Academy Award winning director Andrea Arnold has always honed a unique voice in the landscape of cinema. From her short films Milk and the Oscar celebrated Wasp, to her distinctive take on the classic Wuthering Heights and the experimental American Honey, no project is like another, and she’s continuing such a filmic outlook with her latest, Bird.
After premiering at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, the acclaimed drama is now screening in Australian theatres for all audiences to experience star Nykiya Adams’ BAFTA nominated turn as a young girl navigating an uncertain chapter in her life and the bizarre friendship that forms from her travels.
Ahead of its release, Peter Gray spoke with Arnold about the unique image she conjured that inspired the film’s telling, and why making Bird was one of the hardest experiences of her career.
I understand that this film started from a simple image. What was it that inspired Bird?
All my films start with some kind of image that bothers me. Something that slightly haunts me. Something that brings up a lot of questions. And if I go (away) and it keeps coming back to me, I know that it’s something I feel my psyche is telling me to examine. It feels like something I need to deal with. Almost like it chose me.
For Bird, I had the image of a man, he’s standing on a roof, a really tall, high roof, and it’s night time. He’s naked and he has a long penis. That was my image. I’m thinking, “Who’s the man on the roof? Why is he naked? Why is there mist? What is the building?” The image brought up a lot of questions, and when I started writing I was trying to answer the question. That’s how it started. That was years ago.
Then what usually happens is I meet a producer, and they’ll ask me if I have an idea, and I told them, “Well, you know, I’ve got this weird idea about a man on a building with a long penis.” And they say, “Oh, okay. You want some money to go explore that?” So they give you a little and you go away and write to answer your own questions. You’ve got some money, so you’re starting to feel a bit more pressure, you know, because at some point you know they’re going to want to see what you came up with because they gave you some money. That takes you on the formal road of production. I’m rambling (laughs). I do feel a bit sorry for the producers who give me money. I don’t know if it’s the regular process. Everyone does things in different ways, but that’s how Bird definitely started for me.
How did Barry Keoghan come to the project for you?
I work with this really fabulous casting director, Lucy Pardee. I’ve worked with her for years and years, and she knows me really well. When I start casting a film, and sometimes we cast quite early, because I’m bever quite sure when we’re going to make it, she suggested Barry really early on, and I hadn’t seen him in much up until that point. It was before he became astronomically famous. He had done some things, but he wasn’t really well known. She showed me a picture of him, and I saw him in a couple of clips from some previous films, and from the moment she showed me the picture, I just loved him. He just looked amazing to me. He’s got the most incredible face, and I felt that he was very authentic to my world. I met him, loved him immediately, and I think we offered it to him, pretty much on the spot.
This was just before Banshees of Inisherin came out, and then he got nominated for all these awards, and then he became huge with Saltburn, but he still stuck with my little film. He could have gone and done pretty much anything he wanted at that point, but he stuck with my film. And that was lovely.
Of the film itself, one of the things I really loved were the camera angles and the intimacy they suggested. It was almost voyeuristic. Was that a specific element to enhance the emotionality of the story?
I’ve worked with Robbie Ryan, the cinematographer, for years. I think I have a particular style that I’ve kind of evolved over the years. I’m always trying to be very close to the person that I’m trying to explore so that you can get to see the world from their perspective. That’s what it’s about. It’s about trying to intimately show their world, their feelings, from their point of view. That’s probably why it feels what you’re describing. Robbie has a brilliant way of (showing) that. He’s very respectful of the person in front of the camera. He doesn’t invade their space, but he manages to look at them in a way that I think is respectful. He gives them space, even though we’re close and intimate. There’s a real fine balance, but Robbie’s got this beautiful respect for the person. It’s like you’re experiencing the world with them rather than you’re just in their space.
Going off that intimacy, you’ve mentioned that Bird was the hardest film you’ve ever made, and that it made you carve out things for yourself. Can you speak of that experience?
There’s a lot of obstacles on film (production). That’s normal. You set out to do things that don’t happen for some reason. I’ve learned to let go of that. It’s funny, because you’ll read about these directors in the old days who are waiting for the sunset with 80,000 horses coming over, and they’ll wait for weeks until they get the right light. I’ve never had that privilege of being able to wait for something to happen, you know? But I have little desires, and you want them really badly, and they mean a lot to you, but often what happens is you lose things, and you have to let go.
I think every filmmaker making low budget films knows this. They’re always letting go. What happens is, during the process, you get all these things you weren’t expecting. You get beautiful things every day. You get gifts from places you weren’t expecting. Somebody does a scene better than you expected, or the weather is even more beautiful than you expected. You may get a storm, but the wind is really beautiful. Somehow on Bird, we lost a lot of things. I had to let go of way more than I normally had. That, for me, was a loss. And a grief. Maybe 80% of my intentions for Bird are still there. The film is made and it is what it is, and I’m getting all these responses to it, but when you’re the director and you’ve nurtured things for so long, it does feel a bit painful to let go of some thing, you know? This was just a bit harder than most.
Bird is now screening in select Australian theatres.
