Arthur, an octogenarian rogue, enlists his grandson Kevin to help him escape the nursing home and chauffeur him from Arizona to his cabin in Northern Ontario. What ensues goes both way off the map, and way beyond a road trip.
Arthur is about to be thrown out of a nursing home. Again.
So the octogenarian rogue ropes his grandson Kevin into chauffeuring him from Arizona to his cabin in Northern Ontario. When they pick up a mysterious stranger on the side of the road, mayhem ensues. Asses get kicked, bullets fly, love blossoms — and things go way off the map. Way beyond a road trip.
Somewhere between the desert and the border, Kevin starts to see the man behind the grandfather — flawed, selfish, petty, and somehow, improbably, trying to do better.
Inspired by the director’s own incorrigible father, NORTHBOUND is a heart-warmer and a heart-breaker that asks how to live and love honestly at every age, right up to the last mile.
Starring two-time Academy Award nominee Bruce Dern in his late-life masterpiece, with Hunter Parrish, Julia Fox, Joanna Cassidy and Dylan Baker along for the ride.
A featurette companion to Northbound, this piece weaves together cast and crew interviews, raw footage from the road, and moments from the film to create an immersive look at how the story came to life.
Featuring Bruce Dern, Hunter Parrish, Julia Fox, Joanna Cassidy, director William Scoular, it offers a candid, behind-the-scenes perspective on the people and process behind the film.
A stage director, writer and filmmaker, William Scoular was born in Glasgow and is a graduate of Lincoln College, Oxford, where he read English.
Equally at home with classical and contemporary theatre, his extensive body of work on both sides of the Atlantic includes West End productions of Berkoff's Women by Steven Berkoff and Gardner McKay's Toyer.
His path into film began as a writer. The author of A Question of Guilt, he wrote the screenplay, adapted from his own bestselling book, for the film Deadly Friends. He went on to direct Survival Box. Northbound is his second feature as director. He is currently in production on his next film, Second Voice, and is the creator and director of the upcoming limited series Blood Money, based on the life of whistleblower Dr. Nancy Olivieri, whose story inspired John le Carré's The Constant Gardener.
I made this film because I didn’t know how else to say goodbye to my father.
It’s inspired by the last year of his life, a year I still carry with me. The final months we had together taught me more about living than all the years that came before. NORTHBOUND is my attempt to pass that on.
Growing up with my father was an adventure I wouldn’t trade for anything. He was funny, charming, and absolutely incorrigible, a man who lived entirely on his own terms and paid the price for it. Watching him face his “final curtain,” scrambling to make amends with the time he had left, raised a question I still can’t shake. How do we live well, and honestly, all the way to the finish line?
NORTHBOUND is the film I made trying to work that out.
On the surface, it’s a road movie. Underneath, it’s a very late coming-of-age story. Arthur, played by the incomparable Bruce Dern, is a man-child who’s spent a lifetime acting as though the rules don’t apply to him. Until, that is, mortality arrives at the door, and the question he’s been running from his whole life is waiting for him at the end of the road.
And so the road less travelled, the one Arthur chose his whole life, becomes a requiem. It’s the comedy of a man who lived too loud to listen, and the tragedy of finding the right words too late. Comedy and tragedy, holding hands. That’s where truth lives.
For interview requests, screening access, and press assets, please contact the Northbound publicity team directly. All images and video are for editorial press use only.
