By Anthony Frajman
British director Andrea Arnold (Fish Tank, American Honey) details a fractured childhood in her latest feature, Bird.
Eight years after her last narrative feature, American Honey, Oscar-winning British filmmaker Andrea Arnold is back with a highly anticipated new film, Bird. Starring fast-rising Irish actor Barry Keoghan, Arnold’s coming-of-age drama follows Bailey (newcomer Nykiya Adams), a 12-year-old girl who lives with her single father Bug (Keoghan), and brother Hunter (Jason Buda). Wanting to escape her difficult home life, things change when Bailey meets a man named Bird (Franz Rogowski).
Arnold’s much-anticipated narrative return was shot and set in Gravesend, Kent, close to where she grew up in nearby Dartford. The location was an important spark. “I grew up around there, so I return there all the time,” Arnold tells FilmInk. “I’ve got lots of family there. It’s not actually far from where I live. It’s 20 minutes’ drive from where I am now. Wherever you grow up is part of your DNA, isn’t it? It’s like a part of who you are.”
Arnold began working on the film shortly after completing American Honey. She had Barry Keoghan in mind from the beginning, and says that she felt a natural connection with the Saltburn actor. Keoghan reportedly turned down a role in Gladiator II to work with Arnold. “I cast Barry just before The Banshees Of Inisherin came out in the UK and I hadn’t seen it,” the director explains. “I’d only seen him in a couple of things. I hadn’t seen him in a big part in anything. But I loved him, just from small things. I met him, and I’m very much someone who goes on the meeting. Sometimes I don’t even audition people, I just feel the person and I feel if the person’s right when you meet them, then I trust the meeting. As soon as I met him, I just absolutely loved him. And, it is a very interesting thing with casting, you can just meet someone and go, ‘Yeah, you feel completely right.’ He lands in my world very beautifully, I think.”
Arnold has gained recognition for her casting of unknown actors throughout her career. One of the biggest challenges of making Bird was finding the right performer to play Bailey. “We narrowed it down to the area where we were going to shoot. And in a way that cuts out a lot, because you’re not looking over the whole country, you’re just looking in a very specific area. But of course, we looked in a lot of schools, and then one of the interesting things about casting a kid is that it’s very easy to look because they’re in all the schools. So, we looked in Essex and Kent, they’re on each side of the Thames, they feel very different, but they also feel quite similar. [Casting Director] Lucy Pardee worked her arse off. She worked so hard. Lucy asked me to go along when she’s got a handful of kids that she feels I might be interested in. We do a lot of games and stuff like that, and just meet them.”
Though Nykiya Adams wasn’t what Arnold initially had in mind, she says she immediately wanted the young actress for the part. “As soon as Nykiya walked in the room, I just had a very strong reaction to her,” Arnold says. “She had a real presence, and she was quite different to what I’d written, actually. She was a bit unexpected, a bit more internal and a bit more silent than the person I’d written, but with an inner strength. The person I’d written was kind of mouthy and chatting and there was lots of answering back. She was cheeky and rude and making jokes all the time and talking non-stop. And Nykiya is cheeky, and she’s got some of those qualities, but she’s more internal. She’s got this internal strength which I really responded to. And that never left me…once I met her, that never went away.”
While Arnold has now made six features, including Red Road (2006), Fish Tank (2009), Wuthering Heights (2011) and American Honey (2016), but Bird, which features elements of magical realism, was her most difficult yet. “Every film has its challenges; you get lots of things that go wrong or don’t go according to plan. And I would say that’s normal. You expect that; you expect not to always get things that you intended. But because this had an extra special sort of element, things were not easy to achieve. There were just more challenges. And we had more things go wrong. And sometimes what happens on the film is that you get things not go according to plan, but you get things that you weren’t expecting that are brilliant…it balances it out somehow. But for some reason, this one I really felt the losses of things.”
What did Arnold lose on Bird? “I had lots of what I considered to be beautiful images. I lost a lot of those, actually. There’s a lot of things that were not possible. That’s partly due to small budgets on some level. I had the same amount of time I would have on any other film, yet I had more specifically difficult things to achieve. And I just couldn’t do those as fast as I could if it’s just three people in a room talking. So, when you lose those things, you just lose them…I never got to go back and reclaim some of the things that we lost. I felt really sad about it, because I always do this thing where I try to balance out the roughness of life with the beauty of life. And I had a lot more beauty in there. So, I felt like it was necessary for the content and you needed it. You needed the light, and you needed the beauty, and I found beauty in other ways in the edit, and I did find things that perhaps I wasn’t expecting as well, but there were some things that I felt really sad about losing. I think this is probably what every filmmaker feels a little bit like, but this one was the most.”
One of the biggest joys of making Bird was seeing the established stars and non-actors come together. “I really love it because what I find interesting is that the people who are more experienced, the actors who’ve done it loads of times, they get a lot out of being in an environment that is a bit unpredictable and not totally what you expect to happen,” Arnold explains. “And I think if you’ve been used to working on a lot of films where lots of very professional actors are working together, perhaps in certain environments, you get into a sort of groove. Whereas when you’ve got non-actors, they always bring something that you’re not expecting. That can be really great for actors who’ve done it lots of times. And then the other great thing is that the non-actors really learn a lot from the professionals. So, they both learn from each other in different ways. And I feel like that’s a really lovely thing. So, the trick is to make the world feel real and that everyone in it belongs. And as long as that’s all to do with the casting, and if you cast in that way, then it can work.”
Bird is screening in cinemas now.
