coming-of-age journey for the big screen.
Lucy Halliday (Blue Jean, The Testaments) stars as Ann, who struggles with grief after the death of her beloved father, portrayed by Aidan Gillen (Game of Thrones, Peaky Blinders, Queer as Folk), and finds escapism in the new-wave punk movement and her friendship with Hel. Gemma Whelan (Game of Thrones, Killing Eve) stars as her mother in the movie, which features a soundtrack fit for the era, full of Joy Division, New Order, The Raincoats and more. 7 Miles Out is as much a story about finding one’s own voice and creativity as it is an ode to friendship.
When local band Joy Division’s frontman Ian Curtis kills himself, and Hel leaves town, everything collapses for Ann, who turns to alcohol and casual sex. But a rekindling of the past and a rediscovered cassette tape may provide a pathway to a new beginning.
Original songs performed in the film are written by Morley and Carly Paradis, who also handled the score. The cinematographer is Morley’s frequent collaborator Agnès Godard (The Falling, Beau Travail), with editing by Raluca Petre.
(Time) travel to England a few decades ago with a clip for the film right here.
7 Miles Out world premieres in the official competition of the LFF on Saturday.
Morley talked to THR about the challenges and joys of adapting one’s own novel, finding the right person to play Ann, and why, despite suicide, grief and other darkness, 7 Miles Out also features so much joy and hope.
When did you know or decide that you would adapt your book into a film?
When I was making Dreams of a Life, I wrote the book because we were finding it hard to finance that film, and I got quite frustrated. So I wrote the book, and I felt it was complete – in the sense of putting that away after having looked at that part of my life and made something creative out of it.
During COVID, Michael Winterbottom interviewed me for a book he did about British filmmakers. And he said, “I read 7 Miles Out. You should turn it into a film.” And that made me begin to think about that possibility.
How do you approach adaptations?
I adapted Martin Amis’ Night Train into Out of Blue, and what I realized doing that adaptation is how much you move away from the original source. I think you have to transpose literary things for the screen.
With 7 Miles Out, I did think it would be easier because it’s my own book, but it wasn’t. It was harder in a sense, and in some ways, it was easier because I just looked at other events that had occurred, so it was very authentic. But you still have to shape it into a screenplay and not have as many characters or as many episodes. You’re really trying to create a throughline.
What’s beautiful, compared to a book, is that with the film you have sound and music and actual dialog. And you have actors, performances, and locations. So you’re not imagining it in the same way. In terms of my book and the film, the themes are the same, but the episodes change.
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Let’s talk a bit more about the themes and your take on them. Grief and community are central themes of 7 Miles Out…
Yes, with grief, it’s that idea that grieving isn’t instantaneous. I don’t think you get over it. You incorporate it into your life. So I really wanted to make a film where tragedy and grieving were not something that you get over, but something that you live with. It can make you think more deeply about the world and lead to creative actions, like the music in the film. I really wanted to look at it in a way that was much more complex, possibly, than it is looked at in other places.
And in terms of community, I remember early on, I was really interested in looking at different generations as well. Young people’s tendency is to think about themselves as the center of the world. But they’re surrounded by these other people that they relate to. So it’s about that sense of community in a small town as well.
Yes, the film feels like a smaller version of the bigger universe…
Yes, it’s like a microcosm of the world, and what goes on within this community is reflecting the larger world.
How did you think about mixing the darker sides with the lighter sides and hope?
I often look at quite dark subject matters. For example, Dreams of a Life is about a woman that lay dead in her flat for three years. And I remember people at the time saying it was awfully optimistic. I felt oddly happy, and they couldn’t understand why. I think they thought it would be grim only. But it celebrated a life. And it also made people think about friendship and how they could make a difference in the world.
With 7 Miles Out, I wanted people to feel the light at the end. The film particularly talks about suicide, which was very taboo back then. Even now it’s very hard to talk about. So I wanted to make a film that addressed that. Suicide is one of the biggest causes of death of young men under 50 globally. So I wanted to look at suicide in a way that people afterwards could talk about, but not feel completely disempowered.
The young woman in the film making music and writing songs and becoming able to express herself in a different way was, to be very obvious, about her finding her voice, which was very important. Rather than you feeling very down at the end, I hope that you feel like you’ve been through a lot of emotions, and at the end you feel lighter and enlightened, and you feel like you can go and process some of your own feelings. It was more about catharsis.
7 Miles Out is based on my dad and his suicide. When I was growing up and when he saw a psychiatrist, he would be okay because he could present himself. In my research into suicide, [I found] that people who are going to kill themselves often make that decision a few weeks before, and they start to seem happy because they have resolved something. So people go, “I saw him the day before, and he seemed happy, so I couldn’t believe it.” That’s why I think I make films about the idea of what people represent to the world and who they really are inside, which you cannot always tell.
How did you find your amazing cast?
I cast with casting director Shaheen Baig, and we decided to do a massive open casting call in Stockport, and 450 people came to that. With the younger cast, they sent videos. A lot of the cast are first-timers. They’ve never done anything, and I find that enormously exciting.
I’d seen Lucy Halliday in Blue Jean. We did a Zoom interview because she was filming in Canada, and we really got on. But for me, it’s all about meeting them. So we met at Shaheen’s offices and spoke for about two hours. Shaheen came in at one point and went, “Is everything all right?” I just felt this energy she had and ability to just [express various layers]. So, as soon as I met her, she was Ann for me.
Aidan, I actually had briefly once, and [at another event,] I went over to him and said: “I met you once. Would you be in a film for 10 minutes?” I said we’d send the script to his agent. And then his friend got in touch and said, “Aidan wants to be in touch.” So I ended up meeting Aidan the next week, and he had read it and wanted to be in. Aidan had a conversation with my brother, and my brother afterwards said that was the best conversation he’d ever had in his life. Aidan wanted to talk to my brother about my dad because my brother’s nine years older than me, so Aidan really wanted that perspective,
And weirdly, with Gemma Whelan, what I found out was that the very first thing she did was my short film The Madness of the Dance [in which she appeared as a nun]. So, I keep going: “I discovered you.” And she goes: “I launched you.”
So, we had the core of the cast. And then Kasper Hilton-Hille (Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man, Outrageous) is brilliant as Ann’s brother.
Where did you film, and were any scenes particularly difficult to shoot?
We were on a very stringent budget, so I knew I couldn’t ever do reshoots or pick-ups. I had to get it all at the time. So if it rained, we were filming in the rain. Now, rain never shows up as much on film as it really is. So the filming in the rain was really hard because you’re having to protect the equipment, and the actors are just getting more drenched than they look. We filmed everything within a 15-minute radius in Stockport.
Agnès Godard had never been to Stockport, so I love that. She was seeing it through a different lens, and so the combination of us was good. I love working with Agnès. She calls me “dangerous girl” because I like to be in the moment. I have a plan, but change it at the last minute if I notice something.
And all the songs that you see people sing are all sung live. I wanted that live feeling, which was very challenging but we did a lot of prep. None of those girls could play. Leila [Entwistle who plays Hel] picked up the bass and looked like she could play it. And she did because it was quite simple as the punk idea was that anyone can play. And they all went for it.
7 Miles Out is set in a very specific time and location but feels like people in other parts of the world will quite easily connect with the core themes and emotions. What do you think?
A filmmaker said you could make a film about a village that’s universal. If you make a film where you are primarily conveying emotion, that will connect with everybody. I’m personally not interested in nostalgia. I’m interested in authenticity. So it’s really a great thing to look at things that have happened to you personally to draw out that authenticity.
When I made a film a long time ago called The Alcohol Years, which was a documentary about Manchester, I discovered people in Melbourne and America were writing. People in Australia said it was just like Melbourne, and people from the U.S. said it was just like New York. I think that music has that ability to really transcend place.
Do you know what you will do next?
I really want to work within a genre I’ve not worked in yet. I definitely have got something in mind that would be cross-generational, working with young people and old people, set in a time I’ve never worked in before and a place I’ve never worked in before. I never want to repeat myself.