White Lotus star Jason Isaacs plays a nice guy in The Salt Path, based on the bestselling memoir
After gaining notoriety for playing two of the screen's most unsavoury characters — Timothy Ratliff in The White Lotus and Lucius Malfoy in the Harry Potter franchise — British actor Jason Isaacs knew that playing a nice guy was always going to be a challenge.
"I didn't know if the audience would accept it," Isaacs tells ABC Radio National's The Screen Show.
In his latest film, The Salt Path, he plays Moth, "a tall, slim, handsome Santa Claus" who is about as likeable as characters get.
In the same week that Moth and his wife Raynor (Gillian Anderson) lose their home and business due to a dodgy investment, they receive bad news from the doctor regarding a range of symptoms plaguing Moth, including debilitating shoulder pain.
"They thought he had arthritis [as] he had fallen through the roof of his barn the year before … and his brain had started to go, but he thought that was the stress of the court case," Isaacs says.
But instead they're told that Moth has a neurological disease, corticobasal degeneration (CBD), and his prognosis is poor.
In the face of all this pain, the couple decide to walk the South West Coast Path, a 1,000-kilometre trail stretching from the English towns of Minehead to Poole.
Penniless, they wild camp in a cheap tent and live on pot noodles and fudge bars. They reconnect with nature, find deep reserves of resilience and, miraculously, Moth's health improves.
It's a tale of love and triumph over adversity that also comments on the broader issue of homelessness in society.
And it's a true story, based on the bestselling 2018 memoir by Raynor Winn.
"This couple lose everything. It's not a plot; it's real life," Isaacs says.
"This is one of the reasons I loved this story when I read it and wanted to help put it on the screen."
When Isaacs first met Moth over a video call, he immediately felt a connection with the man he would play on screen.
"He was so generous … When he was describing the darkest things that any human being could ever experience or feel, he was always trying to make me laugh," he says.
"He described these terrible indignities but with such generosity of spirit because he's such a lovely man … He wants everyone to be comfortable."
Isaac's conversations with Moth helped him understand his character's internal life, largely absent from Ray's original memoir.
"He hid from his wife a lot of the time that he was suicidal. The disgrace and shame of having let his family down and not being able to provide a future for his kids anymore made him think he should just step off the path and dash himself on the rocks," Isaacs says.
"But she didn't know because he spent every day trying to cheer her up."
Isaacs sees the parallels between The Salt Path and The White Lotus: both feature a study of a marriage and, in both, his character loses everything.
But the two men — Moth and Ratliff — deal with their misfortune very differently.
"Tim Ratliff … couldn't take the shame and humiliation because he'd spent his life being better than and above everybody else," Isaacs says.
"Moth is such a people-person. He never for a second thought he was better than anyone else, although he did have a nice home and a farm and a business.
"They were generous to a fault, of the [little] money [and food] they had … they shared it with everyone."
Thirty years of marriage, two children and all of life's ups and downs hasn't dulled the romance between Moth and Ray.
"They are madly in love and have been since they were teenagers. [They] finish each other's sentences," Isaacs says.
It may be a love story but the film doesn't gloss over the precarity of their life on the Path.
"Sure, their home is each other in the tent," Isaacs says. "They're also freezing cold and starving. Hunger is something they talked to us about in person a lot. That's very difficult to convey on film — when you're hungry, you can't think of anything else.
"It's not a Disney tale about finding yourself at one with the creatures of the forest. They're very harsh circumstances but, in that simplicity, they found how attached they had become to their stuff and their sense that their stuff kept them."
While they found a kind of happiness in their straitened circumstances, they don't want to romanticise homelessness and poverty.
"When people thought they were middle-class people going for a long walk, they thought, 'Well, how lovely. What a fabulous thing that at your age you can explore nature,'" Isaacs says.
At other times, Moth and Ray encounter kindness and generosity.
"One of the many layers on which the story grabs you — and the film hopefully, too — is to see the huge variety of ways that people treat homeless people and the choices that are available to us: to be generous or to slam our front doors on their fingers," Isaacs says.
The Salt Path is the debut feature from Marianne Elliott, an acclaimed British theatre director whose credits include the National Theatre productions War Horse and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.
To offset her inexperience in film, Elliott recruited veteran French cinematographer Hélène Louvart.
Much of the film was shot in hard-to-reach locations on the hilly coastal trail so Louvart employed a remote camera-operating system that allowed her to film the actors from a distance.
It was a novel experience for Isaacs.
"Normally, as an actor, you have an intimate relationship with the camera operator; there's a dance you do with each other and there's a conversation you have with each other away from everybody else, and we didn't have that," he says.
It allowed Isaacs and Anderson to forget the camera as they acted out their scenes on the Path, adding to Moth and Ray's sense of removal from the world.
"We had no idea what they were documenting, didn't know what they could see, didn't know where the edges of frames were," he says.
Playing Moth was also physically demanding in a way Isaacs hadn't before encountered.
"I don't like to complain about anything but these are difficult circumstances to make a film," he says.
"There were times in the sleeting rain and freezing cold when we felt very sorry for ourselves and had to remind ourselves at the end of the day we were going to go back to a hotel and Ray and Moth had to sleep in these sodden tents with the sleeping bags that weigh 10 tonnes."
The Salt Path follows a different narrative arc to the standard three-part story. Isaacs found it refreshing.
"This was a chronicle, a journal of this extraordinary time in these people's lives," he says.
"Along the way, things happen because they happened, and they may or may not be of significance to the narrative. It's just what happened to them. And that's so unusual as an audience, and it was unusual as a storyteller as well."
The Salt Path is in cinemas now.
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