A simple image can trigger a creative process. For some reason it doesn’t leave your mind, and there’s something about that memory that serves as a spark to write a character, a story. Even this image may have nothing to do, a priori, with the final result, but it was the trigger. This is what happened to filmmaker Andrea Arnold, one of the most important in European cinema in recent decades thanks to titles such as Red Road, Aquarium either American honey (with which he won the Jury Prize at Cannes Film Festival).
In this case, it was a naked man on a roof. He told it almost as a joke when he presented the result, Bird, at the last Cannes Film Festival, but she explains it in more detail during a meeting with a few journalists on the occasion of the European premiere of the film (she is a candidate for the prize for best direction at the European Film Prize). It wasn’t just a naked man, but he joked that it was “a man with a long penis on top of a building, shrouded in fog.” For one reason or another, this picture became the director’s first fiction feature since 2016. In between, a documentary, Cowand the second season of Big little lies in Hollywood.
For her, this image became a “mystery” that she began to try to decipher. “Who is this man? Why is he naked? Why the fog? Why is he standing on a building? Who is watching it? Is it an alien? How old is he? The image made me ask myself a lot of questions, and it became a kind of puzzle for me to solve. Normally, if the image continues to bother me, if it continues to come to mind, it’s something I need to explore. So I start taking notes and thinking about the answers to certain questions. It makes me think about scenes and possible images and characters. Then I build it from there,” he says of his creative process.
The journey was long, more than five years, and it included something that until now had not entered his cinema, “magical realism”. A magical realism that penetrates the neighborhood that she knows how to look at without paternalism or condescension. It is there that it tells the story of 12-year-old Balye, who lives with his single father Bug (played by Barry Keoghan), who deals in buff toads, and his brother Hunter. His encounter with the man on the roof that Arnold saw is the beginning of a story of growing up in places where cinema doesn’t usually show up. The part of magical realism will come from the protagonist’s meeting with this mysterious character, played by one of the most inscrutable and hypnotic actors in current cinema, the German Franz Rogowski.
This novelty in his cinema “was born naturally during the writing process”. He was not thinking of any reference, neither literary nor cinematographic. He prefers not to think about other works when he writes so that, as here, what emerges is “natural”. “I just put my imagination into it and let it flow.” It was liberating, but in a film you can let anything happen. I felt it as a natural progression in what I do, because all things in nature are magical, and if you put the camera on a dragonfly, you can capture it as the strangest and most beautiful thing. more magical than you can imagine,” he explains. .
In Bird, with the music of DC Fountainsonce again depicts a dysfunctional family in the neighborhood, which Andrea Arnold says is one of the connections of almost all of her films, as her own family was “pretty chaotic.” “I am very interested in these types of families. I guess it’s a natural thing, when I write I have to write about things that I know or understand. I don’t want to talk about it too much because I think it’s something personal, but obviously it comes from my own life,” he emphasizes.
Although he says little about her, he gives hints, and he says that her family was working class and from the same area where he lives. bird. He returns again to one of his mantras, speaking of something he knows very well and with which he feels a deep, intimate connection: “I have no prejudices about anyone, it’s in my bones and I think that’s something that will always be reflected in what he does. I’m not forcing anything, it’s just what I feel. “I think we should all respect and love each other.”
He sees working class not “as a political gesture,” but as an “attempt to show people as they really are, in a three-dimensional way.” “To be able to show it like this is a privilege for someone like me, who comes from this working-class background. Being a filmmaker is a privilege. It’s an incredible place to find myself. “It’s a privilege to be able to make films and for me it’s a great responsibility, but I’m not trying to make a political gesture, I’m just trying to express my point of view,” he says.
The director imagines an “egalitarian” and “just” future, with more wealth for all, where people “would not have to fight to eat or have housing”, such is her political way of understanding the world. “With COVID, there are a lot of empty buildings, and I wonder why all the people who don’t have a home can’t live there with the big housing problem that exists in the world. Actually my idea was for the family in the movie to live on a block like that, but we didn’t find it and we didn’t set it up, but that was the intention, but I didn’t “I wouldn’t call it a political gesture, but telling the world in a way that is true for me,” he concludes.
