'Red Road' feature

Andrea Arnold tells TO how she was inspired to make 'Red Road' by the explosion of CCTV cameras on our streets

Oct 11 2006

There is a moment in 'Red Road' so sad that you hope to God it's not based on anything in real life. But to describe the scene in any detail would give the game away. The moment in question comes at the heart of a gripping mystery that unravels in a film that's laced with tension. That she has made a thriller of sorts, comes as something of a surprise to the film's director Andrea Arnold. 'People keep saying that they feel so tense all the way through. I don't think I was quite aware of how much,' she explains. 'I didn't mean to make you all feel so bad.'

At a time when a good British film can be hard to find and amid hand-wringing about the lack of women directors (just seven per cent of films are made by women) Arnold has been getting on with it. Her short film 'Wasp' won an Oscar last year and 'Red Road', an astonishing and accomplished first feature by any standards, was in the main competition at Cannes, alongside films by Pedro Almodóvar and Ken Loach.

Arnold's accidental thriller is set in Glasgow where Jackie (Kate Dickie), a CCTV operator in her thirties, watches over a tough estate in the north of the city. 'I was thinking of making a documentary about CCTV,' Arnold explains. 'For ages I'd been watching all those cameras go up. I'd be standing and looking up and thinking: Who's looking at me?' Britain is the most watched nation in the world, and Londoners are clocked an average of 300 times a day by CCTV. If you're reading this on public transport, chances are you are being filmed by of one of 6,000 cameras on the underground and buses. For those of us who assume the cameras are cosmetic, we learn in 'Red Road' that there are ample control rooms (there's one in the West End, under the Trocadero) full of operators looking out for suspicious behaviour.

In the film Jackie conscientiously monitors people on her patch and directs the police to potential trouble. But while life happens to the people she watches – teenagers snog and fight, a lovelorn cleaner moons over her boss as he chats up her colleague – Jackie lives alone and is withdrawn. When she spots a man from her past (Tony Curran), who has been released from jail, she begins a cat and mouse game, following him through Glasgow. It's tense stuff, with strong performances from Dickie as well as the rest of the cast, which includes Martin Compston (from ‘Sweet Sixteen’) and Nathalie Press, whose career was launched by 'Wasp' and who starred in 'My Summer of Love'.

'Red Road' manipulates the way we respond to CCTV. We only see footage when something's gone wrong, and we watch with a terrible insight into what is about to unfold. Think of Damilola Taylor skip-hopping past Peckham library, or James Bulger walking away from the camera's watchful eye hand-in-hand with two older boys. We watch much of the early part of the film through Jackie's CCTV monitor, and we feel that same dread we associate with those grainy images.

Arnold, unfussy and straight-talking, makes for an unlikely former children's television presenter. And yet anyone who was watching Saturday morning TV in the early '80s may remember her as Dawn, the roller-skating vegetarian in the kids' show 'No 73'. 'I thought it would last weeks and it lasted years,' she says. 'It wasn't something I found easy. I don't think I was ever totally comfortable with it.'

It was in her late twenties that Arnold, now 45, started writing with film in mind. Originally from Dartford in Kent, she took herself off to film school in America and has had her head down ever since. It was 'Wasp', in which Press played a single mum on a Dartford estate, that attracted the attention of Zentropa. The Danish production company that is the keeper of Lars von Trier's Dogme manifesto invited Arnold to be part of its latest project, 'Advance Party'. A trilogy of three films by first time directors, each of the three films (the other two remain unmade) were to be set in Scotland and feature the same cast playing the same characters. 'After the Dogme thing it was another way of making some lo- budget films with restrictions,' says Arnold. 'It was about filmmakers collaborating and giving you some restrictions to bounce off.'

'Red Road' is named after the Glasgow estate in which it is set, a collection of high rise buildings, all over 30 storeys, with a red stripe through the middle of each. 'Deserts wi' windaes' is how Billy Connolly described Glasgow's estates, built on scraps of land with little infrastructure. The descriptions of the characters drawn up by Zentropa are intriguing. 'She is a bonfire of determination, energy and strength, and could beat up men if she wanted too,' reads TT's biography (she is the lovelorn cleaner in 'Red Road'). Arnold was immediately drawn to Jackie. 'The world has been insanely unfair to her' is how her description opens. 'What a thing to happen to somebody,' says Arnold of the tragedy that is then described. 'That really struck me. That's almost the worst thing that can happen. Then, the other character, Clyde, was described as having come out of prison. So, obviously he's got something to do with it. And they must sort this out. So that's where I started.'

'Red Road' opens on October 27.

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