‘Bird’, the film that was born from the image of a naked man on a rooftop and brings magical realism to the neighborhood

A simple image can unleash a creative process. For whatever reason it doesn’t leave your mind, and there is something in that memory that serves as a spark to write a character, a story. Even that image may not have anything to do, a priori, with the final result, but it was the trigger. This is what happened to filmmaker Andrea Arnold, one of the most important in European cinema in recent decades thanks to titles such as Red Road, Fish Tank either American Honey (with which he won the Jury Prize in the Cannes Film Festival).

In this case it was that of a naked man on a rooftop. He told it almost as a joke when he presented the result, Bird, at the last Cannes Festival, but she explains it in more detail in a meeting with a few journalists on the occasion of the film’s premiere throughout Europe (she is a candidate for the best director award at the European Film Awards). It was not just a naked man, but he jokingly adds that it was “a man with a long penis on top of a building, wrapped in fog.” For whatever reason, that image became the director’s first fiction feature since 2016. In between, a documentary, Cowand the second season of Big Little Lies in Hollywood.

For her, that image became a “mystery” that she began to try to decipher. “Who is the man? Why is he naked? Why the fog? Why is he standing on a building? Who is watching it? Is he an alien? How old is he? The image encouraged me to ask myself many questions, and it became a kind of puzzle that I have to solve. Normally, if the image keeps bothering me, if it keeps coming to my head, it’s something I have to explore. So I start taking notes and thinking about what the answers are to some of the questions. That makes me think about scenes and possible images and characters. Then I build it from there,” he says about his creative process.

The journey has been long, more than five years, and it has included something that until now had not entered his cinema, “magical realism.” A magical realism that gets into the neighborhood that she knows how to look at without paternalism or condescension. That’s where it tells the story of 12-year-old Balye, who lives with his single father Bug (played by Barry Keoghan), who trades in buff toads, and his brother Hunter. His encounter with the man on the roof that Arnold saw is the beginning of a story of growth in places where cinema does not usually look. The magical realism part will come from the protagonist’s encounter with that mysterious character, brought to life by one of the most indecipherable and hypnotic actors in current cinema, the German Franz Rogowski.

That novelty in his cinema “arose naturally during the writing process.” He did not think of any reference, neither literary nor cinematographic. He prefers not to think about other works when he writes so that, as here, what emerges is “naturally.” “I just put my imagination there and I let it flow. It was liberating, but in a movie you can let anything happen. I have felt it as a natural progression in what I do, because all the things in nature are magical, and if you put the camera on a dragonfly, you can capture it as the strangest and most magical thing you can imagine,” he explains.

In Bird, with music from Fontaines DConce again portrays a dysfunctional family in the neighborhood, something that Andrea Arnold believes is one of the connecting links of almost all of her films because her own family was “pretty chaotic.” “I am quite interested in these types of families. I guess it’s something natural, when I write I am obliged to write about things that I know or understand. I don’t want to talk too much about it because I think it’s something personal, but obviously it comes from my own life,” he points out.

Although he says little about her, he does give clues, and he says that his family was working class and from the same area where he takes place. bird. He returns again to one of his mantras, talking about something that he knows very well and with which he feels an intimate and deep connection: “I don’t have prejudices about anyone, that is in my bones and I think it is something that will be reflected.” always in what he does. I’m not forcing anything, it’s just what I feel. “I think we should all respect and be loving toward each other.”

He looks at the working class not “as a political gesture,” but as an “attempt to show people as they really are, in a three-dimensional way.” “Being able to show it like that is a privilege for someone like me, who comes from that working class background. Being a filmmaker is a privilege. It’s an incredible place to find myself. “It is a privilege to be able to make films and for me it is a great responsibility, but I am not trying to make a political gesture, I am just trying to tell my point of view,” he says.

The director imagines an “egalitarian” and “fair” future, with more wealth for everyone, where people “would not have to fight to eat or have a place to live”, that is her political way of understanding the world. “With COVID there are many empty buildings, and I think why not all the people who do not have homes can live there with the great housing problem that exists around the world. In fact, my idea was for the family in the film to live in a block like that, but we didn’t find it and we didn’t put it in, but that was the intention, but I wouldn’t call it a political gesture, but telling the world in a way that is true for me,” he concludes.