The Big Picture

Jason Isaacs and Gillian Anderson star in
The Salt Path
, a heartwarming and heartbreaking story about love and resilience.
Isaacs discusses the impact of portraying the real-life Moth Winn and the journey of loss, love, and miracles that the couple experience.
He also spoke about filming Season 3 of
The White Lotus
and the upcoming musical movie he’s starring in.

This year, there is a veritable lions’ share of incredible films making their World and North American debuts at the Toronto International Film Festival, including one of the most heartwarming and heartbreaking films I have watched this year: The Salt Path. Based on Raynor Winn’s memoir by the same name, The Salt Path is also the feature directorial debut of Tony Award-winning theater director Marianne Elliot. It stars Jason Isaacs and Gillian Anderson as Moth and Raynor Winn, who embark on a journey along the 630-mile South West Coast Path, England’s longest waymarked long-distance footpath, after they become unhoused.

Ahead of the film’s World Premiere on September 6, 2024, I had the chance to speak with Isaacs about his work on the film, in addition to his upcoming appearances in Verona’s Rome & Juliet and Season 3 of Max’s critically acclaimed The White Lotus. As Isaacs keenly explains below during our conversation about the film, The Salt Path really highlights the things that truly matter in life. Not only did the Winns face financial insecurity, but their eviction came within days of Moth being diagnosed with Corticobasal Degeneration, a progressive and life-threatening disease. Isaacs gives a very nuanced and thoughtful portrayal of Moth’s disease, which benefited from the conversations he had with Moth. You can read the full transcript of our incredible discussion below.

COLLIDER: First and foremost, I have to say congratulations on this film and the world premiere at TIFF. It was absolutely beautiful. I watched it last night.

JASON ISAACS: You saw it on a small screen.

Yes, I saw it on a small screen, unfortunately, but it was beautiful. It kept me enraptured the entire time. When this interview runs, only a small number of people will have seen the film so far. Can you talk a little bit about your character and what the movie is so they have a context?

ISAACS: He’s not a character, he’s a real guy. I play him, but he’s based on a real guy who is in a real book. These real people went through an extraordinary time. They lost everything. They lost their house and their money. In the same week that they unexpectedly lost everything they owned, including the home where their kids were growing up — the kids were away at college but still kids, and there was nowhere to come home to — they went to the doctor to see about this persistent ache. He’d fallen through the roof of a barn — they were farmers — and the doctor said, “Oh no, it’s not arthritis. It’s a fatal neurological condition, and you don’t have very long to live. You should go home and start making a plan and say goodbye to people. Be careful on the stairs.” He didn’t know they’d lost their home and everything.

In a blind panic and in shock, they were given a week to pack the house, so they couldn’t really manage. They were hiding under the stairs when the bailiffs came to throw them out of the house. His wife — Moth and Ray, they’re called — in a moment of sheer madness, because there was a book she was holding in her hand because they managed to gather a box of books — he was in love with books; he had thousands of books — it was a map and a guide to walking the south coast of Britain. She said, “Let’s just walk.” I mean, he should have said, “Are you trying to kill me?” Because at that point, only one of his legs worked. One of his arms had given up, too, and his brain was failing and stuff. He went, “Alright,” because they had nothing else to do — no money and no one to stay with.

They walked, and they walked, and they walked, and they walked in the freezing cold, and they starved. They walked up very steep hills, and they fell down things, and they were shown incredible generosity by people, and they were also shunned by lots of people. It’s not a sentimental relationship with nature, but bit by bit, they became in-tune with nature over the course of the walk. I don’t think it’s too much of a spoiler to say, because the book has sold millions, but bit by bit nature or magic or love or something made his condition reverse, and nothing like that has ever happened before to anybody. When, at some point, the weather was too bad, and they finally had shelter somewhere, his condition started to come back. He started to forget what had happened to them, and as a birthday gift to him, his wife started to write down a memoir. She handed it to him on his birthday, and that memoir has gone on to sell millions and millions of copies around the world. And they walked again. Every time his condition comes back, they try and walk again. So, it’s a story about love. It’s a story about a miracle. It’s a story of loss. It’s a story, really, about what home is, what a real home is. It’s not bricks and mortar.

Moth and Ray Have “Love at Their Core,” Says Jason Isaacs
Image via Number 9 Films/Shadowplay Features

It makes it so heartfelt. It’s something that has really lingered with me, and I think that’s why so many of us like watching movies and making movies. They’re this transformative experience. Even now, 24 hours later, I’m still thinking over little parts of this movie. What was something that you took away from inhabiting this real person after you were done with the project?

ISAACS: Well, I spent not enough time but some time with Moth. Moth, who I’m playing, had this terrible condition. On one of the Zooms with him, I remember watching it back, and we’re laughing and laughing and laughing, and as he’s documenting for me all the terrible indignities that come with his condition — the loss of bowel control or all the things that his wife and other people have to do for him and what it’s like forgetting and not being able to finish a sentence — I watched it back with horror because I was laughing, and I realized I was laughing because he wanted to make me okay with it. He’s the most lovely person I’ve ever met. Everyone who ever meets him falls completely in love with him.

When you see the two of them together, they’re so devoted to each other. They’ve been together since they were teenagers. The fact that they lost everything and partly blamed each other for it for a while, and were battling against the worst things that nature can throw at you, stripped them down to their bare core, who they were with everything lost. Who they were, were people who had love at their core. So what I took away from it, I suppose, is that none of the stuff we have around us, none of the things we think we want, count. What really counts when it’s all gone is who we’re there for, and who’s there for us.

That’s the thing that’s been lingering with me since yesterday. If I lost all of this, as long as I have my family, that’s all that matters. You touched on getting to talk with Moth and learning the symptoms, from the small to the big, and all of these different physicality things that you’ve had to take on for this role. What was that like taking on the tremors, the limp, the very physical attributes of this?

ISAACS: I wanted to make it accurate. Of course, we didn’t shoot in order, so he had this very extreme condition, and it got worse at some point, it got better, and then they took some shelter, and it got worse again. But we didn’t shoot the thing chronologically, so it was really important for me to get the physical stuff right. But also, he was very, very generous in sharing with me what his doubts were, the things that horrified him, the times that he felt suicidal, and how much effort he made to make sure that Ray, his wife, never saw any of that, and how important it was to him all the time to make sure she felt okay. Both of them felt the same, I think, about each other. They were so concerned with whether the other person was doing all right, and that, in some ways, is what saved them. They’re not self-indulgent people. They don’t think about themselves, they think selflessly about the other person. So, he gave me my inner landscape. That’s all actors ever want to know — “What am I thinking?” And he helped me so much with what he was thinking.

‘The Salt Path’ Is Director Marianne Elliott’s Feature Directorial Debut
I also wanted to talk about the director of the film. Marianne Elliott is obviously this huge powerhouse director on the West End and Broadway, but this is her directorial debut on the screen. I’ve always been really fascinated by directors who go from the stage to the screen because I think they bring something very different to the process, like Martin McDonagh and Kenneth Branagh—

ISAACS: Sam Mendes.

Yes! All of them have something different they bring. I love what they do because I feel like they fill in the screen in a very different way. I was wondering for you — because you have a theater background, as well — if you found that theatrical tone to come through in the way that she was directing this project as you were filming it?

ISAACS: Theatrical means visual. She was very collaborative. She gathered around a lot of talented women, and she delegated a lot because she knew she was new, and she didn’t think in these pictures. So in many ways, the look of the film was Hélène [Louvart], our director of photography. She’s a very idiosyncratic French woman hunched over an invisible cigarette that she didn’t smoke all the time — she was actually wearing a beret on many days. So the look of the film owes an awful lot, I think. Marianne was like, “I haven’t done this before. I don’t know what cuts are what. I never edited anything. You do that stuff, and I’ll do the performance stuff.”

Something I’ve never seen on a film before, and I don’t know if she’ll continue to do it — she had the script in her hand all the time. The script in the theater, of course, is gospel. In films, normally it’s a kind of blueprint to start, to jump off, but for her, it was this terribly important thing that she was glued to all the time. She was very strict about us sticking very closely to the script, which is unusual for me. I have to say, it was an odd fit. So, she brought that to it. The work she’d done was before we got there. She had helped develop the script, and it’s only Gillian [Anderson] and I in most of the scenes, and in many of them, we’re not talking. I’m just thinking, “How can I climb this when one of my legs doesn’t work?” Or, “What is it like trying to sleep in the freezing cold?” She left us alone a lot. One of the great skills of directing is knowing when not to say things because some directors don’t stop talking all the time because they feel that they ought to do that. But Marianne’s done so much of it, I think she knew when to walk away or when to leave things alone.

There’s something about having just two people in a scene that I feel makes it work so well. That might be where I get the idea of the theatrical-ness of it, because you could turn this into a play, as well. There’s very much this idea of the movement and interacting with little groups of people as they go along.

ISAACS: There’s a lot of epic landscape stuff. I’ll be honest with you, I’m English, and I had no idea we had a coastline like this. You asked what I took away from this, and one of the things I take away is I want to go and do that walk. Maybe not all 600 miles. I want to go back to the places we shot because we were climbing up and down the same mountains all day or walking through the same bits, and I want to see all of it because it’s staggering. We met many people who were doing the walk, and they were doing the whole walk because they’d read the book. The book is a huge bestseller, and it sold nowhere more than it sold in that area. Everybody in that area has read the book. And so you meet people all the time, pairs of people, who would never have done it had they not read this thing, and they will all have a magical experience.

I love that. I also loved how, in the film, there are so many people who think he’s Simon Armitage who was doing this walk, as well. It sounds like it was kind of meta there. But it got me thinking, have you ever been mistaken for somebody else the way that Moth is continuously mistaken for Simon?

ISAACS: I remember going into a Best Buy quite recently, actually, in America, and somebody was like, “Oh my god. Oh my god… I was just watching you, Mr. Dalton, in a movie.” And I went, “Mr. Dalton? Timothy Dalton? He’s 25 years older than me!” They were like, “Not in the movie I was watching,” and I went, “Alright. Fair enough.”

That’s too funny!

ISAACS: I don’t know that I get mistaken for anybody else. What happens quite often is that parents — adults — recognize me from some other stuff I’ve done, and they drag kids up and try and persuade the kids that I’m Lucius Malfoy from Harry Potter, and the kids are completely nonplussed. It doesn’t make any sense why there’d be a wizard in the local supermarket. That guy doesn’t look like me, I’ve got the wrong hair, there’s no elf. It becomes very confusing.

What Is Next for Jason Isaacs?

I love that. As we wind down, I wanted to ask about another one of your projects that’s coming up — I think it’s also looking at a 2025 release date — which is Verona’s Romeo and Juliet . What can you tease about that? Do you sing in it?

ISAACS: I don’t sing it, and rather irritatingly. I’m hoping it’s one of three, a trilogy. But the songs are unbelievable because the director’s brother writes. He wrote “Halo,” and he writes giant pop songs, and his partner writes some of the biggest pop songs in the world. It’s an original musical. It’s a very tough thing to do because the jukebox musicals do well because we sing along to them. You don’t know these songs. But I can tell you, once you’ve heard them twice — I’d be on the set, and they’d be shooting them all day — they are the catchiest tunes I’ve ever heard in my life. I came home singing them.

It’s Tim Bogart. He’s just got balls the size of planets. I mean, to make an original musical based on the source material for Romeo and Juliet, which is a different story from Romeo and Juliet, and to tell it on this big, epic scale is just… To want to do that and then to find the money to do that and to make it… So many things we watch on screen are like the other things we’ve seen on screen and playing it safe, and he’s playing it so unsafe. I thought it was fabulous while we’re making it. I can’t wait to see it.

As soon as I saw that announced last year, I was like, “Okay, I haven’t seen anything like this before. I need this in front of my eyeballs right now.”

ISAACS: And they can sing! Let me tell you, the young actors, who are not very well known, who play Romeo and Juliet, they’ve got incredible voices. Just mind-bogglingly good voices.

That’s great. For my last question, the last time we talked, you were getting ready to fly out for The White Lotus . I think you were heading to Thailand for that.

ISAACS: I just got back.

How was that filming experience? Was that your first time getting to film in Thailand?

ISAACS: It was my first time filming in Thailand, and being away for six and a half months somewhere doing a job without coming home at all, and being in it all that time. It was intense. It was a lot of things. Obviously, everybody will think, “My god, that lucky bastard got to be in Thailand for six months,” but I tell you, after a while, when you wake up and you’re not sunbathing, you’re not on holiday anymore — I hadn’t taken early retirement. The days I was working were fantastic. The days you weren’t working, there are only so many times you can go down to the beach and snorkel or whatever. So, it was a five-star, gilded Groundhog Day. But the work was fabulous. Mike White is really something else. He is one of the most entertainingly twisted people I’ve ever met.

Oh, that’s great. I have actually not watched The White Lotus yet, but the cast for Season 3 has me tempted. So I’m like, “I might actually finally get into it.” Everyone around me loves it.

ISAACS: I watched Seasons 1 and 2 in a day. I just started Season 1 and I went right the way through, and suddenly I looked up, and, the hygiene was an issue, but I watched all 13 hours.

While The Salt Path does not have an official release date yet, TIFF attendees can catch it this weekend in Toronto. Stay tuned to Collider for more news, interviews, and reviews, from the festival, and keep an eye out for updates on Isaacs’ numerous upcoming projects.