If you dig around on YouTube, you can find video of Andrea Arnold winning the best-live-action-short Oscar for Wasp, in 2005. For no good reason, Jeremy Irons is presenting the award from an aisle in the auditorium. The Irish director Gary McKendry was up for Everything in This Country Must. A young, unknown Taika Waititi, nominated for Two Cars, One Night, shakes hands with Arnold as she walks the few metres to Irons. “In English, we’d say this is the dog’s b****cks,” she tells the audience.
“Yeah, that was in the corridor,” Arnold now tells me (not quite correctly). “That was their new thing. They didn’t want to waste time with the lowly people going up on stage. But I was so glad I didn’t have to go on the stage. I’d rather just have taken it and gone.”
For every winner of that prize who becomes a star, another three or four slip back into the dark, obscure bowels of the industry. That didn’t happen to Andrea Arnold. A little more than a year after the Oscar ceremony, Red Road, a searing neorealist thriller set in Glasgow, won her the jury prize at Cannes. She took the same gong on the Croisette for Fish Tank in 2009 and American Honey in 2016. She can now reasonably claim to be one of the four or five most acclaimed English directors of her generation.
We meet in a Dublin hotel. Arnold seems ready to own the day.
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“I feel like I’m Irish even though I’m not,” she says by way of introduction.
She certainly looks Irish. Even if she weren’t, this morning, wearing a thick cable-knit jumper, her busy red hair – now shorter than at the Oscars – would prompt that response.
“There were a lot of Travellers in my area,” she says. “I wasn’t from a Traveller family, but my best friend was a Traveller, a young girl called Debbie. They were Irish. I always feel like I am actually Irish in spirit, even if I’m not.”
Her “area” was the blue-collar town of Dartford in Kent. For most of her career Arnold has built gritty, often troubling stories around the ordinary lives of working-class folk. Fish Tank set Katie Jarvis and Michael Fassbender spinning about the wastelands of east London. For American Honey she went among kids selling magazine subscriptions across the wide American nowhere. Bird, her new film, a hit at this year’s Cannes film festival, brings her back to home territory.
Our own Barry Keoghan stars as a young father who unsettles his teenage daughter when he tells her, out of nowhere, that he’s going to marry his current girlfriend in a few days’ time. The relationship between parent and kid is strained. Dad toys with hallucinogens extracted from toads. The girl’s mother looks to be involved with a bad ’un. Then Franz Rogowski, German actor of the moment, turns up as a quasi-spiritual entity. A lot is going on here.
I saw Arnold on stage at Cannes acknowledging Bird as the most difficult film she has yet made.
“There were loads of reasons why it was hard,” she says. “There were so many reasons. So many things that were difficult. It’s always difficult, but this was the hardest.”
She sighs the sigh of an old warrior.
[ Bird review: Barry Keoghan excels as a likeable dad geezerOpens in new window ]
“We had a lot of bad luck in terms of the shoot,” she says. “You win some. You lose some. You think, Oh, that’s a shame. Especially on a low budget – because you can’t just claim it back. You don’t have the time. If you lose it, you lose it. I’m used to that. But you gain some things you hadn’t expected. This film was mostly losing. This feels like sour grapes on some level. I am happy to have made a film. I shouldn’t be still grieving, but it feels like a loss.”
All very cryptic. At any rate, there is still a great deal of wild action on screen. In an opening, bravura section, Keoghan gets to race through the town on an electric scooter to Too Real by Fontaines DC. The Dubliner is well known for having a list of great directors with whom he wants to eventually work. Arnold was always to the top of that grid. Does she now know why?
“No, we’ve never had that conversation, actually,” she says with a throaty chuckle. “But I’m very blessed and happy. Maybe you need to ask him. I don’t know. He didn’t see the film until Cannes. He was so happy with the film, and I was very glad. He’s a working-class guy, and so am I – well, working-class girl – and maybe there are not so many working-class directors. I am not working-class now, obviously. But I come from that background. I can think of hardly any working-class film-makers.”
How did the connection take place?
“I saw a picture of him and I thought he had the most incredible face,” she says. “I almost don’t need to see more than that. Wow! What a face! What a man!”
When I got back from Cannes I got a letter saying I could have free school dinners for my daughter and free prescriptions because my earnings had been so low that year
— Andrea Arnold
Arnold’s most enduring creative collaboration has been with another Irishman. The cinematographer Robbie Ryan – now twice Oscar-nominated – shot Wasp and has remained by her side ever since. His hand-held style suits Arnold’s own rugged storytelling. She remembers his blithe acquiescence when she explained she wanted to see her lead actor’s face in Wasp as the character ran madly down a staircase.
“Sometimes you have an image of what you want, but you don’t realise what you’re asking is actually quite complicated,” she says. “And I suddenly realised I was asking him to run backwards down the stairs. Not everyone can do that for three or four flights of a stairwell. And he just said, ‘Yeah’. He didn’t blink. And then he did it. And I thought, Yeah, he’s my man.”
He makes the impossible possible?
“Robbie is just this person who will always try and translate my mad ideas into practicality,” she says. “He is amazing at that. He will just do it.”
Arnold took an unlikely route to Wasp and then onwards to international success. She left school at 16 with notions of being an actor but somehow ended up alongside Sandi Toksvig as presenter of the ITV children’s show No 73. One imagines she could have carved out a lucrative career there. But her ambitions were elsewhere. Even as a relatively young woman, it takes some courage to reinvent yourself. But Arnold is not short of chutzpah. She studied at the American Film Institute Conservatory, in Los Angeles, before moving on to a screenwriting course at Pal Labs, in her home county.
“I remember thinking, I really want to make films,” she says. “If I’m going to do that I have to give it some time. I remember thinking, That’s a big decision. I’m going to have to suffer a bit. And I did moneywise, because I had to give up my wage. It was a really big decision.”
And I don’t imagine she was suddenly drenched in wealth.
“I remember when I got back from [my film] Red Road at Cannes I got a letter saying I could have free school dinners for my daughter and free prescriptions because my earnings had been so low that year,” she says. “And that’s the reality. I didn’t come from a family with money or anything. So nobody give me any money for that.”
I wonder has her process changed since the early days. An Arnold film always looks like an Arnold film. She always shoots in a narrow ratio. The camera is always mobile. Her underrated, rain-blasted version of Wuthering Heights from 2011 shared a sensibility with the parched, rocking American Honey from five years later. Bird takes a surprising magic-realist tilt, but it is unmistakably an Arnold joint.
“Yeah, it doesn’t feel any different,” she says. “It’s the same people I work with. And I get the same amount of weeks to film. That’s never changed. It’s always six or seven weeks to make a film. If anything, I’m just a little bit more confident maybe about what I feel is the right thing. So that’s changed.”
She gets the same amount of money? She gets a similar amount of time?
“Now you’re asking me, I’m thinking maybe it should have changed – maybe I should have longer to make a film.”
Quite right too. She’s now a legend. Take note, financiers.
Bird is in cinemas from Friday, November 8th
