Andrea Arnold: 'I wish cinema could be braver'

The moment director Andrea Arnold sets foot on foreign soil (especially in mainland Europe) she finds herself acclaimed as a film-maker of international stature. Her two feature-length films, Red Road (2006) and Fish Tank, were both accepted into competition for the Palme d'Or in Cannes, and both bagged the Jury prize. Her short film Wasp (2003) won her an Oscar. Festivals the world over form a queue to bestow prizes on her. But as soon as she returns to her native Britain she falls victim to a distribution system that leaves her films largely unseen.

Fish Tank, the story of Mia (Katie Jarvis), a troubled girl of 15 on an Essex council estate, who embarks on a doomed relationship with her mother's boyfriend - Connor (Michael Fassbender).


Michael Fassbender was not immediately thought of for Connor. Arnold initially had a very different idea. "I originally wanted real people for everyone in Fish Tank and I had my eye on a man who works in my local park, a man who empties the bins. He was a perfect Connor. I wonder what he made of the watching him so intently every time I saw him. But then I began to think it would be interesting to have someone with experience, mixed in with Katie's innocence as that would echo the relationship in the film and could work well".


Like Red Road before it, Fish Tank is the work of a film-maker who doesn't pander to audiences seeking escapism: the lives it depicts are as grim as the surrounding landscape. As for obstreperous Mia and her self-absorbed mother (Kierston Wareing), their profanity alone sets them apart from polite society.

Arnold bridles at this argument. "I get frustrated because I feel it's more complex than that. I got asked in Cannes a lot about bleak housing estates, by people [film journalists] who probably have quite privileged lives – nice houses, decent holidays.
They're looking at characters who haven't got a lot, are living in poverty, and it annoys them, I'm sure. They don't want to be reminded. But I'm not trying to reflect everything about that way of life, just a few people's lives at a particular time."

Explaining this, Arnold, 48, just about manages to sound good-humoured. Though she can be prickly – especially about the media – in person she is affable, chatty and down-to-earth, with a mane of reddish-blonde, below shoulder-length hair. She first became known on children's television, as a presenter of such shows as Number 73, and, although it's hard to imagine it now, also had a spell as a member of the dance troupe Zoo who were regulars on Top of the Pops.

She grew up on a council estate in Dartford, Kent. "I don't think estates are grim places," she says.
"I love the communities there. People live close together. They're connected to the world more than in some gated, isolated middle-class place. I know where I'd rather live."

Nor does she find her films depressing. She even perceives a strange beauty in the A13 from London to Southend ("The Trunk Road to the Sea," as Billy Bragg called it), where Fish Tank is set.

"It has different personalities as you go along it," she says. "There's empty car parks near Dagenham where the Ford cars used to be, and empty factories, but there's nature and wilderness too."

In Fish Tank Arnold also repeats a narrative device she employed in Red Road – finding shafts of hope in apparently irredeemable, bleak situations. Again, the sense of uplift is so subtle it's easy to overlook. "It's a very small way of saying life goes on," she explains.

She is pleased that Jarvis, a first-time actress, has survived the Fish Tank experience – though when it was shown in Cannes Jarvis could not attend, having only recently given birth to her first baby. She was spotted by the film's casting director on Tilbury station, arguing fiercely with her boyfriend.

Despite having no acting experience she auditioned and landed the role of Mia. Now she has an agent and hopes for a full-time career.
"I think she's OK, and coping really well," Arnold says.

"I was worried after Cannes, because there was so much talk about her. But now she's doing interviews, getting auditions and offers to go to festivals.
She's got a partner, her Mum helps look after the baby. I don't think when we first saw her she could ever have imagined all this. But I hope it works out for her as something she could do for a long time."

Arnold speaks as one who's in it for the long run herself. She is now mulling over three possible ideas for her third feature, and has, she says, "offers of money".

She works on tight budgets: Red Road cost ?1million, Fish Tank twice that amount.
"To me, ?2million seems like an awful lot of money," she says. "But it's how you spend it. Instead of having a sizeable crew and shooting for a few weeks, I've fantasised about having the smallest crew possible and shooting for three or four months. That's what Terrence Malick did with Badlands." (Malick, along with Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, is one of her heroes.)
Either way, she'll keep working: "As long as you keep your budgets small, there’s a way of making films."