Story by Brad Balfour
Film: “Bird”
Director: Andrea Arnold
Cast: Nykiya Adams, Barry Keoghan, Franz Rogowski, Jason Buda, Jasmine Jobson, Frankie Box, James Nelson-Joyce, Joanne Matthews, Sarah Beth Harber
Dublin-born actor Barry Keoghan likes to take on unique, uncharacteristic roles at every turn, as he says. And so he does — especially while starring in British indie darling Andrea Arnold’s latest film, “Bird.” Ms. Arnold, a former actor turned director, won an Academy Award in 2005 for her short, “Wasp.” Then her features — “Red Road” (2006), “Fish Tank” (2009), and “American Honey” (2016) — won the Cannes Film Festival Jury Prize.
Joining forces with Arnold and her very unscripted approach to filmmaking allowed the 32-year-old to fully collaborate on the creation of this film. Keoghan then shaped his character and the interactions he had with the rest of the cast. This came after all the attention he received in 2023 when he appeared in Emerald Fennell’s psychological thriller, “Saltburn,” and revealed a striking part of himself. Keoghan won critical acclaim for his performance and was nominated for the Golden Globe’s Best Actor award. Previously, Keoghan had received a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nom and a Best Supporting Actor BAFTA Award for his performance in the very scripted 2022’s “The Banshees of Inisherin.” But in “Bird,” he has taken a very different approach to building his performance.
“Bird” focuses on 12-year-old Bailey [Nykiya Adams] who lives with her half-brother Hunter [Jason Buda] and father Bug [Keoghan]. The ADHD-afflicted dad raises them alone living in a squat in northern Kent. Though he loves his kids, Bug doesn’t devote much time to them while pursuing dodgy schemes to make money and add more insectoid tats. As a result, the near-teen Bailey seeks attention and adventure elsewhere.
While wandering about, she meets Bird [Franz Rogowski], an odd and maybe imagined character. Her mother Peyton [Jasmine Jobson] is a drug-addicted mess with a violent boyfriend, Skate, and three other very neglected kids by another father. Bailey provides a diversion and occasionally substitute mothering for her half siblings. Meanwhile, Bug is about to marry Kailey [Frankie Box] and wants his daughter to be a bridesmaid, which she adamantly refuses. Ultimately, as episodic sequences unfold — including surreal moments with Bird — Bailey transforms into a more responsible and emotionally connected daughter and joins in the wedding with abandon.
Employing a gritty look at the emotionally strained denizens of Britain’s poverty-stricken underclass, Arnold shows them surviving and at times thriving with a dose of magical realism thrown in. The film’s miserable moments are ultimately overshadowed by its feel-good conclusions. That’s nonetheless made possible by not only Keoghan but the remarkable performance of newcomer Adams.
In the Q&A that followed a recent screening at the Angelika, Arnold and Koeghan try to outline the filmmaking while not getting too serious about explaining it.
Q: You tackle the lives of young people, and have had a couple of coming of age stories before with “American Honey” and “Fish Tank.” What keeps bringing you back to this topic?
Andrea Arnold: That’s such a hard question. When I write, I don’t really make plans. I don’t really know why I write what I write. I usually start with an image, and then kind of work it out like a puzzle. What comes out is what comes out. I never make a plan. So, I don’t know.
Q: What was the styling image for Bird?
Andrea Arnold: Most of the films I’ve written have always started with some kind of image that I then worked on. And this one was a man standing on a very tall building at night in a mist. He was naked and had a long penis.
Barry Keoghan: I remember you telling me this. I was like, is that me? I didn’t know who was playing.
Andrea Arnold: I met Frank and told him that, too. I think they were all thinking, “Oh, no.” I don’t give them a script, you see. So, I tell them that, and they’re thinking, “Oh, my God, what am I letting myself in for?”
Barry Keoghan: Tell my agent I’m playing a man with a long penis. That’s all I know.
Q: How did you come on board especially if you didn’t get the full script in the beginning? What was it like working on this project? From the first…
Barry Keoghan: We met in a fish and chips shop in East London. It was lovely. Got chatting away. Andrea told me, you’re not going to read a script for this. I kind of loved that. I really did. I was like, I’m fucking on board, you know what I mean? Then you gave me a sticky apple to bring home.
Andrea Arnold: A toffee apple.
Barry Keoghan: A toffee apple to bring home.
Andrea Arnold: It was Halloween, you see.
Barry Keoghan: It was Halloween, and I had to go through the airport with this.
Andrea Arnold: And a pumpkin, actually.
Barry Keoghan: And a pumpkin. I had to go through the airport with this. I had nothing else but this. I brought it back to Scotland and left it there. I didn’t throw it out or touch it until I found out I’d gotten the part because, believing in superstition and all that. By the time I got back to the apple, it was gone. But a lot of the people in the airport looked at me going, I was like, “I have to put this through the machine.” They’re like, “Is he all right?”
Q: Can both of you talk about working with Nykiya Adams who plays Bailey. She’s fantastic. This is her first screen role. How did you cast her? What was it like for you to work with her, building this father-and-daughter dynamic that starts from a very complicated place and then softens …
Barry Keoghan: I love [her]. We were always out together and didn’t do the whole rehearsal thing. It was more like me getting to understand her temperament and how she is, and not being too [controlling]. When you bring kids like that onto a set, it’s quite intimidating. And with Andrea, it was not. It was just very welcoming. You can’t really differentiate where it’s on the set and where it’s not. It’s a very livable thing. We went for ice cream. We went for stuff like that and played games. I started to understand her, and I got to sitting in front of her. She got to sit in front of me. Again, I think that was the best kind of way to get to know her –– which was, I think, very smart.
Q: How did you find her?
Andrea Arnold: Nykiya was 12 when we met her and is 13 now. We went to schools. I work with an amazing casting person, Lucy Pardee, who’s fantastic. She knows exactly the kind of kids that I would love. In fact, we’d usually go to all the naughtiest schools first. We’ve learned to do that. Like, you don’t start at the tame ones. You go straight to the naughtiest. And, in fact, the schools where the kids had been kicked out of school, those schools that are taking all the kicked out kids, they’re the best. You get the most amazing characters in those schools, often lively, really full of energy. You can’t always say though. By the way, Nykiya didn’t go to one of those. We usually go and say to the teachers, “Who’s the cheekiest, naughtiest?” That’s usually what we’re looking for, some kids who’ve got a lot of spirit.
Q: The different shades of masculinity you depict in this movie through Bug’s character –– the odd outsider Bird, and son Hunter –– is really quite impressive in the sense that Bug and Bird are almost exact opposites of each other. We also see a new generation of young men growing up. Did you have conversations about that? And where was your head at as you were building these characters?
Andrea Arnold: It’s interesting you said that, because I think it was that image I told you about earlier, about the man on the roof with the long penis …. Although we can joke about that, it’s a sort of metaphor for masculinity on some level. That’s probably what I was exploring a little bit, maybe from my point of view on some level. I grew up without having a lot of men around. Men were this curious other being. I think that there’s a bit of that going on in the film. It’s probably me kind of being curious about what masculinity is exactly? I don’t actually know, but I think these things come out by writing in a very deep way where unconscious curiosity comes out.
Q: Barry, one of the greatest manifestations of that [maleness] is the scene in the train station where you’re talking to your son [who wants to go to Scotland with his pregnant girlfriend]. It’s a really difficult scene where you need to communicate to him that you don’t regret having him, but also you don’t want him to become a father that early on. Talk a bit about shooting that really emotional scene that makes us understand Bug through a whole new lens?
Barry Keoghan: I feel like Jason Buda [Hunter], I really mean that, that it was this forced thing. I remember him going away, getting into the zone, and just being able to give me a lot. It made me quite emotional, that in itself. But they both have a sort of a sibling-like relationship. And you see that these days, I sort of have a similar thing with my child. He’s two and he doesn’t get backtracked. Not yet.
Andrea Arnold: Oh, you wait.
Barry Keoghan: It’s sort of that brother-sister kind of relationship. They challenge Bug a lot. He doesn’t know how to handle it and through resorting to having to be a father, he doesn’t necessarily act like a father or contribute to that. But he’ll go to that title when he feels challenged. You see that growth throughout the movie. You see him take that position and take on that responsibility. Yeah, that was a very emotional scene when he’s on his [son’s] level at the train station. There was something about that day that was just gorgeous. It really was.
Q: Do you have memories about shooting that scene? It seemed so beautiful.
Andrea Arnold: For me, as a director, we were trying to shoot in between all the trains that were coming in and out with all the noise, and we only had three hours. I remember that day as being actually quite tough. But what Barry said about Jason is so true. Jason was another kid that we found, who had never acted before. He just grew and grew and grew through the film and was very curious about how [it was made]. He got really into it, didn’t he?
Barry Keoghan: Yeah, yeah.
Andrea Arnold: He really was just brilliant in that scene. I think that his way of playing that scene affected everybody. And I think it’s down to him that the scene, on some level, led the rest of us on some level.
Q: What was your process of navigating the themes of social realism, which your cinema often depicts, and the magical realism displayed in this movie — especially with the scene of the dog coming back to life? That hasn’t been seen from you before. How did you walk that line so delicately?
Andrea Arnold: When I was writing, that stuff started coming out, And there was more of it in the script than actually made it to the film. I just loved it. It was liberating, because I’ve made myself a lot of rules around my filmmaking in the past, “Oh, it’s got to be real, it’s got to be this, and you can’t do that.” I was like, “Yeah, I can do all of them. I mean, even with the dog at the end, coming back to life. I was very happy about that. I just thought, “I want that dog to come back to life.”I think even when we were getting notes back from some of the cuts, some of the producers were going, “Is it going to be believable? Is the dog going to be alright?” I’m going, “It’s coming back to life.” I didn’t feel I needed to explain anything other than make it come back to life. I really thought that the dog came back to life. I don’t even care if you don’t actually buy it. [Audience laughs] I think that it did mean something emotionally that people needed to have.
Barry Keoghan: I swear, and I said this already, it is a credit to you [Arnold], and it’s great to see that you don’t get caught up in that sort of sci-fi element of it. You’re so involved in these characters, and you’re not questioning that stuff. You’re just so into it — you know what I mean? That is a strength to you, that you don’t go, “Oh, wait, the dog died, but he’s back now.” To be honest, I didn’t even question it. You know what I’m saying?
Q: Barry, you’ve been building a career through really unexpected roles. Every time you give us something new. How do you choose the parts that you want to take on? What are the new challenges that you’re looking for after this?
Barry Keoghan: When I get asked this question, you’d think I’d have that answer ready. But I don’t. What I’m looking for is to be challenged and to approach this process in a different way like with this one. I’ve always said –– going back to 2016, ’17 –– I always said in articles, “I want to work with Andrea Arnold.” I always said that. You can go find that on the Internet, but I didn’t listen. Then it happened in the best way. It didn’t just happen that I came on board and I’d done a movie. I came on board and it changed my life, literally. I’ve been on the hook ever since. Andrea allowed me to really reach some vulnerabilities in places that I didn’t think I could access. And we’re creating that safety blanket. All with this new way of expression and not having a script. I just loved it. I actually loved it.