“I love it. I love the wings. The only thing I’d say… that talon on the bottom next to my surname feels a bit spooky. I don’t think my bird is spooky, really.” My bird.
Andrea Arnold is sat opposite me and I’ve just laid out our new special edition t-shirt in her name, illustrated by Sophie Mo. She takes another look.
“I do love it, though… I’m extremely flattered to have my name on a t-shirt. Every now and again I get a photo from someone who’s been wearing my name somewhere, or at a festival. I’m always like ‘Wow, that’s amazing!’ and my friends take a picture and they send it to me. It’s great. Gives me a boost”.
We’re here, of course, to discuss her latest film Bird. It’s a story about a young girl called Bailey, played by newcomer Nykiya Adams, who lives with her brother Hunter (Jason Buda) and father Bug (Barry Keoghan) in a squat in Kent. Desperate to get away from the chaos of her home life – Bug’s about to marry his girlfriend of three months and Hunter’s just found out his girlfriend is pregnant – Bailey seeks her own adventure and along the way meets the mysterious Bird played by Franz Rogowski, who was recently awarded a BIFA for Best Supporting Performance.
My bird. There was something so telling and yet ambiguous about the way she said it. It got me thinking about the film overall, a kind of enigma of its own, ruffling a few feathers among critics after the film premiered at Cannes earlier this year. Initial reactions were mixed which led to some intriguing discussions. As time passed, however, the conversation evolved, revealing a growing appreciation for the Bird era of Arnold’s filmmaking and her effortless, poetic peregrinations of the beauty and joy to be found in the wild.
Bird is set in Gravesend, a few miles away from Arnold’s birthplace of Dartford in Kent which is where she shot her Oscar-winning short Wasp (2003), a story about a poor single mum who bumps into a former flame, starring a young Danny Dyer and Natalie Press. Catapulting Arnold’s name onto the film industry’s radar, it was the first time that she collaborated with the now multi award-winning cinematographer, Robbie Ryan. Over 20 years later, they’re still working together, even if it means squeezing his time into a very busy schedule (namely, Yorgos Lanthimos’ schedule). I ask her what it was like to shoot Bird in a place close to her heart.
“Well, it’s great because I know where to go. The bridge. The marshlands. The river. All of those kinds of liminal spaces. Factory buildings that are desolate now. All the car parks that are overgrown. Writing the script was very easy... When I was young, we used to be able to climb down into the chalk pits. We could go into the wild spaces, make camps. It’s definitely changed, though. A lot of the spaces that I used to roam were shut down, fenced off.”
I wondered whether any of these areas she was referring to had been noticeably changed, or like many coastal towns a commute’s distance from the capital, gentrified. “Gravesend isn’t like that at all. It’s true that there are towns closer to London that are getting bought up by people who can commute etc but Gravesend… I love Gravesend. It’s really lively and friendly. All of my crew, a lot of them who live or come from London, said they all loved it. We had a really great time there.”
Given Arnold’s personal connection to the story and location, I was curious to know more about the evolution of her lead character, Bailey, played by newcomer Nykiya Adams. “The Bailey I’d written was more vocal, wild and rude and er, what’s the word, unfiltered. An unfiltered sort of teenager with a lot going on. Of course, what happens is… You find people who are different. Key to that is Lucy who is a magnificent human being and cares deeply about everyone we deal with.” Arnold is talking about her other long-time collaborator, Lucy Pardee, who first worked with her as a Casting Assistant on Fish Tank (2009) and there onwards as Casting Director ever since. For Bird, Lucy’s task was to visit schools along the Essex-Kent stretch of the Thames estuary, speak to teachers and share the qualities they were looking for in Bailey. “Sometimes, Lucy will bring people who she knows I’ll find interesting… and then Nykiya walks in the room and I think. ‘Ooh, she made me wake up!’”
Making her acting debut in Bird, Adams brought a softer energy compared to the character that was on the page, “because Nykiya was less vocal, the images then became more important”. There are a few scenes in Bird where we become voyeurs of Bailey’s world through the lens of her smartphone. I wondered what it was like for Arnold to weave technology into the narrative, in what seemed like a more pronounced way compared to her previous films. “It just felt very natural because it’s Bailey’s world and the phone is obviously a massive part of a teenager’s life. I saw it as a way of getting to her internal world, a way of expressing her… I also thought about how you collect things on your phone and how your phone becomes this place of treasure, with photos and videos of everything that you see. To me, this felt like the equivalent of collecting shells or rock or feathers or whatever. It’s just the digital version of it and that’s what Bailey does.”
The one treasure Bailey cannot capture however is her new friend, Bird. An ephemeral figure, reminiscent of the guiding angels in Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire (1987), I have to ask - what does Bird’s character symbolise to her? “I… am never going to tell you that.”
I try to change the subject but all I can think of is a subplot about Barry Keoghan’s character Bug trying to get rich quick by housing hallucinogen-secreting toads. “Yeah, it’s totally true. You can Google it – Colorado River toad. Celebrities take it and stuff. In fact, there was more toad story than there ended up being in the film. The toad’s house started with a bucket and then it went to an ice cream carton, with a few bits of toad gym in and…”. She stops for a second, pausing that train of thought.
“I don’t like talking about Bird’s character. You know why? Because I think words won’t make sense of him as a character and if I say something, then everyone will go ‘oh that’s what he means’. Whereas if people go to the pub and argue about him and what he means – that’s what I want. I want people to have their own relationship with him.” If you haven’t seen the film yet, let’s just say there’s a key transformative scene which foregrounds Bird as her most feral and phantasmagoric film to date.
So, with that moment in mind, what does she make of being newly categorised as a ‘magical realist’ filmmaker? “I guess some find it difficult that I’ve done that, I just found it liberating. I can break my own rules. I actually feel like it’s a growth in me. This idea that you stay stuck in one thing seems weird. We all change. We all grow. Besides, nature is magical anyway. You just look at a dragonfly in close-up and that’s like a strange, weird and beautiful thing… What I’ve just done in Bird is an extension of what I always do. I just gave it more power.”
There’s a knock at the door – her last interview of the day is waiting outside. As I get up to leave, I ask whether she’d like to keep the t-shirt. “Oh my god, yes, I would. Thank you. I’ll wear it for the next lot just in case they don’t know who I am, ha!... I’m very flattered. I’ve always been flattered by this. Always. And like, Laura Dern wore me once. In fact, the whole cast came in wearing Andrea Arnold t-shirts, on my last day of shooting Big Little Lies. It was lovely.”
And that was that. No closer to what Bird’s character means to Arnold but unequivocally sure about one thing. Arnold is herself a mystery, forever teasing, forever leaving us wanting more.
BIRD is now streaming exclusively on MUBI. Watch with 30 days free at mubi.com/girlsontops