Andrea Arnold on new Barry Keoghan drama Bird: ‘The film is its own explanation’

Every time I start a film, I feel like I don’t know how to do it,” says Andrea Arnold, hunched over a half-eaten box of salad. This would be a startling enough admission from any filmmaker, but coming from Arnold – the 63-year-old director of Red Road, Fish Tank and American Honey – it’s downright mindboggling. “Every film feels like a massive adventure,” she continues. “Like I’m starting again each time. Sometimes I’ll get an email saying, ‘Do you want to come lead a masterclass?’ I just think, ‘Why are they asking me?’”

Anyone who’s watched Arnold’s films will know exactly why they’re asking her. Over the past two decades, she’s been responsible for some of the finest features to come out of our country: the knotty, sexually transgressive Red Road; the heartbreaking Fish Tank, about a young wannabe dancer who is preyed upon by an older man; the sparse, gritty Bronte adaptation Wuthering Heights; the potent, vivacious American Honey, following a band of young hustlers around the US. There’s a reason Nicole Kidman, whom Arnold directed in Big Little Lies, describes her as a “visionary”.

Praise like this – not to mention the Baftas she’s won (for Red Road and Fish Tank) – appears to be worn lightly. The woman who sits before me today, in an airy meeting room in central London, doesn’t seem concerned with mystique. Arnold is dressed more for the moors than an upmarket office block: dark coat, black boots, beanie atop her head. She’s enthusiastic but self-assured and free of ego.

For Arnold, the process of making a film begins with a single image, a mental picture that she then, over a period of months or years, gradually finesses into a story. Her new film Bird – a magic realist drama, a departure from the staunch realism of her previous work – is no exception. (“It’s almost like a jigsaw puzzle I have to solve,” she muses.) At a Cannes Film Festival press conference earlier this year, she described Bird’s inciting image as that of “a tall, thin man with a long penis, standing on a roof… but I didn’t know if he was good or bad, or what he was”. It’s an insight that she regrets sharing. “I was really tired, I’d been out all night… I just blurted it out. I usually feel like the film is its own explanation. If you explain it, you’re taking the fun away for the audience.”

The image of that “tall, thin man” eventually metastasised into Bird, a coming-of-age film set in an impoverished town in Kent. At the film’s centre is Bailey (played by newcomer Nykiya Adams), a 12-year-old girl who lives with her scatty and self-absorbed young father, Bug (Barry Keoghan), and her gang-adjacent brother Hunter (Jason Buda). Bug is more concerned with planning his impromptu wedding and extracting hallucinogenic slime from a “drug toad” he ordered on the internet than in dealing with his daughter’s problems; when Bailey meets ethereal oddball “Bird” (Franz Rogowski, the German star of Passages) walking through the fields, she senses, in some strange way, a kindred spirit – and the mysterious figure that Arnold first envisaged.

There are certainly elements of Bird that draw on Arnold’s own childhood. Like Bailey, she grew up in Kent, the child of young, separated parents – Arnold’s mother was 16 when she was born, her father just a year older. Bailey, too is artistic, albeit secretly, recording scenes from her life on her mobile phone. Adams is terrific in the part, at once steely and vulnerable. By this point, we have come to expect this from the lead of an Arnold film; Arnold and longtime casting director Lucy Pardee (Rocks; Aftersun) are exceptional at identifying young talents in the wild, and coaxing from them heavyweight performances. Fish Tank’s Katie Jarvis was approached after being spotted having a flaming row with her boyfriend at a train station in Essex; American Honey’s Sasha Lane was cast by Arnold while sunbathing on the beach during spring break.

“Lucy and I have been doing this together a long time,” she says. “We try very hard to be responsible about who we cast, and how. With Nykiya, we picked a kid who had a lot of support from her parents, whose mum was fantastic, and there all the time, every day, along with the chaperones.”

I think [Barry Keoghan’s] background and his experience up to then meant he fitted into my world pretty well. He felt very familiar to me

Andrea Arnold

Since Arnold first started directing, the process of working with children “has totally changed”, she says. “In all the time I’ve worked, chaperones have always been part of the process. But now there’s one chaperone per child, and they have line of sight, and are around on the scene, so that’s very different. You get used to it, but I think it takes away a lot of intimacy because there’s a lot of people standing around.”

Arnold has nonetheless also wrung great work from bigger names – Michael Fassbender in Fish Tank, Shia LaBeouf in American Honey, now Keoghan in Bird. Though buzzy performances in Saltburn and The Banshees of Inisherin have helped make the 32-year-old one of the most vaunted actors of his generation, Keoghan is an apt choice for an Andrea Arnold film. His mother struggled with drug addiction; after she died when Keoghan was 12, he grew up in a long succession of foster homes around Ireland. “I think his background and his experience up to then meant he fitted into my world pretty well,” Arnold says. “Barry felt very familiar to me, so it felt very easy in a way.”

If there’s a trace of euphemism when I ask about dealing with a big, A-list personality like Keoghan, then Arnold masks it well. (“Barry is a character … He brings a lot of life.”) In conversation, she seems cautious not to give away more than she wants to say, while never seeming anything other than friendly and loquacious. She is comfortable holding court – unsurprising, perhaps, given her origins as a TV presenter, on the 1980s children’s programmes No 73 and Motormouth. It was only after working in front of the camera that Arnold went to the US to study directing at the AFI Conservatory. From there, it was back to the UK, for a screenwriting course at the PAL Labs in Kent, and in 1998, she made her first short, Milk. She would write and direct two further shorts, with 2003’s Danny Dyer-starring Wasp winning her an Oscar for Best Short Film.

“I’ve always tried to be myself,” Arnold says. “Even from the early days, I definitely very early on started putting the camera where I wanted.” Where she wants it is often very specific – Arnold’s films have a very distinct look. She typically shoots handheld, from around eye level, with the ethos being not to “look down” at the characters. “I’m probably more confident [than I was when I was younger],” she adds. “The thing is, my films usually find small audiences. So I feel that I can make them the way I want to, and that there’ll be some people who want to receive them.

“Because I worked in TV as an actor for some years, I kind of knew what all the basic rules were,” she explains, “and I saw what didn’t really work for me. If I thought, ‘Oh, I don’t like the way that works,’ I would change it.”

This sort of creative autonomy is easier to achieve when you’re making your own small-budget indie film; when you’re brought in as a hired gun on a large-scale TV series, is it another story? Around the time of American Honey, Arnold became increasingly sought-after in the US, and was brought in to direct four episodes of Prime Video’s Emmy-winning queer dramedy Transparent, and four episodes of I Love Dick – both of which were collaborations with Joey Soloway.

The environments she walked into brought something of a professional culture shock. “TV is just a whole different beast,” she says. “You have to do more setups every day. Film is, they say, on average, about three minutes a day of filming. In TV it’s double that, sometimes more. So you’re having to do things much faster.” She balks, however, at the idea that the work was any less meaningful. “Whatever I do, if I’ve committed to it, I work hard,” she says. “I don’t just slack off if suddenly it’s got more money. Actually, I really care about it.”

In 2019, Arnold was given what might have been her mainstream breakthrough: she was hired to direct the entire second season of Big Little Lies, the glamorous, zeitgeisty comedy-drama starring Reece Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman and Meryl Streep. Around the time of the season’s release, reports emerged of behind-the-scenes turbulence: an expose in IndieWire alleged that creative control had been taken away from Arnold after the series was shot; season one director Jean-Marc Vallée stepped in to recut the material.

Some have interpreted Arnold’s subsequent project – the stoical 2021 livestock documentary Cow – as a pointed attempt to get away from travails like these. If there’s any lingering ill will over her experience on Big Little Lies, though, she’s keeping it to herself. “On all the TV shows I’ve done, I’ve had loads of freedom, and they’ve pretty much allowed me to be myself, on the actual shoot at least.” She pauses, and adds: “In the edit, that’s a whole other land.

“When I’ve directed TV in America, I pick some locations, direct the actors, and do a quick director’s edit, and then the showrunner takes over. There’s a lot of freedom in that because I don’t have to take responsibility for the whole thing. Actually, it’s almost like a holiday from the struggles of my own films, which are really long and quite painful experiences for me.”

Again, she seems to catch herself, and qualifies: “Not physically, mind you… I have to say that 70-hour weeks are not a holiday. But professionally.”

The making of them may indeed be long and painful but Arnold’s films, for all their grit and candour, contain moments of real transcendent beauty. And Bird, despite some really quite brutal moments, could well be Arnold’s most optimistic film.  As for what the future holds, it’s anyone’s guess.

“I can never tell what I want to do next,” she says. “Some directors have a plan; I can never tell. Each film is a huge labour of love and usually, we’ve gone through quite a lot. I’m always a very different person by the end of it.”

‘Bird’ is out in UK cinemas on 8 November

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