Shot and set in Gravesend, a town in Kent, England, Andrea Arnold’s new film Bird, starring newcomer Nykiya Adams alongside Barry Keoghan and Franz Rogowski, is a portrait of a young girl coming of age under chaotic circumstances. Twelve-year-old Bailey, played brilliantly by Adams, is bound by poverty and a dearth of options to her unstable father, Bug (Keoghan); she seeks solace in whatever independence she can find. When a mysterious stranger (Rogowski) appears on her doorstep, an uncanny bond is formed between them, altering the course of her life.

Filmmaker: Your narrative work tends to have a sort of freewheeling structure, but these pieces always feel like they bring the viewer full circle, in some respects, by their close. I’m wondering what the writing process is like for you. Is it improvisatory and more discovery-based, or is there a set outline where you know you want to hit certain narrative points, without necessarily planning the getting there?

Arnold: It’s just my weird way of doing things. I usually start with an image, and that’s how I get into the story. I have an image that comes to me, somehow, and then I ask myself what that’s about. What does that image mean? I’ll ask questions of it, and try and figure out what the world is, who’s in the world. Usually, not always, but usually, the image will then occur in the film at some point. So it’s a key image in a way. I don’t start at the beginning. I start in the middle and work my way out. Other images present themselves, and it’s like a jigsaw puzzle. When I feel like I know enough about the character, and the world, then I’ll go back to the beginning. And when I’m writing, it’s just my own peculiar way of doing things, but I just ask myself, ‘What happens next?’, and never really follow any rules of structure or the received wisdom of screenwriting. I went to film school, but you’d never know it. People tell me they never know what’s going to happen next in my films. I don’t know why that is, but it is the case.

Filmmaker: What was the key image for Bird?

Arnold: I’ve blurted it out before, in Cannes. I’d had two hours sleep and just premiered the film, and it just came out. But I usually try to keep it a secret. It was a man standing on the edge of the roof of a tall building.

Filmmaker: You’ve dealt with the concept of a young woman confronting challenges and coming into her own in your previous work — Mia in Fish Tank, Star in American Honey. What was the flashpoint for this project, this character of Bailey?

Arnold: It’s way more mysterious than that. Whenever anyone asks me about themes or grand plans, I don’t really have any. I don’t know why I make anything that I make ahead of time. I never say to myself: I’m going to make a film about a teenage girl. It just comes about from asking, “Who’s in this world? Who is it?” It just comes. I didn’t plan it, and I didn’t set out to make a ‘coming-of-age’ story, or whatever. I just jigsaw it. Start with that one image and continue on from there. I’m not even aware I’m working in genre. I just dig around in the image and see what comes from there. When people talk about what I’ve been doing, trying to sense a theme or make connections between my films, it’s not something I do. It’s truly quite unconscious. I don’t think in themes or plans.

Filmmaker: Like in your previous work, Bailey follows a path of curiosity, which leads to her eavesdropping, spying, following people. Again, in Red Road, the Jackie Morrison character finds herself in a similar dynamic, as does Mia in Fish Tank, specifically when she follows her mother’s boyfriend Connor and discovers he has another family. Bailey takes on this sort of amateur detective role, and I haven’t really been able to find anywhere in print where you’ve addressed these parallels or unwound this kind of trajectory, and maybe interrogate if there are any parallels between these characters, their paths, and your own experience as a filmmaker.

Arnold: I kept thinking as I was making this film, ‘I’m obviously digging around in something that I’ve explored before’ — you know, masculinity, what it means. But I really don’t intentionally chase any one idea. I know a lot of filmmakers who claim not to realize what they’re doing half the time as they’re doing it. I remember hearing [novelist and screenwriter] Guillermo Arriaga asked by an interviewer, “Why do you always have characters trying on each other’s clothes?” He said, “Am I doing that?’”And I thought, he’s like me. I was really relieved to hear it. I’m not sitting outside of my world, looking in and deciding on my subjects. I get sucked in, and once I’m in it, most of what I’m doing is quite unconscious. I’m trying to figure something out in my own psyche. The common themes are probably all things I need to figure out for myself — but I’m loathe to say what they might be, as I don’t even know myself half the time. Making a film, every time, I feel like it’s a growth. But I try not to talk about these things because it doesn’t leave much room then for the audience to have their own relationship with the films themselves. I hate explaining things. The film is the thing, and to explain it takes away the fun for those watching it. (…)

Quelle: “Don’t Call It ‘Magic Realism’”: Andrea Arnold on Returning to Narrative Cinema with Bird – Filmmaker Magazine