Andrea Arnold was recently asked to mount a retrospective of her work for a film festival, a rather unusual request for a director who has made only three features: Red Road (2006), Fish Tank (2009) and her savage new version of Wuthering Heights. Her immediate response was one of concern. "I thought, 'That poor audience, watching those films together.' I almost felt like I shouldn't do it. Or that I should say, 'Don't watch them back-to-back. Leave a week in between.'"
Still, she doesn't have much time for critics who label her work bleak. "I wonder whether my bleak-o-meter is set differently from other people's." The 50-year-old, Dartford-born film-maker is huddled inside a navy-blue duffel coat as she sips tea in the library of a London hotel. "I have such passion for what I do that I can't see it as bleak. When people use that word, or 'grim' or 'gritty', I just think, 'Oh, come on, look a bit deeper.' My films don't give you an easy ride. I can see that. The sense I get is that people have quite a physical experience with them. They feel afterwards that they've really been through something."
Anyone familiar with Red Road, her debut, will consider that an understatement. The film was an unbearably tense thriller about a woman stalking the ex-convict who destroyed her life, following him into the depths of a Glasgow housing estate. A merit badge was in order for those viewers who stayed the course: "I Survived Red Road." Arnold's second film, Fish Tank, was set on another housing estate, this time in Essex, where a 15-year-old girl is drawn into a hazardous dalliance with her mother's boyfriend. Both films won the jury prize at Cannes, more than ratifying what had been a change of career for Arnold.
She had started out as a teenage dancer on Top of the Pops before becoming a mainstay of 1980s Saturday morning children's TV: she played a roller-skating flibbertigibbet on Number 73, and presented Motormouth. "I was getting uncomfortable in front of the camera and starting to feel I was in the wrong place. I had this desire to do my own thing," she says.
Arnold enrolled on a year-long film-making course at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles before returning to Britain to make short films. One of these, Wasp, won her an Oscar. Accepting her statuette at the ceremony, she called it "the dog's bollocks", just in case anyone tuning in had mistaken her for Gwyneth Paltrow. Since then, she has established a distinctive voice with a slim body of work: in modern British cinema, only Lynne Ramsay (We Need to Talk About Kevin) and Steve McQueen (Hunger) might be said to have had a comparable impact. Three films in, and already we know what an Andrea Arnold film might entail: visual poetry blooming in the harshest terrain; brutalised souls achieving emotional catharsis; and animals, lots of animals, the better to point up the underlying savagery of human experience.
Wuthering Heights forsakes Arnold's beloved housing estates altogether – though even the most forbidding of these would resemble Paris in springtime next to the rain-lashed moors near the Pennine Way where Arnold filmed her adaptation. The production wasn't undiluted hardship: there were raucous weekend shindigs, says Arnold, who hired a Kate Bush impersonator to sing Wuthering Heights for the wrap party. But the shoot took its toll. "We all knew it would be a difficult location, but we weren't prepared for how tough it was. It was so muddy that your feet sank wherever you walked. We were shooting in a house that kept collecting water. We ate lunch huddled around this metal heater in a stinky old sheep-house. On the last week, I was carrying a heavy camera box on my head, walking up this hill, and my legs just gave way. I collapsed to my knees and burst into tears. But I didn't want anyone to see me crying, so I pulled my hat down over my eyes and sat there on the grass with the box on my head. Eventually I struggled to the top of the hill, where I saw another crew member, also with a camera box on her head, also on her knees crying. We'd had enough."
Heathcliff in the raw
The harshness of the shoot translates to the screen, where the tortured passion between Cathy and her adoptive brother Heathcliff is mirrored by the fiercely elemental backdrop. And it's not only nature that's untamed in the movie. Arnold has a track record in coaxing miraculous performances from non-actors: 17-year-old Katie Jarvis famously won the lead in Fish Tank after Arnold's casting director spotted her arguing with her boyfriend on a station platform, which was possibly not how it all began for Audrey Hepburn. Wuthering Heights features Skins regular Kaya Scodelario as the adult Cathy, but her co-stars are all greenhorns: Shannon Beer, 13, and Solomon Glave, 14, as the young Cathy and Heathcliff, and 23-year-old James Howson as the older Heathcliff.
Howson briefly joins us, sinking into a chair in the corner and addressing my questions in an undemonstrative West Yorkshire lilt. The burgeoning afro he sports in the film has been pruned back; his 19th-century velvet threads are today replaced by a rugby shirt and windcheater. "I were in this Jobshop-type thing," he mumbles, "and I heard there were auditions that day. At first I got cold feet." He gazes up from his lap to look at his director. "But you insisted. You said, 'You're the one.'" What made her so sure? "I think he's got a vulnerability about him," says Arnold. "And a beauty."
It's instructive to see them together. She's like a big sister, prodding him affectionately to answer my questions, or teasing him about the weight he gained on set. "Making the film weren't hard," he says. "I were well-fed." Does he think he's going to carry on acting? He shakes his head. "Nah. Gonna go job-hunting." I wish him luck with it, and he sniffs: "Don't hold your breath."
This decision to go for rawness rather than technical skill or celebrity is characteristic of Arnold, who only inherited the project after it had twice fallen through. First Natalie Portman and then Abbie Cornish had been lined up by other directors to play Cathy, with Michael Fassbender and Gossip Girl's Ed Westwick on board at various points as Heathcliff. But Arnold favoured authenticity over A-list, and also wanted to square her Heathcliff with Emily Brontë's original. "There are five or six clear descriptions of him in the novel," she explains. "He gets called 'a little Lascar', which meant an Indian seaman, and there's a reference to Chinese-Indian parentage. He also gets called a Gypsy. In the end, I decided that what I wanted to honour was his difference."
More noteworthy than the "black Heathcliff" angle is Arnold's decision to shoot only half of Brontë's novel (which has been adapted for screen several times, most famously with Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon in the title roles). "It's such a complex book that I just had to pick out the things that had resonance to me, while still honouring the work as a whole. I knew I wanted to keep the kids in the film for the first hour, whereas most people only show them for 10 minutes then move on to the adults. But the childhood is so important in the book that, without it, the adulthood wouldn't make sense. They're yearning for what they had as kids. I knew then that I couldn't squeeze everything in. I love the second half of the book: what you feel, at the end, is that Heathcliff's death makes it complete because only once he dies can he be with Cathy. It brings it full circle. But in my version, I have to leave him suspended. It's unresolved – you almost feel that he's still out there, wandering the moors."
'I've never Twittered anyone'
Arnold seems almost surprised at having wrapped on Wuthering Heights. She had, after all, professed that she would never make a period piece, and had no interest in adapting a novel. "It's almost like you don't have a choice," she shrugs. "The material chooses you." She admits that she might do the film differently if she had another chance. "The journey has taught me so much about what I feel towards the material. I was even thinking I might have cast a woman as Heathcliff. That would have been interesting." She unleashes a wheezy laugh, but won't elaborate. "I don't want to give too much away because part of that feeling is still in the film, and I want people to discover it for themselves."
Intensely guarded, Arnold is not one of those directors to be found recording DVD commentaries, or parrying with fans on Twitter. "I don't read reviews. I've never Twittered anyone. Is that what you call it? I don't want to be inhibited by what other people say. I don't want to think too much about me."
