Sundance Award-winning comedy The Incomer is a modern folk fairy tale set on a remote Scottish island, where two siblings (Gayle Rankin, GLOW, and Grant O'Rourke, Outlander) survive by hunting seabirds, retelling the stories of their ancestors, and defending the isle from dreaded Incomers.
Their world is upended with the arrival of an awkward council worker (Domhnall Gleeson, The Paper) who has come to uproot them from their homeland on behalf of the government.
Written and directed by Louis Paxton, the movie—a legitimate Film of the Year candidate with 94% on Rotten Tomatoes—also stars Emun Elliott, Michelle Gomez, and John Hannah.
The filmmaker delivers a distinctly unusual genre mash-up, blending absurd comedy, fantasy, Scottish folklore and family drama into a story that's as heartfelt as it is strange. For Paxton, the film offered an opportunity to bring together a number of his biggest influences, from The Lord of the Rings and Predator to traditional folklore from the Scottish islands.
In our exclusive interview, the writer/director discusses finding the right balance between comedy and drama, Gleeson's hilarious Lord of the Rings retelling, the freedom given to his cast on set, and how animator Selena Wagner brought the film's striking animated sequences to life.
You can check out the full interview for The Incomer in the player below.
This film is such a unique combination of absurd comedy, fantasy, folklore, and family drama. I'd love to know where that mixture of ideas came from.
Oh, thank you. I mean, look, I’d love to say it was all—look, all of those things that you mentioned are things that I love and that I hold very dearly. And, you know, I’m a big genre film enthusiast. And I feel like this is the distillation of all of the things I’m interested in in terms of tone, genre, comedy, but also, you know, the historic folk tales of the islands of Scotland. Yeah, this is all very much influenced by so much of what I love and so much of what I admire. And even, you know, I think you can see that in the references that we make in it to other franchises. You know, I love Lord of the Rings. There’s nothing cynical about us putting that in there. It’s, you know, I watch them every year. And I think, yeah, and Predator is one of my favourite films as well. So like having that reference in there, you know. Yeah. I’m just glad that that whole jumble of influences and ideas came together in this film. So, yeah.
I guess it was quite an easy decision then to have Domhnall do that retelling of The Lord of the Rings and the kind of fun places that goes.
I mean I would say it was the tricky thing is figuring out how to do it without, you know, angering people or getting people becoming litigious. I think it was like—and also like it kind of had to be that franchise because Domhnall is in Star Wars and he’s in Harry Potter, which are the other kind of major global sort of franchises that feel like they were relatable in some way. So, you know, Lord of the Rings just felt like the perfect way of doing that. And, you know, Domhnall’s just wonderful to work with in that regard as well. And so experienced as well. I mean, it was a little intimidating working with him to begin with because, you know, he’s worked with so many incredible directors and he’s so experienced, but he’s just the loveliest guy and very generous and really elevated the character beyond what was on the page. I think he did a great job.
I really appreciated the contrast between the absurd moments where they’re sitting around a table having a seagull for dinner, and then the really emotional moments between these three characters. How important was it to you to find the right balance and to make sure you’re doing right by each of them as this story unfolds across the film?
I mean, it’s incredibly important and that’s what I would say I spent—that’s what the majority of the work throughout development was just finding that right balance. And I would say, you know, there’s drafts that you do where you move too far in one direction. And I remember doing drafts that were way too serious and almost started to border more on horror film, which is another genre I love, but then it didn’t feel quite right. And then I had other drafts that felt much more comical. And I think that for me it’s just so important that you have a kind of solid dramatic story at the core of what you’re doing. So if you were to remove all of the genre, whether that’s horror, sci-fi, or, in this case, this kind of fantasy comedy, there’s a robust or strong enough kind of skeleton to hang everything off. And I think that’s where the drama comes from.
And that’s why it was so important that we had Gayle and Domhnall and Grant. Even though it is a comedy, it might seem silly to say this, we played it very straight, and we approached it from a very straight point of view. You know, all of our visual influences were films like There Will Be Blood, which were, like, very serious kind of period-set films. Because we just felt like the straighter it’s played, the funnier it’ll be, but also the more meaningful. And that balance is something that you’re just constantly tweaking. Even in the edit, you’re constantly tweaking. There are scenes where there was more humour, and we’ve cut that back. There were scenes that we had to play around with a little bit. But it’s all a journey, constantly tweaking, I would say. Yeah.
As writer and director, did you allow the actors to have freedom on set to improvise, or were you keen to stick to the script? There’s that great scene with Grant’s character where he talks about milking a seal; was it a scripted moment, or was that a moment you allowed him to play a little?
What’s interesting is that I’ve known Grant since he was in my graduation film from my BA. I’ve known him since I was 19. We worked together, and he’s been across the script throughout the process. He would often read the script through, and we would play through stuff. So there’s a lot of stuff in there that was things he improvised that I then put into the script prior to actually shooting, certainly with his character. And then on set, I would say that 90% or 95% is just as it was scripted. And that’s not necessarily because I didn’t want to give them freedom to do that because I love improv. It’s more that we didn’t have a lot of time on set. And so once you’ve got it, you’re like, 'All right, we have to move on because we don’t necessarily have the time to do a looser take.'
But sometimes I always encourage people, if they have ideas, to just go for it. And so sometimes there are moments in there. Certainly that scene you mentioned in the cave with milking a seal. Part of that—the original script covered him milking, talking, using that line about milking the seal, but the bizarre tangent he goes off on towards the end about the seal he met and all that, that was all kind of improvised. And I’ve said there’s loads of other stuff that I would have loved to have put in the script. But it’s funny when you get into the edit and you often find the improvised stuff just hangs or sometimes it feels like it hangs on top of what’s already there and you’re kind of putting a hat on a hat. And look, there are loads of moments that are improvised, and they’re all great at it, but in the end you just have to make difficult choices. But yeah, if we had DVD extras, we’d have some cool extra material I think that people would like. Yeah.
The animated sequences in the film were amazing. Were those something you knew you wanted from the start?
Well, it was always a part of—I think it was important that you understood where they’d come from and I think it was just a lovely way to kind of visualise these sequences. As soon as I met Selena Wagner, who is an animator from the north of Scotland, her work just spoke to me and spoke to this film. She’s incredibly evocative and full of character. And I’d say deceptively kind of simplistic. And the other thing is we’re quite limited with time. Animation takes loads of time. And if I was to—my ideal situation would be we do like cell by cell kind of hand-drawn, really traditional, because it has such an amazing quality. But actually we didn’t have the time to do that.
Selena proposed this technique where we could give that effect so that it’s partially hand-drawn and then also kind of like animated. And I’d not worked with animation before, so she really led those sequences. I’d scripted them, but there are ideas in those sequences. There’s a bit where you see a lot of naked people and one of them said something really rude, and that was not something I’d written. Just the first animatic that she showed me, that appeared in, and I was like, “Yes, she gets it.” I just loved it. I loved that moment because it’s always been a laugh-out-loud moment. So yeah, it was a great collaboration. And I learned a lot, certainly about animation. I’d not worked with animation prior to that. So, yeah.
You mentioned being a longtime friend of Grant, but when it came to having Domhnall and Gayle in the film and putting this trio together and their chemistry, was that quite a lengthy process to find the right people, or did that dynamic come together quite quickly?
I would say that when we got the three of them, it just felt right. I think Domhnall—I was really excited about working with him—as I say, he comes with a huge body of experience. Gayle does as well. I’d not seen as much of her work in the UK, I suppose—like she’d done GLOW and I’d seen all these amazing indie films that she does. But as soon as I met her, I knew she was right for it. And I think when we got everyone together, I just felt like they really clicked. And it’s funny casting because often so much of it is creative, but then so much of it is also just making schedules work as well and just trying to pull it all together. And I think the planets aligned and we got everyone in the right place at the right time and they were the right people for the roles.
You cast John Hannah as Finn Man, which I think is an incredible bit of casting as well and such a funny role for him.
Yeah, that was really fun. I mean, I was a bit—the first meeting I had with him, I felt like I was almost talking him out of it because I was like, 'Are you sure you want to do this? You have to be in the water for two days. It’s really cold. You’re going to have to be in makeup for three hours before that.' But he turned up and he just smashed it. And it did feel surreal. I’d grown up watching him in The Mummy and loving those films and loving him in other films as well. And he’s so funny as well. I remember seeing him in A Touch of Cloth, the Charlie Brooker sort of mock procedural thing. And it was really great to get him in something where he could be funny again. He’s awesome. He’s such a cool dude.
The Incomer arrives in theaters on September 25.