'Red Road' set visit

Emilie Bickerton reports from the set of the British feature debut of Oscar-winner Andrea Arnold.

May 19 2006

Glasgow, December 2005, and I'm on the set of 'Red Road', the first feature from British director and ex-kids TV presenter Andrea Arnold. The film crew divert the curiosity of passers-by with shouts of 'Taggart', a dismissal that's met with rolling eyes and mutterings of 'nae again' from locals.

But Arnold’s film is hardly 'Taggart'. It's set in the notorious residential tower blocks that loom over the city's north side and bear the same name as the film. The 30-storey Red Road blocks were Europe's tallest when first built in 1971 – but today they're marked for demolition. From the outside they're forbidding, and eerily half-empty when you get closer (inhabitants are progressively being rehoused elsewhere).

It's here that 45-year-old Arnold (who used to present 'Motormouth' alongside Gaby Roslin in the late 1980s) spent six weeks last November and December making her film with actors including Martin Compston ('Sweet Sixteen') and Nathalie Press ('My Summer of Love').

'Red Road' is the first film in a planned trilogy called 'Advanced Party', a project inspired by the principles of Dogme 95, masterminded and produced by Carrie Comerford and Gillian Berrie from the Scottish production company Sigma Films, in collaboration with Lars von Trier's Zentropa.

The plan is that three young directors (Arnold, fellow Scot Morag McKinnon and Mikkel Norgaard, a Dane) will each make a film under strict constraints – a fixed budget, the same locations, the same actors and characters – and all in only six weeks. Arnold's contribution is the first of the three and, for now, will be judged alone when it has its world premiere in Cannes this week.

'Red Road' mixes naturalist filmmaking with a compelling plot: a CCTV operator (Kate Dickie) witnesses a crime and becomes increasingly involved with the perpetrator. There are two locations: a flat in the tower blocks and Saracen Street, or 'murder mile' as it's dubbed because of all the stabbings that occur there; the local paper makes for chilling reading.

The plot may sound hostile, but Arnold was adamant that her film would not antagonise the local community. Rather than dropping in, doing the job and disappearing, she invited local people to get involved. By the last week of filming, lots of the locals are participating. On Saracen Street, for a final shoot, the mood is easy: people look out from doorways, some ask questions, children watch the sound engineer work and wear his headphones, and Arnold introduces new recruits to the crew.

The crew is still dropping the 'Taggart' line to deflect attention once in a while, but the atmosphere never feels like lofty artists intruding on people's 'real' and difficult lives. Under Arnold, the two aren't separate: there's a place for film everywhere and anyone has the capacity to be involved.

When first asked to take part in the Advanced Party project, Arnold was immediately keen. The constraints would be challenging, but she's all for risking failure. 'It's the only way we learn anything new,' she says. She'd only made short films before and found the larger crew of a feature trying. You can't move elsewhere mid-scene, she says, 'not with 40 people behind you'.

It's the sort of thing she does: wearing combat trousers and a rucksack, she's a hands-on director; her energy enthuses others, while her precise vision makes her free shooting style innovative rather than aimless.

There's a quietly confident atmosphere on set, a tangible sense of being involved in something special. The cast talk about the film as a liberating experience. Actor Tony Curran is struck by Arnold's request for him to play things down. 'You're looking too sad, stop acting the emotion, the audience knows it already,' she tells him during the filming of a tragic scene.

Meanwhile, Martin Compston is delighted at being encouraged to let go of the falseness he picked up at drama school and stop playing up to the camera. Melodrama jars in a film like 'Red Road'.

After winning her Oscar for the short film 'Wasp' in 2005, Arnold went rock-pooling with her daughter to escape the media frenzy; she's not motivated by that kind of attention. Whatever the reception to 'Red Road', she says the experience has been worthwhile. She's better understood the lives of the Glasgow community and visually conveyed their experiences as best as she could. In the end, there wasn't too much of a gulf between the pressures of filmmaking and the lives of the people around her. For Arnold, that's success.

Click here for Time Out's 'Red Road' review from Cannes.

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