Andrea Arnold: ​‘I’m very inter­est­ed in the sen­su­al world’

Andrea Arnold’s sixth fea­ture, Bird, fol­lows Bai­ley (Nykiya Adams) as she nav­i­gates life in a squat in Kent with her father Bug (Bar­ry Keoghan) and her broth­er Hunter (Jason Buda). Her rela­tion­ship with her father is volatile, and her broth­er and his friends are pre­oc­cu­pied with mak­ing and watch­ing YouTube videos of peo­ple get­ting beat­en up. Bai­ley cuts a lone­ly fig­ure, until she meets the mys­te­ri­ous Bird (Franz Rogows­ki) who seems to be the hero that she is look­ing for.

Arnold’s debut fea­ture, Red Road, was released while I was study­ing film at Kent Uni­ver­si­ty in 2006. I was encour­aged by a tutor to sup­port a ​“local film­mak­er” by going to see it at the Gul­benkian Cin­e­ma on cam­pus, and so here began per­haps the most for­ma­tive cin­e­mat­ic rela­tion­ship of my life. I’d been deeply moved by the depth of Kate Dickie’s per­for­mance in that film, how Arnold draws out her yearn­ing and sad­ness. I’ve always had the impres­sion that there’s a real mater­nal kind­ness that Arnold offers her char­ac­ters, a fierce duty of pro­tec­tion and a refusal to place judge­ment on them despite their some­times-anti­so­cial behaviour.

When watch­ing Bird, I found myself won­der­ing if Franz Rogowski’s char­ac­ter was in fact how Arnold saw her­self – an ethe­re­al being who has the wis­dom to know the impor­tance of ten­der­ness where there is chaos, and who embraces the heal­ing qual­i­ties of giv­ing love to oth­ers, despite hav­ing so many unan­swered ques­tions of her own. This idea that kind­ness and love are as sort of super­pow­er may sound trite, but they are essen­tial com­po­nents that are miss­ing in the lives of so many of Arnold’s char­ac­ters; and, of course, in real peo­ple who live in the sorts of worlds that her char­ac­ters inhab­it. I actu­al­ly think there’s some­thing quite rad­i­cal about that.

It’s hard not to feel nos­tal­gic watch­ing the film; whether it be the sound­track full of sur­pris­ing nee­dle drops (Cold­play, The Verve, Blur), a score by Bur­ial whose work notably invokes themes of cross­ing time and space, or its dream­like qual­i­ty, some­thing mag­i­cal that is famil­iar in Arnold’s work but that is cranked up more than ever to deliv­er some­thing of an urban fairy tale. Bird is a film full of the ghosts of Arnold’s past; cer­tain moments that feel like a revis­it­ing of her pre­vi­ous films: a woman stomp­ing along a road push­ing a pram (Wasp); a stone tur­tle orna­ment in a gar­den (Amer­i­can Hon­ey); or some trav­eller boys trot­ting by on hors­es (Fish Tank).

Bird pre­miered this year at the Cannes Film Fes­ti­val, where Arnold was award­ed the Gold­en Coach Award in recog­ni­tion of her work as a direc­tor, and it feels like exact­ly the right moment to pause and reflect on the work of one of the most cel­e­brat­ed British film­mak­ers of her generation.

It feels strange to be open­ing an inter­view by talk­ing about con­clu­sions. But I real­ly got the sense from watch­ing Bird that it has cul­mi­nat­ed from so many themes and ideas that you explore a lot in your work. What made you go back to Kent where you did Fish Tank? Why this moment in your career?

I nev­er feel that I make that sort of tan­gi­ble choice real­ly. The things that appear just appear, and then I just have to go and dis­cov­er them. The idea for this film came to me a very long time ago, and it was just an image at that point. I had to then go on that jour­ney. And the thing about the film is that it stopped-start­ed a lot because I did oth­er things. I can usu­al­ly tell when some­thing needs me to keep on at it, because it won’t leave me alone, so I can’t drop it. And I find it so fas­ci­nat­ing, because it’s out of my hands – almost like it just kind of nig­gles at me, or sort of keeps on at me until I deal with it.

If you’re some­body who writes or if you’re a painter or a sculp­tor, or if you’re a poet, or some­body who does what­ev­er, you have some artis­tic expres­sion. I think that each work is an explo­ration of your own psy­che on some lev­el, and I think it’s some­thing you don’t under­stand about your­self, or that you haven’t worked out. It’s some­thing that is impor­tant for you to deal with. That’s how it is for me any­way. Every film feels a bit like that. So, in that way, I don’t have a choice. I think some­body like [Robert] Bres­son said that some­times you have an idea for some­thing, and it’s like you’re pulling at a bit of string. And some­times you pull the string, it doesn’t go very far. It just goes there [ges­tures a short dis­tance with hands]. And some­times you pull at a bit of string, and it goes on and on and it unrav­els and unrav­els and doesn’t stop unravelling.

I think that cer­tain ideas that I have, or cer­tain things that come to me, are like that. They just keep on. I keep on. It did seem odd to me that I would go back to some­thing that is set around my child­hood, where I grew up. I don’t know, it just kind of took me there. I think I won’t again, though, actu­al­ly. I think it’s inter­est­ing what you said, because maybe Bird might be some kind of some sort of cul­mi­na­tion of something.

While watch­ing Bird, I noticed so many moments where small inter­ac­tions or cer­tain motifs were sig­nalling to some­thing from your pre­vi­ous films, almost like a ghost from the past. I got the impres­sion you’re think­ing a lot about cin­e­ma, and about how we are con­sum­ing images, maybe how that’s changing.

I don’t feel that our worlds have changed mas­sive­ly with the fact that we are all view­ing so many visu­al, two-dimen­sion­al images. And I think that I def­i­nite­ly incor­po­rat­ed that into the film. I think about it a lot, because I’m very inter­est­ed in the sen­su­al world, the world that we can see and feel and touch and hear and smell as I feel our lives are becom­ing increas­ing­ly two dimen­sion­al through images. And I know that’s what film is as well. I’m always a lit­tle bit frus­trat­ed with film in that [sense]. I always wish you could touch it and feel it and smell it. And maybe that’s the future, who knows? Or maybe that’s the­atre… I don’t know.

But I do feel there’s a lim­i­ta­tion to what we under­stand about the world through the two-dimen­sion­al image. A lot of us are con­sum­ing the world in this way, with­out real­ly get­ting out there and expe­ri­enc­ing it. You know, we are all now con­sum­ing the world through the screen. And my younger friends, or chil­dren of my friends, tell me that they don’t go out any­more very much. They do every­thing on their social media. They hard­ly meet up. That’s because they feel they can con­trol the way they look, the way they are, the way they come across, the way they present themselves.

I’ve got that sort of curios­i­ty about all that going on all the time. And when I start­ed to make Bird, I didn’t real­ly have so much. I had Bai­ley film­ing things, because I realised that for a teenag­er like Bai­ley, how do I show her emo­tion­al inte­ri­or? How do I show what she might be feel­ing? I do real­ly believe in cin­e­ma, and that how you put images togeth­er can man­age to con­vey someone’s inte­ri­or self. But I also thought it’s kind of inter­est­ing that she expe­ri­ences the world through her phone, through these images, and that says a lot about what’s going on with her. So, in the very begin­ning, when we start­ed, I realised that was quite a pow­er­ful thing, and so I start­ed film­ing more with the phone.

Youth and youth cul­ture is some­thing that you come to time and time again. What we often see pre­sent­ed is a young per­son who wants to grow up. They always want to get away, to be an adult. Bai­ley feels dif­fer­ent, in that her wom­an­hood is being thrust upon her in a way that she maybe doesn’t want.

What I find real­ly inter­est­ing is when I’ve writ­ten some­thing, and I’ve got cer­tain ideas about how I want it to be, I then go on a jour­ney with the mak­ing of it. The inter­est­ing jug­gling act you have to do is when you bring togeth­er all the ele­ments. such as the loca­tions or the peo­ple. (and) they all then bring some­thing dif­fer­ent or new or some­thing per­haps you weren’t expect­ing or weren’t plan­ning on. I know some direc­tors, they’ll have an idea in their mind, and they go out to get (it) exact­ly, they’ll want exact­ly what they had in their mind. And they will go off and try to do that. Where­as I always like to write a script, and although I have an emo­tion­al place I want to reach with­in that, I’ll look for peo­ple that I just feel fas­ci­nat­ed by, and Nykiya was one of those people. 

The char­ac­ter writ­ten was more of a jok­er, a bit more expres­sive and ​‘out there’. And Nykiya wasn’t real­ly like that. She was a bit more… I wouldn’t say reserved, but she was just a dif­fer­ent kind of girl. It’s fun­ny, this thing about when you’re cast­ing, because some peo­ple just rouse your life force or some­thing, you sort of… come alive when you meet them. And she did that when she came in the room. I was like, ​‘Oh!’ I sat up, you know, and there was some­thing about her very being, when she walked in the room. I just felt very curi­ous. The main rea­son I cast (her) was because of that feel­ing I had that I can’t put into words or explain, but (she) was dif­fer­ent to what was writ­ten. So then I had to find anoth­er way of express­ing this char­ac­ter which wasn’t quite what I’d writ­ten in the script. But the resis­tance was always there, the defi­ance – all that was always in the script, the world around her being chaot­ic. How do you nav­i­gate when you’re in the world where every­thing around you is so com­plete­ly chaot­ic? How do you do that?

I’d like to talk about Bar­ry Keoghan who plays Bug. In many ways he’s quite a men­ac­ing char­ac­ter, but there’s also a part of him that’s very child­like, and very sweet. You seem to be very com­fort­able with these men that have this hyper-mas­cu­line qual­i­ty, but who are search­ing for the com­pli­ca­tion inside themselves.

I met Bar­ry at some Hal­loween thing. I’d seen him in some oth­er things, only small things. And then The Ban­shees of Inish­erin came out. I just absolute­ly loved it. I just loved him straight away. You just go, ​‘Yeah, that feels total­ly right. He feels right.’ I feel if you cast some­body that feels very close to what you’ve writ­ten, there’s lots of work to do, but every­thing kind of falls into place, you know, in a very nat­ur­al way. You’re not try­ing to make some­thing that doesn’t exist, he just fell into that role very eas­i­ly. And he is not that per­son, but he knows how to be (that per­son). What I love about him as well – which is what I love about a lot of the actors I work with – he’s nev­er the same twice, he’s very much alive. Even though you’ve got a script, you’re hop­ing for them to find the life there. He brings the life to those moments.

He’s the antithe­sis to the char­ac­ter of Bird, who is so dif­fer­ent to a lot of the men that we’re used to see­ing in your films. I felt that what the film was say­ing – and what I felt Bird was try­ing to say – is that in the lives that these peo­ple live, actu­al­ly the only thing you real­ly need is basic kind­ness. I found that real­ly mov­ing, because a lot of what the char­ac­ters are lack­ing in Bird is any­one show­ing them that kind­ness. And he’s just this pure hero for doing that.

I feel like his char­ac­ter is there for you to find. It’s real­ly hard talk­ing about your work, because the whole point of mak­ing a film is to leave ques­tion marks, and not dot the i’s and cross the t’s. It’s to give some­thing for the audi­ence to put them­selves into and to have their own expe­ri­ence with. It’s hard not to give the things away that you feel are secrets. They’re like lit­tle sort of things you put in there that you want peo­ple to dis­cov­er and have their own rela­tion­ship with. So I hate to sort of explain it, you know. I don’t want to explain it. Some­times I don’t under­stand myself any­way, you know, like when I start­ed with his char­ac­ter, I wasn’t even sure what he was going to be, or how he was, or what it was. And then by going on the jour­ney, I found my own ver­sion of him. And I’ve got lots of feel­ings about Bird, but they’re mine. I know that peo­ple inter­pret the film in lots of ways, and I like to leave it that way. I feel like they’re (the char­ac­ters), they’re the meati­ness of the film. Any­thing you make, you want to leave things for peo­ple to dis­cov­er, and debate in the pub after­wards like, ​‘What did that mean?’ I think I had the same thing with Cow, and that got read by so many peo­ple like a big fem­i­nist thing, and all about slav­ery, or about the lack of con­trol over your body, and I found that absolute­ly fas­ci­nat­ing. So that’s one of the chal­lenges, to try and not say why. I also think it takes away from peo­ple when they go and see it.

When do you have that feel­ing that a film isn’t yours any­more? I think that must be so hard; I can tell you how I’ve read your film, but you might not have felt that way, and you sort of need to let that go.

I’m hap­py to put it out in the world. You know, I nev­er watch my films again after they play, nev­er. You put it into the world, then every­one has a rela­tion­ship with it, or not, or what­ev­er. And that feels very much like it’s its own thing now – it’s out there. I don’t want to watch it ever again. Every now and again, occa­sion­al­ly peo­ple will show me.

When was the last time?

When I was in Cannes this year and I got this Gold­en Coach award, they put togeth­er fan­tas­tic lit­tle clips, a selec­tion of things from my films. And I found it so mov­ing to see. They did it very beau­ti­ful­ly as well, they picked all my favourite things with­out me even know­ing, because they’re direc­tors and they know. And I sit there and I’m watch­ing this com­pi­la­tion of my work, and I haven’t watched some of it for years, and I found it so mov­ing. It’s like watch­ing my past flash before my eyes. And I got real­ly emo­tion­al, because it was such a beau­ti­ful thing that they gave to me. So, in that way, that was kind of nice, but I wouldn’t want to do it every day.