Film director Andrea Arnold. (Steve Carty/CBC)
Like people and their dogs, directors and their movies are often predictable mirrors of each other: an intense, street-smart fast-talker creates intense, street-smart, fast-talking films. But London-based director Andrea Arnold is a living rejection of this little theory. She’s a self-effacing and even giggly 46-year-old blonde, while her first feature, the techno-thriller Red Road, is a terrifying, sexually fraught drama about the boundlessness of heartbreak.
A Jury Prize winner at Cannes in 2006, Red Road tells the story of a CCTV (closed-circuit television) operator (played by Kate Dickie) who monitors a micro-universe of derelict low-income high-rises in Glasgow. From an anonymous surveillance room, she begins stalking an ex-con she spies on her monitor, and slowly inserts herself into his life. The film turns on several shocking moments that are never prurient, but in service of a film that builds to a startling emotional climax. If that sounds vague, it’s because Red Road works best as a surprise — and because director Andrea Arnold pleaded for vagueness. “I think it’s always better when the audience figures it out themselves,” she said in an interview with CBC.ca during the Toronto Film Festival last fall.
I sat down with Arnold to talk about Lars von Trier’s rules, why Britons are being spied on and, naturally, sex.
Q: Your short film Wasp won best live action short at the Oscars in 2005. How much does an award like that matter?
A: I think any prize helps because it helps you get your films made. But my 11-year-old daughter does art at school and the teacher said to her: “Don’t draw like this, draw like that.” And I would say: “Don’t listen to your teacher, don’t let anyone be your judge.” So prizes are about not letting anyone be your judge. Just don’t think about it and do your work. I think they help other people feel confident about you and so therefore they can invest in you.
Q: It’s funny you would say, “Don’t listen to anyone else,” because Red Road actually came with a rulebook. What exactly is the Advance Party project?
A: These two producers, Lone Scherfig and Anders Thomas Jensen, were thinking about making a co-production of some low-budget films and they were wondering about doing something with some restrictions, something like Dogme 95 [Danish director Lars von Trier headed this experimental movement with a manifesto of no-fuss, naturalistic, anti-Hollywood filmmaking]. They had a meeting with Lars von Trier and asked him: “What can you think of that would create those kinds of conditions that worked with Dogme?” And he said: “Why don’t you try giving a bunch of filmmakers the same characters, and the characters have to be played by the same actors in all of the films, so the directors have to collaborate to cast?” And that’s what we did.
Q: He’s notoriously mercurial. Did you meet him?
A: I met him once at the beginning. The other directors [Morag Mackinnon and Mikkel Norgaard] and I met and we talked about how we were going to do everything. I had lunch with Lars and he told me to “love the rope,” to embrace the rules that bind you. I thought that was very good advice.
Q: But why would any director want to cede that kind of control?
A: I like a challenge. I was excited about working with Zentropa [von Trier’s studio], and I liked the idea of collaborating with other directors. I thought that would be a supportive and creative atmosphere to work in.
But I admit that when I sat down to write with the characters in hand, I thought, maybe it’s going to be more frustrating than I imagined. All three directors got handed a document, written by Scherfig and Jensen. Each character was described in a paragraph, some more detailed than others, and you could take or leave things about the characters. You could take one thing that really touched you about the character and leave all the rest of it. It was quite open within the framework.
A scene from the Andrea Arnold film Red Road. (Glasgow Film/Seville Pictures)
Q: What were the parameters for your lead character, Jackie?
A: She was described as being aloof and cool. She had this terrible thing happen in the past, which was described to me but I don’t want it to be described to your readers, okay? Promise?
Q: Promise.
A: It said she had an affair with a married man. There are little evidences that she used to be funnier and happier, she played the banjo or used to speak French. I didn’t let the gimmick of the concept interfere with what I was finding to be the big issues of the story. Like, in an earlier draft she was supposed to have been a hang glider, and we had this whole image about an abandoned hang glider, and then gave it up.
The only rule was you had to shoot in Scotland. I’ve lived in London since I was 18. I like big cities, I wanted to pick the most urban place. We all decided to shoot in Glasgow, so I had Glasgow in my mind when I started writing. I like to show the corners of people’s lives, show what might never have been seen.
Q: Much of the film consists of the main character watching the world via CCTV. What were the logistics?
A: We filmed everything you see but we used a real CCTV camera, one that we borrowed, attached to a van so we were able to take it around to places. Amazingly good, the quality. You can zoom in on somebody a long way off and see exactly what they have in their hand.
Q: It’s quite terrifying, the idea of this constant eye on its citizens, and yet, the woman doing the watching is so benign.
A: Yeah, I’m definitely thinking about this. Twenty per cent of CCTV cameras in the world are in Britain. I think it’s something that there could be a big discussion about. They sprung up very quickly in our country over a short period of time. I certainly notice them on street corners. It’s the Big Brother thing: You don’t know when you’re being watched or not, so your sense is that you're being watched all the time. The latest invention is that they’re going to start talking to people: “Hey you, put down that knife!” It’s totally strange.
Q: The film contains a couple of very explicit sex scenes, which isn’t necessarily unusual, but seeing female pleasure in such an overt manner is. Were you aware of doing something radical?
A: The sexuality in the film was something that I wasn’t immediately aware of when I was writing. It was sort of an undertow. I was trying to let the story be what it wanted to be. There’s something quite fundamental in the film in quite a deep way — I almost don’t like talking about it because I think it’s an ambiguous thing. I think the sex adds an ambiguity to what she’s doing, and I think the audience gets these layers, and I like, to a degree, to leave it up to the audience to interpret.
When I was writing, sometimes I would say to the character: “What are you doing? You’re crazy!” It was like I didn’t want her to do the things she did, but she was doing them. She had to, and so I’d let her. I let her be, and later I would figure out why she did it. It’s interesting, I learned about these people as I made the film. I got to peel back the layers myself.
Red Road opens June 29 in Toronto and Vancouver, with screenings to follow in Calgary, London, Edmonton, Victoria and Winnipeg over the summer.
Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBC.ca.
CBC
does not endorse and is not responsible
for the content of external sites
- links will open in new window.
More from this Author
Katrina Onstad
- Lost in transition
- The Golden Compass on screen: opulent but misdirected
- The many faces of Bob
- Todd Haynes discusses his Dylan biopic, I'm Not There
- Twisted sister
- Margot at the Wedding is a venomous look at family
- Guns blazing
- Brian De Palma's antiwar film Redacted is a preachy mess
- Five questions for...
- Laurie Lynd, director of Breakfast With Scot
