Shooting within a 15-minute travel radius was one way of keeping costs down on Carol Morley’s Stockport-set coming-of-age story 7 Miles Out.
“Our central base was former council offices, and we didn’t have trucks, so that was our base for hair and makeup,” says the UK writer-director. “It was a 25-day shoot, and I had to get it all in those days. I couldn’t do reshoots or pickups.”
The film is making its world premiere at the BFI London Film Festival as the sole UK title in competition. Based on Morley’s 2015 novel of the same name and inspired by her youth in Stockport – seven miles from Manchester – 7 Miles Out follows a young woman navigating first love, friendship and grief after the death of her father. It is set against the 1980s Manchester music scene.
The novel was first published in 2015. Fellow UK filmmaker Michael Winterbottom was interviewing Morley during the pandemic for a book on UK independent filmmakers, when he suggested adapting it for screen.
“I’d excavated that part of my life, and it never occurred to me to do anything [further] with it,” says Morley. “I had to go back to those times in a deeper way. I went through this second amount of pain, to get to an authenticity and truth.”
7 Miles Out is the first of Morley’s films not to receive public funding from either the BFI or BBC Film, after films including Dreams Of A Life, The Falling and 2022’s Typist Artist Pirate King.
“Their money taught me how to be a filmmaker,” says Morley. “In this case, I’m pleased if newcomers got the money.”
That required hustling for private finance, which Morley has always been apt at doing. One meeting alongside her long-time producer Cairo Cannon with an unnamed potential financier sticks in her mind. “It was critical. We were already in prep in Stockport,” she recalls. “We’d planned everything we would and wouldn’t say… then we just went against all of that. We pigeonholed him on this sofa, and didn’t stop talking for 20 minutes about why this film was important.
“We’d agreed not to ask him [in the meeting] whether he would give us the money. And at the end we went, ‘Do you think you will give us the money?’ He said, ‘Yes, if you promise I never have to have a meeting with you again, because that was intense!’”
The UK tax credit also proved useful, “because you can get it before post, and then at the end. The shifts in the tax credit changed a lot for us.”
No shouting
As on The Falling, all of the HODs on 7 Miles Out were women, including cinematographer Agnes Godard, composer Carly Paradis, casting directors Shaheen Baig and Naomi Jalil, and rising editor Raluca Petre.
“It’s not something I’m conscious of,” says Morley, while acknowledging the rules she introduces for her sets. “There’s no shouting allowed. No demonstration of displeasure. I know what I want, but I’m always ready to listen to everybody and their input because that’s exciting. Then in the edit, working with a woman editor and composer. They’re bringing their experience of girlhood and womanhood to it.”
According to Morley, 7 Miles Out is one of the first feature films to have been shot in Stockport. “Things can be represented from the outside in; this is definitely an inside-out film,” says the filmmaker. “There’s a weird northern mentality; everyone thinks their hometown is crap but is very proud of it. The big T-shirts in Stockport now say ‘Stockport’s not shit’.”
Lucy Halliday, a 2024 Screen UK-Ireland Star of Tomorrow, stars in the film alongside Gemma Whelan and Aidan Gillen, who play her parents. The majority of the rest of the cast came from the Stockport and Manchester area, to save on accommodation costs.
“That’s how we found [The Falling actress] Florence Pugh, she was local to Oxford,” says Morley. “It was about, ‘How do we circumvent what costs money?’”
The soundtrack includes The Clash, The Fall, Magazine, and six Joy Division tracks (plus one by New Order). “There were something like 120 rights-holders, because different people have the rights,” says Morley. “Some of the more obscure tracks were the hardest to clear because people didn’t know who owned it anymore.”
The filmmaker already has a script for her next feature, a time-travelling lesbian witch romance titled Air Of Night. It follows two young women who travel back to 1650 to a place of ill repute in London.
“It’s a witch film, but there are different levels of witches,” says Morley. “There are those back in the day who weren’t witches but were accused; and then there are my contemporary young women who are taken back.”
Morley says the film has been written with cast in mind, with those discussions starting once she has finished another draft.
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