Island escape: Scott Graham on Iona

“I visited the island when I was 10 years old, with my mum and my sister. It definitely made an impression on me. I remember arriving by boat, and sleeping on the beach, and boiling potatoes in seawater.”

Scott Graham is reminiscing about Iona, the island in the Inner Hebrides that provides both the setting and the title for his second feature film, following his acclaimed 2012 debut Shell.

“I remember being told that this was somewhere where people went to feel close to God,” he continues. “Somehow that translated into someone returning there who didn’t feel close to God. I was interested in how raw that would make you feel, and the conflict that would give you.”

A place of spiritual contemplation and worship since the formation of Iona Abbey in the sixth century, Iona becomes a place of escape in Graham’s film, which begins on mainland Scotland before a sudden act of violence turns Iona (Ruth Negga) and her teenage son Bull (newcomer Ben Gallagher) into fugitives. Returning to the island where she was brought up, and which she was named after, Iona is reconnected with the devout way of life she once turned her back on.

Graham cites the Harrison Ford thriller Witness (1985) as a precursor for his film’s unusual blend of genre elements with the backdrop of a religious community. “For a little while there I thought I was writing a thriller,” Graham says. “Iona starts with an ‘exciting incident’, which is what you’re supposed to start your script with – but which Shell didn’t really have. So I felt I was on new ground with Iona because it had momentum from the start.”

The writer-director was already 30 pages into this new screenplay before Shell was due for release. “Shell was put back for six months,” he explains. “I’m not a particularly patient person, and I thought maybe the best thing to do was to focus on something else for a while, so I began the script.”

Like Shell, the story of a teenage girl living with her taciturn father at a remote Highlands petrol station, Iona also foregrounds a parent-child relationship, at the point that the adolescent child is beginning to face up to decisions and desires of their own. “I’m interested in how the past informs the present, particularly the parent’s past and how that defines them as adults.”

But beginning his new story with a dramatic opening immediately gave this project a different “beat” or “current” to his debut. “As well as being a filmmaker, I’m also a cinema-goer, and I know how rewarding it can be to feel like you’re on a journey with a character. That’s something I couldn’t have with Shell because the point was that everyone else was on a journey but they weren’t.”

For Iona, the director reteamed with producer Margaret Matheson, who was conscious of how this second film was to be a more expansive production than Graham’s debut. “Scott’s working in a clear artistic space, which is not mainstream genre cinema,” she notes. “It’s slightly more continental European in feel. So the challenge was to allow him to adhere to his artistic instincts, yet to produce something that might appeal to and reach a broader audience than Shell.”

How did the experience of making Shell prepare him for going into production on his second? “I went through a period of mourning after I’d made Shell, as the writer of it,” Graham explains. “Directing my own script, I should have been more loyal to it, and protective of it. But the time pressures got to me a bit, and I let certain things slip through my fingers. I’m learning that that always happens and you have to adapt. You can’t go into each day or each scene rigid.”

“I don’t over-describe in my scripts; I leave them fairly bare. I was cutting Shell and realising we didn’t have certain things. I was annoyed at myself because they were there in the script for a reason, and we needed them.” With Iona, Graham made a note to himself to go on set as the writer, with a keen eye for any liberties being taken with his original conception.

This sparseness in his writing prompts the question: how easy was it to persuade backers that this was a script worth making? “I wasn’t sure how they were going to receive the script,” he reveals. “It’s a tricky subject matter – issues around faith. I felt there were a lot of dramas around the harm religion has done, or that take a critical view of faith. I wanted to write about faith in a way that wasn’t overtly negative, and it was quite surreal to be having conversations with people about God, and them opening up about their own experiences of religion. It’s not something that we talk about very much. I found an openness to the fact that I was trying to be open.”

The shoot found Graham and his crew decamping to the island for three weeks, where they set up base in a school hall and got around on foot or by bike. “We were spread across two hotels and many B&Bs and rented houses,” remembers Matheson, “which put us in direct touch with the community – you don’t want to be isolated from the community you’re depicting. We borrowed bikes to speed around the island because we weren’t able to take many vehicles across.”

Summertime brings Iona daily visitors in their droves, which created challenges for a crew filming on an island that’s three miles long by one mile wide, and with only two roads. But the weather kindly played ball, bringing a glorious golden glow to the cinematography by Yoliswa von Dallwitz, a returning collaborator from Shell (“There’s something nostalgic about her lighting,” Graham notes. “It reminds me of life as I remember it as a teenager.”)

In this secluded setting, Iona is reunited with her former lover, Matthew (Douglas Henshall), and his grown-up daughter, Elizabeth (Michelle Duncan). Bull finds himself beguiled by Sarah (Sorcha Groundsell), Elizabeth’s fetching teenage daughter, and there’s a bucolic eroticism worthy of Thomas Hardy in an early fruit-picking scene in which Sarah, whose legs are paralysed, encourages him to run his hand up her thigh until he reaches the point where she has any feeling.

Sarah is a vivacious presence in a film in which many of the other lead characters are weighed down by guilt or memories of the past. She’s “not unlike Hayley Mills in Whistle Down the Wind”, comments Graham. “I love that film.”

Of the Ethiopian-born actor Ruth Negga, who plays Iona and who has been seen recently in Jimi: All Is by My Side (2013), the director says: “There’s a toughness there, and a childlike quality too, which is important for Iona because so much of what happens when she goes back to the island is about a regression to when she was 15 or 16.”

“She’s quite a physical actor. She uses her body very well: the way she moves and sits, the way she used her hands.”

Graham found his Bull after a casting call out. “Ben is studying acting at drama college in Glasgow, so he does want to be an actor, but you’re still working with someone who is very raw. I liked him straight away. He had an innocence and sincerity that was there in the character. I’ll generally try to cast actors who are already as close to the character as possible.”

To Witness and Whistle Down the Wind, cinephiles will wish to add another point of comparison for Iona: Carl Dreyer’s 1955 film Ordet, an austere story of faith and the miraculous in a strict Christian community. Graham admits the film provided much encouragement: “I was on to a third draft of Iona before I watched Ordet. It’s so bare and brave. It’s really difficult to write prayers or have actors talk about God. So to have a film like that which is powerful rather than sentimental… It was good to watch that before making Iona because it helped me not to be afraid.”

Such fearlessness has resulted in a bracing spiritual drama that marks a step up in both ambition and accomplishment from Graham’s debut film. But the Aberdeen-born director won’t feel at ease about his achievement until Iona screens for the public. “You rely on the audience to help you complete the film,” he concludes. “It’s not complete until it’s seen by people in a room together – it’s a communal experience.”

Iona was backed by the BFI Film Fund.