Franz Rogows­ki: ​‘If you talk about birds, you always talk about ethe­re­al energy’

If there is one con­tem­po­rary Ger­man actor whose name you ought to know, it’s Franz Rogows­ki. Thanks to a back­ground in dance, the phys­i­cal vir­tu­os­i­ty of his per­for­mances is often the first thing to be noticed, but in his ges­tures, deliv­ery, and gaze there are emo­tion­al puls­es that res­onate beyond lan­guage and genre. Indeed, one of his break-out moments was an extend­ed karaōke rage-out to Sia’s ​‘Chan­de­lier’ in Michael Haneke’s Hap­py End. Rogows­ki has since col­lab­o­rat­ed with mas­ters such as Ter­rence Mal­ick, Chris­t­ian Pet­zold, and Ira Sachs, and it has placed him firm­ly on the world cin­e­ma map, while his recent roles in Sebas­t­ian Meise’s Great Free­dom or Gia­co­mo Abbruzzese’s Dis­co Boy cap­tured by cin­e­matog­ra­phers Crys­tel Fournier and Hélène Lou­vart reveal the pow­er of his char­ac­ters’ opac­i­ty. In Andrea Arnold’s Bird, and through Rob­bie Ryan’s sig­na­ture embod­ied cam­era, Rogows­ki radi­ates a warmth as a cheer­ful lon­er look­ing search­ing for his fam­i­ly. It’s a warmth that is not what Bai­ley – the film’s 12-year-old pro­tag­o­nist – wants, but it is what she needs.

The sto­ry of Bird con­cerns the life of 12-year-old Bai­ley, but the film is named after your char­ac­ter, who is not exact­ly a main char­ac­ter, but def­i­nite­ly not a side one. Where do you posi­tion him with­in the world of the film?

You might have expe­ri­enced this as well, that feel­ing that you’re always the lead in your own life. So right now, you’re the prin­ci­pal role in your life, and I have the same feel­ing on my side of the screen. So I knew that if I am Bird, I’d have to see the world from his point of view whether the cam­era takes the same per­spec­tive or not. But if you just see a char­ac­ter, it could even be some­one who only has one line in one scene, com­ing in and say­ing, ​‘I have to go. My mum died.’ It has no impor­tance for the film, nar­ra­tive­ly, but now if you then imag­ine someone’s mum dying: this is a major event in anyone’s life. Then, we would have wit­nessed a lit­tle frag­ment, and just a small sec­ond of a life that from the per­spec­tive of that indi­vid­ual means every­thing. So in the­o­ry, it was easy.

How did you approach the char­ac­ter in practice?

Andrea didn’t share a script with me. She only shared songs and pic­tures of a lone­ly, naked man float­ing above trees and mead­ows, swim­ming and climb­ing trees. When she told me that I would be some kind of a Mary Pop­pins fig­ure that would accom­pa­ny a girl on her jour­ney, so I was pre­pared to sup­port some­one else and not lead the sto­ry. That puts you in a dif­fer­ent mind­set, where you form a tri­an­gle with the cam­era try­ing to guide and accom­pa­ny the lead; to some­times appear and then dis­ap­pear. In this case, I was more dri­ven by empa­thy, and I also felt like I was accom­pa­ny­ing not just Bai­ley, but also Andrea. Part of this world, part of her is also Andrea. And Bird is also a part of Andrea’s self. And she told me that in the begin­ning, that this is actu­al­ly a very per­son­al ener­gy for her. It’s one of the ani­mal ener­gies that she feels in her­self. When I agreed to this project, I also agreed to be her Bird and be by her side.

There is a myth­i­cal grav­i­ty around Bird as well, which, in the way I see it, feeds into the inde­pen­dent, self-suf­fi­cient kind of char­ac­ters that you’re often por­tray­ing in films. Is this a fair assess­ment, to say that you’re drawn to such roles?

We live in a world that likes to put things in box­es so we can sell them and ship them, you know. And if you have a cleft lip and a bit of a naval voice and a rough face, they will put you into a space that allows you to be the out­sider, the vil­lain, or some kind of a stranger with a lit­tle super­pow­er. I guess that this place has been giv­en to me in soci­ety, but in my pri­vate life, I am also quite social and not always only at the out­skirts. I like it, and some­times it’s very nice to observe. I am actu­al­ly a bit of a voyeur, but I don’t think the roles I play rep­re­sent me as a per­son. What I do like is when I feel that a film doesn’t trans­late every­thing into words, but gives space to oth­er dimen­sions of cin­e­ma by cre­at­ing these emp­ty moments in between. Maybe a part of the lon­er ener­gy is just me enjoy­ing films that don’t need to talk all the time.

Andrea Arnold’s scripts are very bare and there’s a lot of con­jur­ing hap­pen­ing in the moment, dur­ing shoot­ing. But was there any oth­er prep than, for exam­ple, your exchanges of music and talks?

For me, there wasn’t. I had her num­ber. I knew I could call her. But I accept­ed that as a chal­lenge. I guess if some­one tells you to come to a par­ty with­out telling you any­thing about it, it’s prob­a­bly more inter­est­ing to just go there and see what happens.

Arnold finds inspi­ra­tion in life and social issues, which bleed through all her char­ac­ters. I know fic­tion is impor­tant for your craft – inhab­it­ing a char­ac­ter as a fic­tion that becomes real – is part of your process. How did Bird chan­nel this rela­tion­ship between real­i­ty and fiction?

We would meet on set, and then just spend hours just hang­ing around in time and space, drink­ing cof­fee. The set includ­ed a house that was built after images from her own house where she grew up, and we were sur­round­ed by neigh­bours that would real­ly live there. We wouldn’t use any intim­i­dat­ing film artillery, no cranes, maybe a lit­tle truck around the cor­ner, but it real­ly came across as a lit­tle stu­dent pro­duc­tion, and that is also key to blend­ing these two worlds of real­ism and poet­ry. I guess Andrea is like a mix­ture of a tiger on the hunt and a very patient gar­den­er. She would cre­ate these spaces in which all the ingre­di­ents are right, even if the cam­era isn’t ready. Also, this kind of film can eas­i­ly turn into pover­ty porn, where a direc­tor uses the strong colours of pover­ty to make some­thing that is hyper-real for wealth­i­er peo­ple to look at in the cin­e­ma. And in her case, these are her peo­ple. This is how she grew up. And she’s one of the very few that has seen both worlds, those of Cannes and Kent. I think all these dif­fer­ent lay­ers of her per­son­al­i­ty make her the direc­tor that she is.

What you said makes me think of Bird’s abil­i­ty to retreat in the back­ground and still be a very inte­gral part of the film world. What was it like for you dur­ing the shoot, when there were these moments of wait­ing, did they help your role?

It helped a lot. I mean, you come on set, you’re very ambi­tious, you do your thing, and then you realise, ​‘Oh, wow, okay, the cam­era is not even on me.’ Most of the stuff that I’m doing as Bird is invis­i­ble. Nobody will ever see it. But does that real­ly mat­ter? Actu­al­ly, it doesn’t, because I’m Bird, so I do my Bird thing. Soon, I also realised how pre­cious and rare Andrea’s approach is, to cre­ate a micro­cosm in which you just hang around and then, you know, some­times you shoot and some­times you don’t, but some­how every­thing turned into one big expe­ri­ence. I hope that I can also one day cre­ate that basis of res­o­nance for oth­er people.

It’s very easy to read your work through the lens of phys­i­cal­i­ty, espe­cial­ly with your back­ground in dance, but Bird is skip­ping, twirling, basi­cal­ly float­ing. Lev­i­ty is very impor­tant for this char­ac­ter. And I real­ly won­der, how did you work with your body and your mind to get a per­for­mance that is both expres­sive and also very subtle?

Wow, that’s so, so kind of you and charm­ing. I often feel heavy as a donkey.

Don’t we all?

Yeah, yes, we do. You know, I’m long­ing for lev­i­ta­tion, but most of the time it’s just my back aching and me feel­ing guilty… But you’re right, that the first images that Andrea shared were images of a guy stand­ing on a sky­scraper, and pic­tures of man float­ing above nature. And, yeah, if you talk about birds, you always talk about ethe­re­al ener­gy. So when we start­ed impro­vis­ing on the street, I would often instinc­tive­ly choose to be slight­ly ele­vat­ed when accom­pa­ny­ing Nykiya [Adams]. So Nykiya would walk the streets of real­ism, let’s say, and I would walk the paths of fan­ta­sy. I would just slight­ly ele­vate my path and walk on a lit­tle wall next to her, or stand on a lit­tle stair­case, a lit­tle fence, a lit­tle chair, a table, and always some­how make myself slight­ly altered or some­how weird in a way, to some­how break the log­ic of the space that we were in. Most of this mate­r­i­al is invis­i­ble, but it inspired Andrea to make her next deci­sions along the way.

Obvi­ous­ly, we see a 12-year-old girl and a grown up man, but it nev­er feels like a mis­match. There’s some­thing about the size and weight of the char­ac­ter that just keeps chang­ing and shifting.

That’s great to hear! Because, I mean, I remem­ber try­ing on the cos­tumes for the first time, all these beige and brown colours, and this weird mil­i­tary skirt and ugly san­dals. And I was like, ​‘Oh, my God, they’re real­ly turn­ing me into a ter­ri­ble per­vert, accom­pa­ny­ing a lit­tle girl! I’m not sure I want to be that kind of Bird…’ It real­ly was a cos­tume that I had nev­er seen before, one that would inter­rupt the con­nec­tion to soci­ety that we usu­al­ly cre­ate with the ref­er­ences that we are wear­ing on our body. This cos­tume was so strange in so many ways that it put me in a very alien posi­tion on the first day, and I wasn’t sure whether it would turn out to be on the heavy end, or rather on this oth­er end, where the oth­er­ness some­how stands for itself.

I was also think­ing about the cos­tume and how unlike it is, for exam­ple, the ones you wore for Pas­sages which was as much a means of expres­sion as it was an armour. But here, the mate­ri­als and their weird com­bi­na­tions work to a dif­fer­ent effect.

You should also talk to the cos­tume design­er, but in gen­er­al, the ref­er­ences to these tex­tiles were sur­vival, Boy Scout, mil­i­tary, gen­der-bend­ing, queer, and obvi­ous­ly, wear­ing a skirt as a man. But also, as you said, com­bined with some soft­er tex­tures, like a wool pullover, socks, and the san­dals were from an old guy with a camper van. The skirt makes him queer, which is almost the oppo­site of an old het­ero­sex­u­al man. Then you have these jumpers that make him, I don’t know, like Ger­man in a way… I think I felt ter­ri­ble in that cos­tume at first, but watch­ing the movie, I felt it all made sense.