While it was I who wrote ‘Junky’, I felt that I was being written in ‘Queer’,” William S. Burroughs reflected in 1985, when his novella was finally published some 33 years after it was written. A bracing, unfiltered, semi-autobiographical work inspired by his complex relationship with Adelbert Lewis Marker (a waifish twentysomething he met in Mexico City) ‘Queer’ – a slim 119 pages – was originally intended as an extension to ‘Junky’, but after it was rejected due to the explicit homosexual content, Burroughs lost interest. Even now ‘Queer’ has not achieved the fame of ‘Naked Lunch’ or ‘Junky’; a great shame, as its restless melancholy and transactional tenderness leave a mark on the soul like a brand, red and raw.

One person forever changed by Burroughs’ confessional account of desire and addiction was Luca Guadagnino, who first read ‘Queer’ when he was 17. “My teenage self must have been compelled by the beautiful writing – the way in which he was finding a language to tell a love story that felt classic, but his point of view was everything,” reflects Guadagnino, lounging on a sofa in a Claridge’s hotel room on a bright October afternoon. “I read everything in the Burroughs canon after that, which solidified my passion for ‘Queer’, because in that it felt like he was making love to the desire for a confession that he had inside himself, whereas in ‘Naked Lunch’ Burroughs becomes more guarded when it comes to him as a person.”

‘Queer’ stayed with Guadagnino. There was an attempted adaptation of the book in 2011 by Steve Buscemi that never came to fruition; the rights remained with the Burroughs estate. It wasn’t until the summer of 2022, while directing his tennis love triangle dramedy Challengers with screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes, that Guadagnino realised the timing was just right. “I said to him, ‘Listen, there’s this book I’ve wanted to make into a movie forever. Would you like to read it?’”

Guadagnino recalls with a smile. “I gave him the book in the morning, and by the evening, we were talking about it, and that conversation was very inspiring. I find Justin’s ambition inspiring – it’s not ambition to be famous or rich, but ambition to make beautiful things.”

The pair secured the rights to ‘Queer’, and as Kuritzkes began working on the script, Guadagnino set his sights on casting. But who could play an iconoclast like William Lee, so nakedly an avatar for Burroughs himself? In Guadagnino’s mind, it always had to be Daniel Craig, who was elated at the prospect. “I was already such a huge fan of his,” Craig explains over Zoom, in between wrangling his family’s new kittens into their carriers for a vet appointment. “We’d wanted to work together for many years. And when I read Justin’s script, I just saw within the character somebody who I kind of thought I recognised and I thought was incredibly interesting and complicated.” Although William Lee might share the loquacious drawl, inquisitive streak and queerness of Detective Benoit Blanc, Craig’s most famous role after Bond, the similarities end there.

In both Burroughs’ and Guadagnino’s versions of Queer, Lee is a shifty, philandering writer, laying low in Mexico and spending his time drinking, shooting heroin, or chancing it with whoever he can talk into bed. He is charismatic with an undercurrent of seediness, but mostly Lee is lonely – desperately reaching out in the sticky darkness, hoping someone might reach back.

That someone arrives in the form of Eugene Allerton, a young ex-serviceman and recent transfer to Mexico City, lithe and bright and completely enigmatic, who always holds Lee at a tantalising distance. He’s played by Drew Starkey, hitherto known to legions of teenagers as part of the Netflix adventure drama series, Outer Banks, where he plays a drug addict with anger issues. Allerton couldn’t be more different; a coquettish study in silences, he is a beguiling foil to Lee, who is smitten from the moment he first lays eyes on him. “Daniel I wanted, and Daniel I got,” Guadagnino recalls, “It was a long casting process to find Allerton. But I was in London two years ago, for Bones and All, and I watched a tape of Drew for another movie, and I thought he was great. I wanted him for Allerton immediately.”

Like Craig, Starkey was already an admirer of Guadagnino. “There’s something about my generation that strikes a chord. He leads with some type of truth,” he muses, in a room down the hall from the director, ahead of Queer’s UK premiere. Starkey has just asked me – politely, apologetically – if he can eat his lunch (an omelette) while we talk. “There’s this naked honesty that’s showing on screen, and I think with American film culture, that was lacking for so long. And I love the sense of reverie with his films,” Starkey adds. “It’s like watching a memory.”

With the heart and soul of Queer in place, Guadagnino rounded out the cast with his “dear friend” Leslie Manville, playing Doctor Cotter (a male role in the novel), an ayahuasca expert Lee and Allerton seek out in the depths of the Ecuadorian jungle, and Jason Schwartzman as Lee’s hapless, hilarious associate Joe Guidry. Starkey was star-struck, particularly by Schwartzman, who proved a balm for his nerves about his biggest role to date. “I’m on set and I’m riddled with anxiety. And he comes in the same way,” Starkey recalls brightly. “He also has
his insecurities, but he’s so excited to be there.”

But Allerton’s taciturn nature, combined with the reality that we only ever see him through the prism of Lee, provided a challenge to Starkey. How does one portray a man who exists through the lens of another? He levels with me, with a wry smile: “There’s always a sense of, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing and I don’t know who this person is,’ but Eugene was a much tougher code to crack. I watched a lot of movies for inspiration – Body Heat, Paris, Texas, some Fellini, Beau Travail… Sweaty movies. But really, it didn’t start to come together until the table read.”

If Starkey was worried about finding a way into Allerton, the pressure of going up against a pro like Daniel Craig never showed to the man himself. “Playing opposite him made things very easy,” Craig notes. “He’s incredibly hard-working and dedicated, but also has this lightness to him – on set you have to be able to remain as inventive and creative as possible, and open yourself up to what’s going on around you. Drew absolutely does that.”

And how does one get a grasp on a character as slippery and self-aggrandising as William Lee, an adept actor himself? “My key was Burroughs,” Craig explains. “What I found really fascinating was watching William Burroughs in interviews, this sort of façade that he had as a literary person and very serious,and then I’d see bits of footage occasionally that you get, which were more private moments of him relaxing at home, being high,in company with people. Those two things were my way in.”

Guadagnino is elusive about his own collaborative instincts. “Creative processes should be kept secret,” he decides grandly. “When I went to the Kubrick exhibition, I was so disappointed, because one of the last rooms is for the star child [from 2001: A Space Odyssey, which is referenced in Queer] and there is this plastic puppet, there in the nakedness of its own mortality, as a prop, and I thought, ‘Oh no, I cannot look at him like this, because my imagination will be perverted by this image when I watch the film.’ The magic of the movies should be kept as such.”

Magic is at the heart of Queer – and Burroughs’ work in general. His lifelong interest in the occult seeped into his writing, and Guadagnino translates this onto the screen via ghostly apparitions and a devastating final act, in which Lee envisions Allerton again, years after their revelatory trip to Ecuador. “I think fear eats the soul of Lee and Allerton,” Guadagnino reflects, referencing Fassbinder. “And the tragedy is the fear. For me, Queer is a love story – not a story of unrequited love, but a story of two characters being in love with each other at different times, and in different ways. The tragedy lies in those shifting moments. And certainly, in the line, ‘I’m not queer, I’m disembodied,’ which both Allerton and Lee say. Because at the end of the day, life is about the adherence between your self, your desires, your morality, your anguish and your body, and if you act them out together or if you repress all of this.”

Speaking of repression…Our conversation turns to David Cronenberg, who directed his own Burroughs adaptation, Naked Lunch, in 1991. Guadagnino is an admirer of Cronenberg’s, and has tried several times to cast him in a film. “The Fly is one of my top five movies of all time,” he enthuses. “It’s the most devastating love story ever made. It’s about what love makes you into.”

I mention the dichotomy between the warmth of his cinema, and the chilly, clinical strokes of Cronenberg. “It’s because he’s Canadian and I’m Sicilian,” Guadagnino grins. “But Cronenberg got it so right, in Naked Lunch,” he’s referring to the scene where Burroughs infamously kills his common-law wife, Joan Vollmer, during a drunken game of William Tell. “Burroughs shoots her, but Vollmer places the glass on her head. Why does she do that? It’s about unconscious desire. It’s about what love does to us.”

The gap between reality and fantasy is where so many of Luca Guadagnino’s films exist: the phantom of a hand on the small of your back; the feverish night terrors of a detoxing junkie. His films – which have their admirers and their detractors – exist in the fantastical realm. And for Starkey, whose ascent to stardom is just beginning, that translates into reality. He recalls a moment on set with Jason Schwartzman: “We were standing on this street that they built for Mexico City. It’s beautiful. And he kind of just looks over at me and he says, ‘Don’t you love this?’ And I was like, ‘What?’ Jason gestures all around, and says, ‘This! Look at where we’re at. Making movies! It’s incredible’.” Starkey laughs. “That little reminder… yeah, I do love this. This is magic.”

One of the supreme highlights of my 2024 Cannes experience was discovering the films of New York filmmaker Tyler Taormina. Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point is presented through its marketing as a cheesetastic holiday movie, but is in fact a wide-eyed paean to the dynamics of family and the suburbs as a place of ecstatic joy. It’s his feature follow-up to 2019’s Ham on Rye, a strange coming of age movie in which the suburbs is not painted in such a dewy-eyed light.

Your first feature, Ham on Rye, was a film that was critical of life in the suburbs. Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point, is almost the opposite, framing it as this rapturous place.

I would say that there are thorns presented to that particular rose. Ham on Rye is for me the story of staying in the womb too long and not cutting the cord. I think that Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point is the story of how tempting it is to stay in the suburbs. The bosom of childhood is what the suburbs becomes in this film. But I think we present a little bit of darkness and some of the limitations. But also, I wanted to make a Christmas film in a way that was warm and inviting and not written with cynicism.

Where did that impulse come from?

Well, the germinating seed of the film really is my writing partner and I sort of waxing poetic about our memories with family members and these little details that have become sort of characterised in our minds. It really was with an affection for those memories that started the whole thing.

How were you able to select and assemble the soundtrack of wall-to-wall Christmas tunes?

Well, so the first thing I’ll say, and I always take this sort of compliment, but none of the songs in the movie are Christmas songs, but they feel like it. They’re all just pop songs from the ’60s, or at least that sound like the ’60s. The soundtrack is really one of the germinating seeds of the work, and it came to us from listening to the Scorpio Rising soundtrack. We wrote the script listening to that soundtrack, and it’s pretty obvious. It was very difficult to get all the licensing for the songs. And in the end, there’s a lot of songs that sort of just sound like the period so that we can play the bigger, more expensive songs that are really important.

Rather than use the act structure, your films – including this one – are more like passing through a moment of time, and seeing that time from many different perspectives.

The shape is everything. Yeah, I definitely am aware that I am not working in a sort of traditional dramaturgical way. And I think that the way in which Eric Berger and I approach a script, we’re really studying a sort of milieu and what it’s like to be there and what it’s like for a camera curiously going from person to person.

What did the initial script for the film look like?

The way in which I understand these films is actually through drawing out the space. What I mean is we drew a house on the top left corner of a piece of paper, and we populated all the scenes we wanted to be there, sort of left to right in order you’re going to see them.

It’s like you’re trying to trap a moment in amber with this film.

Well, the first Christmas ornaments were made of amber. Yeah, this was a big thought of ours, day one of writing. And I kind of regret not naming the main character Amber.

If there is one contemporary German actor whose name you ought to know, it’s Franz Rogowski. Thanks to a background in dance, the physical virtuosity of his performances is often the first thing to be noticed, but in his gestures, delivery, and gaze there are emotional pulses that resonate beyond language and genre. Indeed, one of his break-out moments was an extended karaoke rage-out to Sia’s ‘Chandelier’ in Michael Haneke’s Happy End. Rogowski has since collaborated with masters such as Terrence Malick, Christian Petzold, and Ira Sachs, and it has placed him firmly on the world cinema map, while his recent roles in Sebastian Meise’s Great Freedom or Giacomo Abbruzzese’s Disco Boy captured by cinematographers Crystel Fournier and Hélène Louvart reveal the power of his characters’ opacity. In Andrea Arnold’s Bird, and through Robbie Ryan’s signature embodied camera, Rogowski radiates a warmth as a cheerful loner looking searching for his family. It’s a warmth that is not what Bailey – the film’s 12-year-old protagonist – wants, but it is what she needs.

The story of Bird concerns the life of 12-year-old Bailey, but the film is named after your character, who is not exactly a main character, but definitely not a side one. Where do you position him within the world of the film?

You might have experienced this as well, that feeling that you’re always the lead in your own life. So right now, you’re the principal role in your life, and I have the same feeling on my side of the screen. So I knew that if I am Bird, I’d have to see the world from his point of view whether the camera takes the same perspective or not. But if you just see a character, it could even be someone who only has one line in one scene, coming in and saying, ‘I have to go. My mum died.’ It has no importance for the film, narratively, but now if you then imagine someone’s mum dying: this is a major event in anyone’s life. Then, we would have witnessed a little fragment, and just a small second of a life that from the perspective of that individual means everything. So in theory, it was easy.

How did you approach the character in practice?

Andrea didn’t share a script with me. She only shared songs and pictures of a lonely, naked man floating above trees and meadows, swimming and climbing trees. When she told me that I would be some kind of a Mary Poppins figure that would accompany a girl on her journey, so I was prepared to support someone else and not lead the story. That puts you in a different mindset, where you form a triangle with the camera trying to guide and accompany the lead; to sometimes appear and then disappear. In this case, I was more driven by empathy, and I also felt like I was accompanying not just Bailey, but also Andrea. Part of this world, part of her is also Andrea. And Bird is also a part of Andrea’s self. And she told me that in the beginning, that this is actually a very personal energy for her. It’s one of the animal energies that she feels in herself. When I agreed to this project, I also agreed to be her Bird and be by her side.

There is a mythical gravity around Bird as well, which, in the way I see it, feeds into the independent, self-sufficient kind of characters that you’re often portraying in films. Is this a fair assessment, to say that you’re drawn to such roles?

We live in a world that likes to put things in boxes so we can sell them and ship them, you know. And if you have a cleft lip and a bit of a naval voice and a rough face, they will put you into a space that allows you to be the outsider, the villain, or some kind of a stranger with a little superpower. I guess that this place has been given to me in society, but in my private life, I am also quite social and not always only at the outskirts. I like it, and sometimes it’s very nice to observe. I am actually a bit of a voyeur, but I don’t think the roles I play represent me as a person. What I do like is when I feel that a film doesn’t translate everything into words, but gives space to other dimensions of cinema by creating these empty moments in between. Maybe a part of the loner energy is just me enjoying films that don’t need to talk all the time.

Andrea Arnold’s scripts are very bare and there’s a lot of conjuring happening in the moment, during shooting. But was there any other prep than, for example, your exchanges of music and talks?

For me, there wasn’t. I had her number. I knew I could call her. But I accepted that as a challenge. I guess if someone tells you to come to a party without telling you anything about it, it’s probably more interesting to just go there and see what happens.

Arnold finds inspiration in life and social issues, which bleed through all her characters. I know fiction is important for your craft – inhabiting a character as a fiction that becomes real – is part of your process. How did Bird channel this relationship between reality and fiction?

We would meet on set, and then just spend hours just hanging around in time and space, drinking coffee. The set included a house that was built after images from her own house where she grew up, and we were surrounded by neighbours that would really live there. We wouldn’t use any intimidating film artillery, no cranes, maybe a little truck around the corner, but it really came across as a little student production, and that is also key to blending these two worlds of realism and poetry. I guess Andrea is like a mixture of a tiger on the hunt and a very patient gardener. She would create these spaces in which all the ingredients are right, even if the camera isn’t ready. Also, this kind of film can easily turn into poverty porn, where a director uses the strong colours of poverty to make something that is hyper-real for wealthier people to look at in the cinema. And in her case, these are her people. This is how she grew up. And she’s one of the very few that has seen both worlds, those of Cannes and Kent. I think all these different layers of her personality make her the director that she is.

What you said makes me think of Bird’s ability to retreat in the background and still be a very integral part of the film world. What was it like for you during the shoot, when there were these moments of waiting, did they help your role?

It helped a lot. I mean, you come on set, you’re very ambitious, you do your thing, and then you realise, ‘Oh, wow, okay, the camera is not even on me.’ Most of the stuff that I’m doing as Bird is invisible. Nobody will ever see it. But does that really matter? Actually, it doesn’t, because I’m Bird, so I do my Bird thing. Soon, I also realised how precious and rare Andrea’s approach is, to create a microcosm in which you just hang around and then, you know, sometimes you shoot and sometimes you don’t, but somehow everything turned into one big experience. I hope that I can also one day create that basis of resonance for other people.

It’s very easy to read your work through the lens of physicality, especially with your background in dance, but Bird is skipping, twirling, basically floating. Levity is very important for this character. And I really wonder, how did you work with your body and your mind to get a performance that is both expressive and also very subtle?

Wow, that’s so, so kind of you and charming. I often feel heavy as a donkey.

Don’t we all?

Yeah, yes, we do. You know, I’m longing for levitation, but most of the time it’s just my back aching and me feeling guilty… But you’re right, that the first images that Andrea shared were images of a guy standing on a skyscraper, and pictures of man floating above nature. And, yeah, if you talk about birds, you always talk about ethereal energy. So when we started improvising on the street, I would often instinctively choose to be slightly elevated when accompanying Nykiya [Adams]. So Nykiya would walk the streets of realism, let’s say, and I would walk the paths of fantasy. I would just slightly elevate my path and walk on a little wall next to her, or stand on a little staircase, a little fence, a little chair, a table, and always somehow make myself slightly altered or somehow weird in a way, to somehow break the logic of the space that we were in. Most of this material is invisible, but it inspired Andrea to make her next decisions along the way.

Obviously, we see a 12-year-old girl and a grown up man, but it never feels like a mismatch. There’s something about the size and weight of the character that just keeps changing and shifting.

That’s great to hear! Because, I mean, I remember trying on the costumes for the first time, all these beige and brown colours, and this weird military skirt and ugly sandals. And I was like, ‘Oh, my God, they’re really turning me into a terrible pervert, accompanying a little girl! I’m not sure I want to be that kind of Bird…’ It really was a costume that I had never seen before, one that would interrupt the connection to society that we usually create with the references that we are wearing on our body. This costume was so strange in so many ways that it put me in a very alien position on the first day, and I wasn’t sure whether it would turn out to be on the heavy end, or rather on this other end, where the otherness somehow stands for itself.

I was also thinking about the costume and how unlike it is, for example, the ones you wore for Passages which was as much a means of expression as it was an armour. But here, the materials and their weird combinations work to a different effect.

You should also talk to the costume designer, but in general, the references to these textiles were survival, Boy Scout, military, gender-bending, queer, and obviously, wearing a skirt as a man. But also, as you said, combined with some softer textures, like a wool pullover, socks, and the sandals were from an old guy with a camper van. The skirt makes him queer, which is almost the opposite of an old heterosexual man. Then you have these jumpers that make him, I don’t know, like German in a way… I think I felt terrible in that costume at first, but watching the movie, I felt it all made sense.

Barry Keoghan is someone who has built a cottage industry around making sure that when he’s on the screen, we’re watching intently to see exactly what he’ll do next. His ascent through the industry came from a place of small supporting turns, but it wasn’t long before he made a name for himself as a professional scene-stealer in films such as Yorgos Lanthimos’ Killing of a Sacred Deer and David Lowery’s The Green Knight. It’s no great shakes to be typecast because of the intensity you bring to a role, and it seemed only natural that he’d end up playing The Joker in an upcoming Batman movie. Yet Andrea Arnold is someone he’s always wanted to work with, and he accepted his part in Bird without even seeing a script. He plays Bug, a scatterbrained young father who’s trying to collect hallucinogenic slime from a toad in a bizarre get-rich-quick scheme, but Keoghan makes sure his character is anything but a novelty comic relief.

When you prepare for a new role, I understand you have these little Moleskine notebooks – what goes in them?

Yeah. So it all started when I would give me granny my Moleskine about three or four weeks before starting a project. And I’d say to her, granny, while you’re sitting there watching the telly bingo, or whatever, could just write some questions down that you would ask this person. The question can be as silly as, do you prefer red sauce or brown sauce? Or do you like feckin’ mustard? Whatever. So she’d hand the book back and, I’m not even messing, there would be like 80 questions, and I’d elaborate on all of them. As part of that process, I’d go back to the script and find out what’s factual, what I know about the character. And the rest would be pure imagination and just shaping this person. It all started from that. I started to make more books and go a bit deeper, writing about the physicality of the characters, and accent and things like that. Then I started to do drawings and image walls of people and locations. Just creating that world for myself, and then throwing it all away before you going to set.

You throw them away?

Yeah, because you’ve got to be open for collaboration and finding new things. So chucking the books away, but not too far away. So’s I can still see them.

Your future biographers will have so much great material.

It’s the stuff that you don’t get paid for that, ironically, I enjoy the most. That’s just getting to do stuff that I loved to do as a kid: drawing; inventing characters. I’m doing that all right now as I’m stepping forward into Peaky Blinders, which is my next one. I’m not gonna give yous all this spiel about being a method actor, but it’s my own method and it’s what gets me by. And I’m always looking to learn new methods. Even the likes of Nykiya [Adams, who plays his daughter, Bailey, in Bird] on set, seeing what she brings. There’s an unorthodox aspect to her approach because she comes from a background where she hasn’t had training – so like me. I’m curious to see why she chose this rather than that; some is instinct but some is just really clever and thought-out. I’m always looking for stuff like that, and maybe take that and use it for me going forward.

Did you take Nykiya under your wing?

Yeah, but that wasn’t in front of the camera at all. She was out here in Toronto with me, bless ’er, and she was incredible. She handled it like a pro. But I just wanted to be by her side and help her get through things. That’s the kind of stuff that’s been passed on to me. No-one ever really gives tips on acting. I don’t think you really can. It’s expressive and it comes from within. All I did was try and make her feel equal to everyone. She brought a lot more to this than anyone.

Do you feel you ever had anyone who took you under their wing when you were first starting out?

Yeah, Colin [Farrell] has always been there for me. There’s a bunch of lads who have been there for me. Always supporting and checking in on me. Colin and Cillian [Murphy] actually. They’ve always checked in. You learn from watching them. No one actually tells you anything, ‘You should do this,’ or, ‘You should do that.’ It’s an unspoken thing. You learn from the best. You see how Colin engages with people on set and how he has time for everyone and treats everyone with the exact same amount of respect. Watching that as a younger actor, that’s the stuff I want to take in and pass down.

You’ve talked about how you jumped on this opportunity to work with Andrea Arnold. Do you recall your first encounter with her work?

Fish Tank. I remember seeing that and thinking… cos I grew up in flats similar to that. I just remember feeling like it was all filmed down the balcony from me. I knew that world so well. I wanted to do that, and I wanted to be on camera for that. I wanted to have someone like Andrea with me – and if you look back over past interviews, I’ve always talked about wanting to work with her, so this isn’t just me saying this. I love her documentary-like approach. We stepped into this, and you’d have to look around to find the camera. You’d have to remind yourself that you were on set. That to me is a privilege, rather than every 10 seconds having people come over and fix everything. People have their own jobs to do, but selfishly speaking, I just loved being in her world. She has this talent and this energy, and people just trust her. She gets these younger kids, and she draws out these performances from them… That’s incredible.

You’ve got Robbie Ryan’s camera moving constantly in this film. Are you less conscious of the camera?

Unless they have to get a specific thing, like you picking up a cup, that’s when I’ll have to look for the camera. Other than that, I’ve always wanted to be on the side of, let the camera chase me, let the camera try and figure out what I’m doing. Film acting for me isn’t a show and tell. I want people asking questions. I don’t wanna give it away. Someone actually said to me, or maybe I read it, but it was like, treat the camera like it’s someone you’re dating, then play really hard to get. And that involves lots of looking away and not making eye contact. Flirting. Even the mumbling side of it, refusing to project, is all part of that.

Projecting in that very traditional way is something that’s more vital for theatre. Have you ever considered doing that?

I never took to the stage because – not to speak ill of it – I don’t get that feeling I get when the camera’s there. You start and you finish on the same night – I don’t get it. Film is a way to immerse yourself in a world, and with someone like Andrea, you don’t know what’s going to happen next. I love that.

You mentioned your method, and I remember seeing you in Killing of a Sacred Deer and thinking that you’d embraced some form of very immersive and intense prep to get into that role.

I think method is sometimes a thing that people use in the wrong way. They use it as an excuse to be just silly. I’m not going call myself a method actor and get myself on a list with other actors. I have my own method; I’m still learning and discovering. I like to work on the accent, listen to the music, tuck myself away, be offline, all of that. I doesn’t mean that I’m a method actor. It’s whatever you’re comfy with.

Were you an avid film watcher when you were growing up? Were there types of films you were into?

Yeah, there was. I always watched films with Paul Newman and James Dean. Just men back then. I don’t know what I was searching for? Maybe it was the absence of a father for me. Just trying to get a sense of how men behaved. But it was always old movies. My granny would constantly be asking why I was putting all these old movies on, but I was fascinated with them. The Marlon Brando movies… I went and named my boy Brando. I used to go to place called the IFI in Dublin, and they’d show lots of European movies.

Sounds like you were more a cinema guy rather than a DVD-watcher.

When they let me in. I remember being barred from one cinema because I used to run up the exit stairs and they caught me. I was just being a little brat. I actually went back to that same cinema for the premiere of Eternals and was like, ‘Oh, guess I’m allowed back in?’

Did they have a Polaroid of your face behind the tills? Do not let this guy in.

I did run up the exit stairs again, just for the craic. One last time. But I love the cinema. Just being lost in a world for 90 minutes. I remember going to see [Céline Sciamma’s] Girlhood as well, and that’s one of the best movies I’ve ever seen.

With your character, Bug, did Andrea have a very specific vision of how he was going to look and dress?

She did. She really knew what she wanted. This is all coming from her mind. It’s a collaboration to some extent, but everything she brought to it I never had a problem with. The hat – such a genius touch. Having the little paddy hat. The tattoos were amazing. Everything was very deliberate.

I imagine the tattoo-applying process was quite arduous.

I mean… as someone with ADHD, it’s hard to sit still for two-and-a-half hours. But it does give you a chance to get into it. If you’ve just got the scenes a day or two days before, it gives you a chance to settle in before you get on. It wasn’t that trailer make-up thing of going from a massive trailer to a set. It was all compact.

Did you go in public with your big face tattoos on?

Not really. You really wanna take them off. The reason is quite practical actually. It was really sunny while we were shooting, so I didn’t really want tan-lines of a big centipede on my face. Just stuff like that. All the tattoos all represented something quite specific. My brother has rosary beads on him in real life, and that was on me. These things are all a touch of home.

How did you find the e-scooter?

The e-scooter was fun. It’s not my favourite thing to go to. I prefer motocross, I do a lot of motocross. I’m familiar with being on two wheels.

The Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg is into motocross. You can chat bikes if you bump into him at a festival.

Is it about motocross?

No, but he has made films touching on that world in the past.

When I was in LA, I found a great place out there. I was with Axel Hodges, who’s a pro rider and he’s brilliant. Only 28. In San Diego, just getting back on the bike for prep for something else, it’s just really great fun. I’ve not seen of any motocross movies ever. Only two weeks ago, I asked Axel if there are any movies on it, or any movies he thinks should be made on it.

Feels like there’s a gap in the market there.

Totally. But you want the motocross to be the backdrop, not the subject.

I understand you’re a bit of a gamer. What are you playing at the moment?

Yeah, I am. When I can hold attention for more than 20 minutes, then yeah, I am. I get bored before you get to press the start button. I love to play Pokémon: Violet on Nintendo Switch. And what else? I play Football Manager. And I just bought Elden Ring. I got freaked out on the start mission. It’s quite scary. You know when you’re in caves and chattin’ to ghosts. I’m like, ‘Oh Jaysus, I don’t wanna be playing this.’ I think being alone in the game is tough. You need company, like a little doggie or something. Or a dragon.

It’s one of those games where you have to die a thousand times before it clicks.

I think I’ve died so many times it now won’t come back on.

Andrea Arnold’s sixth feature, Bird, follows Bailey (Nykiya Adams) as she navigates life in a squat in Kent with her father Bug (Barry Keoghan) and her brother Hunter (Jason Buda). Her relationship with her father is volatile, and her brother and his friends are preoccupied with making and watching YouTube videos of people getting beaten up. Bailey cuts a lonely figure, until she meets the mysterious Bird (Franz Rogowski) who seems to be the hero that she is looking for.

Arnold’s debut feature, Red Road, was released while I was studying film at Kent University in 2006. I was encouraged by a tutor to support a “local filmmaker” by going to see it at the Gulbenkian Cinema on campus, and so here began perhaps the most formative cinematic relationship of my life. I’d been deeply moved by the depth of Kate Dickie’s performance in that film, how Arnold draws out her yearning and sadness. I’ve always had the impression that there’s a real maternal kindness that Arnold offers her characters, a fierce duty of protection and a refusal to place judgement on them despite their sometimes-antisocial behaviour.

When watching Bird, I found myself wondering if Franz Rogowski’s character was in fact how Arnold saw herself – an ethereal being who has the wisdom to know the importance of tenderness where there is chaos, and who embraces the healing qualities of giving love to others, despite having so many unanswered questions of her own. This idea that kindness and love are as sort of superpower may sound trite, but they are essential components that are missing in the lives of so many of Arnold’s characters; and, of course, in real people who live in the sorts of worlds that her characters inhabit. I actually think there’s something quite radical about that.

It’s hard not to feel nostalgic watching the film; whether it be the soundtrack full of surprising needle drops (Coldplay, The Verve, Blur), a score by Burial whose work notably invokes themes of crossing time and space, or its dreamlike quality, something magical that is familiar in Arnold’s work but that is cranked up more than ever to deliver something of an urban fairy tale. Bird is a film full of the ghosts of Arnold’s past; certain moments that feel like a revisiting of her previous films: a woman stomping along a road pushing a pram (Wasp); a stone turtle ornament in a garden (American Honey); or some traveller boys trotting by on horses (Fish Tank).

Bird premiered this year at the Cannes Film Festival, where Arnold was awarded the Golden Coach Award in recognition of her work as a director, and it feels like exactly the right moment to pause and reflect on the work of one of the most celebrated British filmmakers of her generation.

It feels strange to be opening an interview by talking about conclusions. But I really got the sense from watching Bird that it has culminated from so many themes and ideas that you explore a lot in your work. What made you go back to Kent where you did Fish Tank? Why this moment in your career?

I never feel that I make that sort of tangible choice really. The things that appear just appear, and then I just have to go and discover them. The idea for this film came to me a very long time ago, and it was just an image at that point. I had to then go on that journey. And the thing about the film is that it stopped-started a lot because I did other things. I can usually tell when something needs me to keep on at it, because it won’t leave me alone, so I can’t drop it. And I find it so fascinating, because it’s out of my hands – almost like it just kind of niggles at me, or sort of keeps on at me until I deal with it.

If you’re somebody who writes or if you’re a painter or a sculptor, or if you’re a poet, or somebody who does whatever, you have some artistic expression. I think that each work is an exploration of your own psyche on some level, and I think it’s something you don’t understand about yourself, or that you haven’t worked out. It’s something that is important for you to deal with. That’s how it is for me anyway. Every film feels a bit like that. So, in that way, I don’t have a choice. I think somebody like [Robert] Bresson said that sometimes you have an idea for something, and it’s like you’re pulling at a bit of string. And sometimes you pull the string, it doesn’t go very far. It just goes there [gestures a short distance with hands]. And sometimes you pull at a bit of string, and it goes on and on and it unravels and unravels and doesn’t stop unravelling.

I think that certain ideas that I have, or certain things that come to me, are like that. They just keep on. I keep on. It did seem odd to me that I would go back to something that is set around my childhood, where I grew up. I don’t know, it just kind of took me there. I think I won’t again, though, actually. I think it’s interesting what you said, because maybe Bird might be some kind of some sort of culmination of something.

While watching Bird, I noticed so many moments where small interactions or certain motifs were signalling to something from your previous films, almost like a ghost from the past. I got the impression you’re thinking a lot about cinema, and about how we are consuming images, maybe how that’s changing.

I don’t feel that our worlds have changed massively with the fact that we are all viewing so many visual, two-dimensional images. And I think that I definitely incorporated that into the film. I think about it a lot, because I’m very interested in the sensual world, the world that we can see and feel and touch and hear and smell as I feel our lives are becoming increasingly two dimensional through images. And I know that’s what film is as well. I’m always a little bit frustrated with film in that [sense]. I always wish you could touch it and feel it and smell it. And maybe that’s the future, who knows? Or maybe that’s theatre… I don’t know.

But I do feel there’s a limitation to what we understand about the world through the two-dimensional image. A lot of us are consuming the world in this way, without really getting out there and experiencing it. You know, we are all now consuming the world through the screen. And my younger friends, or children of my friends, tell me that they don’t go out anymore very much. They do everything on their social media. They hardly meet up. That’s because they feel they can control the way they look, the way they are, the way they come across, the way they present themselves.

I’ve got that sort of curiosity about all that going on all the time. And when I started to make Bird, I didn’t really have so much. I had Bailey filming things, because I realised that for a teenager like Bailey, how do I show her emotional interior? How do I show what she might be feeling? I do really believe in cinema, and that how you put images together can manage to convey someone’s interior self. But I also thought it’s kind of interesting that she experiences the world through her phone, through these images, and that says a lot about what’s going on with her. So, in the very beginning, when we started, I realised that was quite a powerful thing, and so I started filming more with the phone.

Youth and youth culture is something that you come to time and time again. What we often see presented is a young person who wants to grow up. They always want to get away, to be an adult. Bailey feels different, in that her womanhood is being thrust upon her in a way that she maybe doesn’t want.

What I find really interesting is when I’ve written something, and I’ve got certain ideas about how I want it to be, I then go on a journey with the making of it. The interesting juggling act you have to do is when you bring together all the elements. such as the locations or the people. (and) they all then bring something different or new or something perhaps you weren’t expecting or weren’t planning on. I know some directors, they’ll have an idea in their mind, and they go out to get (it) exactly, they’ll want exactly what they had in their mind. And they will go off and try to do that. Whereas I always like to write a script, and although I have an emotional place I want to reach within that, I’ll look for people that I just feel fascinated by, and Nykiya was one of those people.

The character written was more of a joker, a bit more expressive and ‘out there’. And Nykiya wasn’t really like that. She was a bit more… I wouldn’t say reserved, but she was just a different kind of girl. It’s funny, this thing about when you’re casting, because some people just rouse your life force or something, you sort of… come alive when you meet them. And she did that when she came in the room. I was like, ‘Oh!’ I sat up, you know, and there was something about her very being, when she walked in the room. I just felt very curious. The main reason I cast (her) was because of that feeling I had that I can’t put into words or explain, but (she) was different to what was written. So then I had to find another way of expressing this character which wasn’t quite what I’d written in the script. But the resistance was always there, the defiance – all that was always in the script, the world around her being chaotic. How do you navigate when you’re in the world where everything around you is so completely chaotic? How do you do that?

I’d like to talk about Barry Keoghan who plays Bug. In many ways he’s quite a menacing character, but there’s also a part of him that’s very childlike, and very sweet. You seem to be very comfortable with these men that have this hyper-masculine quality, but who are searching for the complication inside themselves.

I met Barry at some Halloween thing. I’d seen him in some other things, only small things. And then The Banshees of Inisherin came out. I just absolutely loved it. I just loved him straight away. You just go, ‘Yeah, that feels totally right. He feels right.’ I feel if you cast somebody that feels very close to what you’ve written, there’s lots of work to do, but everything kind of falls into place, you know, in a very natural way. You’re not trying to make something that doesn’t exist, he just fell into that role very easily. And he is not that person, but he knows how to be (that person). What I love about him as well – which is what I love about a lot of the actors I work with – he’s never the same twice, he’s very much alive. Even though you’ve got a script, you’re hoping for them to find the life there. He brings the life to those moments.

He’s the antithesis to the character of Bird, who is so different to a lot of the men that we’re used to seeing in your films. I felt that what the film was saying – and what I felt Bird was trying to say – is that in the lives that these people live, actually the only thing you really need is basic kindness. I found that really moving, because a lot of what the characters are lacking in Bird is anyone showing them that kindness. And he’s just this pure hero for doing that.

I feel like his character is there for you to find. It’s really hard talking about your work, because the whole point of making a film is to leave question marks, and not dot the i’s and cross the t’s. It’s to give something for the audience to put themselves into and to have their own experience with. It’s hard not to give the things away that you feel are secrets. They’re like little sort of things you put in there that you want people to discover and have their own relationship with. So I hate to sort of explain it, you know. I don’t want to explain it. Sometimes I don’t understand myself anyway, you know, like when I started with his character, I wasn’t even sure what he was going to be, or how he was, or what it was. And then by going on the journey, I found my own version of him. And I’ve got lots of feelings about Bird, but they’re mine. I know that people interpret the film in lots of ways, and I like to leave it that way. I feel like they’re (the characters), they’re the meatiness of the film. Anything you make, you want to leave things for people to discover, and debate in the pub afterwards like, ‘What did that mean?’ I think I had the same thing with Cow, and that got read by so many people like a big feminist thing, and all about slavery, or about the lack of control over your body, and I found that absolutely fascinating. So that’s one of the challenges, to try and not say why. I also think it takes away from people when they go and see it.

When do you have that feeling that a film isn’t yours anymore? I think that must be so hard; I can tell you how I’ve read your film, but you might not have felt that way, and you sort of need to let that go.

I’m happy to put it out in the world. You know, I never watch my films again after they play, never. You put it into the world, then everyone has a relationship with it, or not, or whatever. And that feels very much like it’s its own thing now – it’s out there. I don’t want to watch it ever again. Every now and again, occasionally people will show me.

When was the last time?

When I was in Cannes this year and I got this Golden Coach award, they put together fantastic little clips, a selection of things from my films. And I found it so moving to see. They did it very beautifully as well, they picked all my favourite things without me even knowing, because they’re directors and they know. And I sit there and I’m watching this compilation of my work, and I haven’t watched some of it for years, and I found it so moving. It’s like watching my past flash before my eyes. And I got really emotional, because it was such a beautiful thing that they gave to me. So, in that way, that was kind of nice, but I wouldn’t want to do it every day.

It was in early 2005 that I first stumbled across the unlikely image of a costumed Korean man lassoing planets in a fit of giddy mania in my local HMV. The DVD in question had ‘Tartan Asia Extreme’ plastered on the header, and since I’d already shat my pants watching Japanese children be put to slaughter in Battle Royale and Sadako crawl out of the TV in Ring, my curiosity was piqued. Park Chan-wook’s hammer-bludgeoning Korean thriller Oldboy had debuted on the same label just one month prior, while Sympathy for Mr Vengeance and Kim Jee-woon’s A Tale of Two Sisters were already both in the catalogue. I didn’t know it then, but the first Korean Wave was splashing into the UK – and Save the Green Planet! was its most zany and genre-bending flagship.

A gonzo chamber drama drawing from horror, sci-fi, comedy and even martial arts movies (for one bonkers scene, anyway), Save the Green Planet! was the story of a delusional beekeeper (Shin Ha-kyun) who kidnaps and tortures a furious chemical corporation CEO (Baek Yoon-sik), believing him to be an alien from the planet Andromeda. Partly inspired by a ‘90s conspiracy theory accusing Leonardo DiCaprio of being an alien bent on seducing Earth’s women in a bid for global domination, the movie offered a shotgun blast of hallucinatory colours, MTV-style editing, and an unexpected depth of emotion. Despite initially flopping in its native country upon release in 2003, it’s widely considered one of the greatest Korean movies of all time today.

Save the Green Planet! returns to the UK for two rare big-screen outings in the weeks ahead via the BFI’s bumper ‘Echoes in Time’ Korean cinema season – so Little White Lies caught up with maverick filmmaker Jang Joon-hwan to reflect on his wildly inventive debut. With Poor Things’ Yorgos Lanthimos having just wrapped shooting a long-speculated Hollywood remake (led by Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons), this riotous cult classic is ripe for rediscovery.

LWLies: Save the Green Planet! was your debut feature — what were your filmmaking ambitions at the time?

Jang Joon-hwan: I’d been classmates with Bong Joon-ho at the Korean Academy of Film Arts – I was a lighting technician on his graduation film, Incoherence (1994), and he was the cinematographer on mine: 2001 Imagine (1994). After that, I worked as an assistant director and then wrote a film script with Bong – which was made into Phantom: the Submarine (Min Byung-chun, 1999). That’s when I decided I should make my own film.

I first envisaged a big project with a superhero — but then I wondered if I could take on a project of this scale on my debut. I decided to cut back and to have only a limited number of spaces and characters that appear, and the script I wrote from that was Save the Green Planet!. My ambition was to create a story that was both compact and explosive.

The film is a real mish-mash of genres. Where did you draw inspiration from?

I wanted to convey aspects of all the different films I had observed and experienced up to that point — so there are lots of homages and parodies. The most obvious ones are films like 2001: A Space Odyssey. More hidden are references to Blade Runner, Dressed to Kill, even The Birds by Hitchcock – as well as Silence of the Lambs.

Elsewhere, I included references to children’s cartoons and the science magazines I’d read when I was young, as well as Japanese animation – and all these reference points blend to create this melting hotpot of a film. There were silly or childish or kitsch visual elements inadvertently and knowingly incorporated as well, so it gives the feel of being in a magic eye. I was very relieved and grateful it turned out the way it did.

Two magnetic characters are at the core of the film. Was there a real-life counterpart that inspired the defiant, captive CEO Kang Man-shik?

When I was growing up, South Korea was rapidly becoming an industrialised society, and it had this period of huge growth that we achieved in a matter of decades. Within that time, there were numerous conflicts and clashes in the media — accidents and incidents leading to arguments and fights, and some companies even mobilised gangsters called the gusadae to commit violence against [protesting] workers.

I kept seeing characters like Kang Man-shik in the media, who could be full of avarice and exploitative of their workers – and so he became a sort of representative figure of this in a villain-like way. Byeong-gu’s house, meanwhile, is set in a coal mining town because images of the coal mine collapse and strike in the ‘70s – which I saw on a black and white TV when I was young – remained vivid in my mind.

What about Lee Byeong-gu, the conspiracy theorist kidnapper?

He was inspired by Annie, the character played by Kathy Bates in the film Misery. I thought it was a really fun film — but I wondered, why was she being depicted as this evil bitch? I started to wonder what a film would look like from Annie’s point of view, and about this very hurt and wounded character becoming immersed and absorbed in their own world.

After I saw Shin Ha-kyun in the [Park Chan-wook] film JSA and the [Jang Jin] film Guns and Talks, I thought he’d be perfect to play this complex, multi-faceted character who could show deep grief and violence, a side that’s soft and gentle, and another side that’s incredibly strong and persistent all in one body.

Save the Green Planet! premiered in Korea just weeks before major hits like Memories of Murder and A Tale of Two Sisters. Park Chan-wook called it “the best Korean film ever”, and Parasite actor Song Kang-ho said he was “deeply moved”. What happened next?

The critics were extremely enthusiastic — such a film had not come out of Korea before. However, when audiences saw the film posters, I don’t think they really understood what the film was about.

The people marketing the film found it challenging – it can be violent or gory, slightly funny, or with a touch of melodrama. But they weren’t honest about this. They just appealed to audiences that this was a comedy – so when they went into the cinema, it contradicted their expectations. I watched the film crash and burn at the box office. It was very painful.

In the West, it is considered a classic of New Korean Cinema. Did local audiences warm to it after the initial release?

I was feeling very discouraged, but I noticed that I was being invited to many international film festivals – which was a surprising and odd experience for me. I would meet the audiences and feel the enthusiasm and I could feel that Korean films were beginning to be loved by international audiences as well.

I won some big awards – not only abroad, but back at home, too: like the Grand Bell and Blue Dragon awards [Jang won Best New Director at Korea’s two most prestigious film awards ceremonies]. It was like this film was in a coma, and became resuscitated by the international response — enabling Korean audiences to revisit the film and watch it again. It was a very personal and dramatic experience. It felt like I was coming back from the dead!

When did conversations about a US remake begin to surface?

Talks started in 2017 or 2018 after my film 1987: When the Day Comes was released. The overseas team at CJ Entertainment suggested we work on an international project, and immediately I thought of Save the Green Planet! – if we made this film in a different film system and with different actors, it could be really fun.

Director Ari Aster (Hereditary) really liked the film — he’d even participated in Q&As after screenings abroad, so we reached out. He told us he thought it would be very meaningful to remake it, and agreed to be a part of it.

We were proceeding with me as director, and I collaborated with American author Will Tracy (Succession; The Menu) to write the script. We were trying our best to progress the project, but due to health reasons I wasn’t able to work for some time – so we contacted director Yorgos Lanthimos, and that’s how we got here!

Why is now an interesting time to remake a film like this?

Of course, it’s very exciting and fun for me – but there is another way to think about it. Our tiny planet hasn’t changed very much, and it remains this very violent world where wars are erupting and people are fighting one another. In that way, I feel it’s also a shame!

‘Echoes In Time: Korean Films of The Golden Age and New Cinema’ is at BFI Southbank until 31 December and includes screenings of Save the Green Planet! on 30 October and 30 November.

The London Korean Film Festival takes place at BFI Southbank, Ciné Lumière and Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) from 1 – 13 November.

French director Mati Diop returns to the big screen with her hotly-anticipated follow up to the 2019 Senegalese coming-of-age ghost story Atlantics. With Dahomey, the Berlin Golden Bear winner, Diop continues examining the long arms of colonialism that strangle West African identity in the present day. In a taut 67 minutes, the industrious filmmaker follows the journey of 26 artefacts stolen from the former Kingdom of Dahomey as they are returned to Benin. She utilises surveillance and other fly-on-the-wall techniques to depict the journey, and, in a stroke of genius, Diop gives a voice to artefact number 26, a statue of King Ghézo. Through the statue’s eyes, and the voice and words of Haitian writer Makenzy Orcel, we are encouraged to sit with the gravity of having history itself torn from its homeland and displaced. Here we discuss her feelings on restitution and the generation coming up behind her.

You said in an interview that it took you a long time to realise what restitution really signified – what does restitution signify to you and at what point did the realisation come in the making of Dahomey ?

The word restitution is officially used to describe the process of repatriating objects once looted by colonial armies. But, to my opinion, an ancient colonial power like France can only repatriate. To restitute has a much deeper meaning. Restitution begins with us, artists, intellectuals, filmmakers or activists. It’s up to us to choose the meaning we give it. We can’t just rely on our governments; we have to take charge of this gesture by raising awareness in civil society. For me, restitution means first and foremost giving back a voice to African youth who have been dispossessed of their history. It also meant giving back to these despoiled works their agency.

What questions were you asking yourself when it came to the use of music in this film? And how were you able to transmit that to your collaborators?

It’s not a score composed especially for the film, but four separate tracks, two by Wally Badarou and two by Dean Blunt. I knew very early on where each track would fit in the editing. The music was in the editing from the very first days of it. I never changed my mind. I just met Wally Badarou in Paris and he told me that all the tracks he composes are potentially written for cinema.

The university debate format that features in the film is so much more fresh, vital and diverse than traditional talking heads – how did you come to include that sequence in the film?

It’s a paradigm shift, a counter-narrative. Have you ever heard young African students speak out on this subject? No. And yet they are the first to be concerned, because it is precisely these young people who, in addition to being deprived of mobility in the world, have been dispossessed of their history. It was high time we took up the subject of stolen artefacts from the point of view of the dispossessed. Once again, this is also what restitution should be about: this counter-view.

One of my favourite quotes from the student debate is, ‘They came and tore that from us and conditioned us to think we couldn’t tear it back.’ Do you have faith this conditioning can be combated in younger generations?

It’s impossible to talk about African youth in general but I think what emerges from the debate we hear in the film is the end of a state of stupefaction. We’re witnessing an awakening of consciousness. And that’s the key. The quote you are referring to comes from a very brave activist called Habib Ahandessi. Habib loudly denounces many of the injustices taking place in his country, Benin. We really must salute the courage of these young activists, wherever they come from in the world, in a context where freedom of expression is increasingly under threat. What recently gave me the most hope concerning African youth was the democratic revolution in Senegal a few months ago. We owe this victory to the young people who fought fiercely against the dictatorship to ensure that elections were held in the country. We’re undoubtedly at a turning point, and that’s what, somehow, I wanted to portray in Dahomey.

“It was probably the happiest shoot of my life,” says Shane Meadows of Dead Man’s Shoes, his hard-hitting revenge drama that reminds us all why we shouldn’t mess with Paddy Considine. “There was so little expectation. We didn’t have trailers so we’d eat dinner off our lap. Sometimes, me and Paddy would sleep in the First Assistant Director’s car with the seats wound back. There was just something beautiful about it,” he smiles. “It taught me so much.”

The fact that Meadows can look back on the experience of making his fifth film with such wistful fondness is no small feat. Having landed on the scene with his 1996 debut feature Small Time, Meadows swiftly delivered a double-punch of Twenty-Four Seven with Bob Hoskins a year later, followed by A Room For Romeo Brass featuring a scene-stealing Considine in 1999.

For his next project, things ramped up. Working with big names like Rhys Ifans, Robert Caryle and Kathy Burke, 2002’s off-kilter rom-com Once Upon a Time in The Midlands saw Meadows’ play with his biggest budget to date – but when the film didn’t pan out quite as he’d planned, he feared his directing career might have stalled just as quickly as it had started.

“Working with those actors was a real honour but I’d lost my way quite badly,” he tells us, reflecting on the experience years later. “I knew how to make things that were well received but never did anything at the box office, and when you listen to other people’s advice and that doesn’t work either… I was still in my 20s and thinking about retiring,” admits Meadows. “Before Dead Man’s Shoes, I was literally on the verge of finding another way forward.”

Thankfully, a visit from Warp Films CEO Mark Herbert changed things. He was after shorts for a new DVD compilation and when he saw Meadows’ treasure-trove of unfinanced short films made with his college pal Considine, he became convinced the duo should do something new. “I didn’t quite answer in my pants and vest but I don’t think I was out of my pyjamas,” laughs the filmmaker, remembering meeting Herbert at an all-time low. “He came to buy a few DVDs and walked out saying ‘I think you should a make a feature film like those shorts with Paddy.’”

Released in 2004, Dead Man’s Shoes sees Considine play Richard, an ex-army man who returns to his Derbyshire hometown to seek vengeance on the local thug drug dealers who tortured his mentally impaired brother, Anthony, played by Toby Kebell in his film debut. Opting for less money but more creative freedom, Meadows was able to reignite his passion for filmmaking while focusing on a raw story of small-town bullying and aggression that spoke directly to both his and Considine’s shared personal experiences. It was a winning formula.

“We were able to make the film as we went along in a way that the film business still isn’t set up to do,” says Meadows of his loose approach and tendency to drift off-script. “We didn’t know who was going to get murdered first. We [told the cast] it might come down to the fact that you started off well but now you’re not acting very well so we’re going to kill you,” he laughs. “We were making the mould as we went along and it reignited my passion for filmmaking massively. The biggest education was that less money somehow meant more control – and most definitely helped to create a much more incredible film as a result.”

Meanwhile, Considine had experienced his own moment of growth. The pair first met on a Performing Arts course at Derbyshire’s Burton College and kept crossing paths as they routinely joined and ditched various would-be degrees. However, their partnership was cemented in 1999’s A Room For Romeo Brass where Considine played the vicious man-child Morrell, a guy whose humour hid his ability to flip into switchblade violence at the drop of a hat.

Making Romeo Brass was a lesson in what the pair could achieve together, with Morrell eventually leading Considine to Paweł Pawlikowski’s 2002 drama Last Resort and jobs in America. As Meadows found himself lost in work wobble, Considine’s career was on the up – and while the filmmaker happily jokes that as he was “trying to get a job at Tesco, Paddy was having his teeth whitened,” another collaboration was calling.

“I’d always known how special an actor he was but until Romeo Brass, I never knew friggin scary he could be,” says Meadows. “Dead Man’s Shoes was like unfinished business. Whereas Morrell was mostly funny and then changed, we thought ‘What if this fucking guy has already changed.’ I think that was exciting for Paddy,” he suggests. “On Romeo Brass, most of us were laughing our heads up but over time, Paddy had diluted things down so it was like a tap. You could turn it on and an unbelievable performance would come out. When it came to creating this avenging fallen angel, we got to places so much quicker – and with the subject matter of Dead Man’s Shoes, we certainly weren’t laughing our heads off.”

Co-writing with Meadows meant that Considine was just as involved in the minutiae of the film’s characters, especially his own. “It was next level. Paddy and I had conversations about the coat he wanted to wear, the foods Richard wanted to eat and the little fork he wanted to eat it off on the end of a multi-function knife. He came up with the gas mask idea,” says Meadows, referencing the film’s terrifying climax where a masked Richard takes his vengeance. “I’m pretty certain he’d been past an old World War One shop, seen an old gas mask and thought ‘Fucking Hell, that with a boiler suit on would look all kinds of scary.’”

Much like their budget, the pair had realised they could say more by doing less. It’s something that’s perfectly encapsulated in Richard’s tense first meeting with head drug dealer Sonny (Gary Stretch) where the former tells the latter exactly where he stands.

“Richard had developed and when we got on set, what was written didn’t fit. He was almost trying to get the better of him verbally and it felt too ‘written’,” says Meadows of the quiet power of Considine’s now-iconic ‘You’re fucking there, mate’ scene – one that was originally set to be much bigger. “We ended up shortening it down; it was almost like he couldn’t wait to get Sonny to piss off by answering his questions before he’s even asked them. Not playing games with him throws Sonny,” he adds. “He’s not a very nice character but he’s switched on enough to know the wires aren’t connected [with Richard] – and that seemed much more powerful. It feels almost like a Western. We never had any idea it’d become so iconic.”

Twenty years later, it’s something Meadows hears about regularly, adding yet another element to the significance and importance that Dead Man’s Shoes holds within his career so far. “The fact that I’d given Paddy that first leap and he came back when I was at my lowest ebb and pulled me back into the game… I’ll never forget that,” he says earnestly.

“Dead Man’s Shoes was the culmination of all these things that hadn’t quite worked and having one final swing, saying ‘this is me,’” continues the filmmaker. “It was partly our lives – some of the bullying and culture we’d come across as kids but never quite seen on screen. That’s why This is England was born,” reveals Meadows. “Had Dead Man’s Shoes died a death, I don’t think I would’ve had the confidence to tell a film specifically about me as a kid. It completely changed the course of my life.”

We have been negatively conditioned into expecting way too much from our filmmakers. If a director doesn’t deliver a new movie on the dot of two years since the last one, then snipey little rhetoricals are floated into the digital ether. “Whatever happened to X?”, “I wish Y would hurry up with a new movie!”, “Hey Z, u OK hun?” Some might even think that our obsession with artists and their erratic work rates occasionally border on the psychotic.

Alice Lowe, whose new film Timestalker is a wondrous, psychologically profound exploration into the mindset of the romantic obsessive, feels that the content-hungry commentariat have little sense of the hurdles that need to be leaped before a film can come into glorious fruition. When she made her micro-budget debut, Prevenge, in 2016, she had one child and managed to work them into her production and promotional activities. This time around, she has two, and they’re both a bit older and require more attention. She talks about her experience attending film festivals and the types of people who can plunge time and resource into taking such jaunts: “You’re with directors who are men on the whole and they’ve got children but they’re just not with them. This is really difficult to navigate if you are the primary carer for your children. It’s tricky.” She then deadpans, “This is why it’s good that I only do a film once every seven years.”

Obviously, as professional consumers of culture, it’s hard for a journalist not to want their appetite constantly whetted. But in the case of Lowe, Timestalker is, to use the old cliché, a labour of love, one which has been shaped in a very specific and personal way – and that nurturing takes time. In this case, the Covid pandemic added to the delays, but it’s still sad that a vision so unique and fully-realised would take so long to reach our screens. “After lockdown I was thinking I won’t ever get to make another film. A lot of female directors never get to make a second film.” The film addresses the idea of our endless striving to reach something that always remains just out of reach, with the only respite coming through death. “I definitely had a feeling to make this one about mortality,” she says. “I treat it as if this is my last chance. The whole thing is a big metaphor for filmmaking.”

Lowe herself plays the hapless Agnes, a witty, kindly woman with a distinct set of predilections and who exists across a number of temporal planes – the Dark Ages, the Victorian era, Ancient Egypt, the early 1980s. Her desperate yearning for a very specific type of romantic love leads to, at best, constant disappointment, and at worse, skull-cracking violence. It’s a film whose clever conceit initially raises many questions (and many big laughs) before all the various strands coalesce into something that is at once playful, poetic and emotionally rigorous. “I’ve seen people do bad things for love, and it drives you mad,” says Lowe. “You’ve told them not to do something and they keep doing it, giving your friend advice and they keep going back to their awful boyfriend or whatever, and it drives you insane. Yet you can have a type of admiration for someone who’s crazy because they actually have a belief system, and we’re in a world where we don’t have religion anymore. It’s not the focus of the western world, so what do you lose through that?”

Certainly, Agnes makes for a morally abstruse lead: she’s prone to bouts of violence; she’s blind to the people who actually love her; and she cannot help but make the same mistakes over and over and over again. Yet the film proves that her antisocial tendencies don’t necessarily lead to instant alienation and revulsion. The hackneyed impulse of moaning about an “unlikable character” is, nine times out of 10, moaning about a complex character, or someone who doesn’t just embody the platitudes presented by a genre or type of film. “I think a misconception I sometimes get from people is that they think I want to make weird stuff,” explains Lowe. “I think I’m more populist than I’m given credit for. I actually want people to see my work. I want people to enjoy it. I’m really audience focused. I started out in live performance – theatre, comedy – and I like to know the audience are having a good time and have felt something and gone through a process. So part of me does want to make that Back to the Future – I do want to make something timeless.”

That sense of timelessness comes from the decision not to have a McGuffin or some conceited reason why Agnes is having a string of very bad dates across multiple millennia. Instead, the story was inspired by ideas and concepts that are already common and have taken root in the world, things that actually mean something to the everyday viewer. “I did lots of research into different faiths, religions and their thoughts about karma and reincarnation,” explains Lowe. “I really wanted to make something where I felt the characters are not stereotypes – they are more archetypes. I love things like Commedia dell’arte, and clowning. There’s lots of references to Tarot in the film.” From a cinematic vantage, two gods of British film were very important when it came to Lowe’s sharping of her eccentric vision: “I love Powell and Pressburger, they were a massive influence on this. I was thinking how to get British films back to the sense of colour and magic. It comes down to belief, I think. It’s a belief in something, even if it’s not religious.”

In both Prevenge and Timestalker, Lowe plays characters who are trying to cloak their true identity and present to the world what they feel to be a more socially acceptable and genteel guise. “Loads of it is about identity,” she says, “with someone wearing disguises and going against the very obvious identity of, say, being a pregnant woman who’s taking control of who she is or who she wants to be.” Identity and performance are inextricably linked in terms of this idea of everyday roleplaying, and Lowe sees Timestalker as an example of the audience “roaming around someone’s brain.” In fact, it’s her brain if she’s being honest. “It’s my memories and it’s my fantasies,” she admits. “And it’s a collection of experiences and influences about cinema and what beauty is and what romance is – all these classic tropes. All of these come down to the soul and memories and dreams – an interior world. And the question I have to ask at the end of all of this is, are we going to be allowed to make these films in the future? I do hope so.”

This note of reticence, often laughed of nervously, crops up repeatedly in our conversation – the idea that Lowe may never get to make one of “her” films again. And questions of identity crop up once more, this time in relation to art itself. There’s so much eyeball-harvesting “content” out in the world, and the majority of it is made without the personal signature that serves to make something special and worthwhile. TV, in particular, is in a bad place, with massive shows written by 50 diferent people and AI making its unwanted incursions into the field of creativity. “It’s a sense of quirky identity,” is how Lowe describes it when pressed, “because that’s perceived as a risk – to really say you like something and not caring whether other people like it too”

First aired on Channel 4 in 1997, Brass Eye remains the north star of modern British TV satire, influencing everything from Look Around You to The Thick of It to Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe. Viewed today, the most striking thing about Brass Eye is how fresh and funny it still feels – not least when series creator and presenter Chris Morris is in full flow, baiting and bamboozling unwitting celebrities and politicians as only he could. Rewatching the original six episodes, it’s impossible not to be left awestruck by the show’s audacious genius, while at the same time lamenting the fact that it could never be repeated now.

Thanks to series director Michael Cumming, however, Brass Eye’s legacy continues to evolve. Originally released in 2017 to mark the show’s 20th anniversary, Oxide Ghosts: The Brass Eye Tapes is an archive documentary constructed by Cummings from hundreds of hours of outtakes and unbroadcast material. Due to legal restrictions and rights issues, the film can only ever be shown publicly, making it a holy grail for fans. Ahead of a new UK-wide tour this autumn, Cumming spoke to LWLies about the Brass Eye’s enduring appeal, how Oxide Ghosts came together, and the priceless moments left on the cutting room floor.

LWLies: How did you first become involved in Brass Eye?

Cumming: Well, it was all a bit random. I mention it in the beginning of the film, just to give the audience the context of where I was at the time. Basically, I was an art student and a film student who had become a pretty disillusioned, jobbing director. I’d been directing The Word on Channel 4; they would send me off to America to make these little films for the show. I was on the verge of giving up when the series editor got the job of producing Chris Morris’ Brass Eye, and because The Word was sort of this edgy show, they asked me if I’d do it. Chris and I met and we obviously got on in a way that I can’t quite quantify. So that’s how I started doing it. But up until that point I’d never made any comedy at all. I’d never even really thought about making comedy. Then the show came out and, of course, from that moment on nobody ever offered me anything else.

Looking back on the making of the show, what were some of the biggest production challenges?

The big challenge that made it different from doing another kind of comedy show was that we didn’t really know at the time which bits of it might be used to put in front of real people to convince them to do ridiculous things. Of course, it was supposed to have a realistic documentary style, but the ideas were often quite absurd, so they had to be executed in a way that would feel convincing. For example, firing a cow out of a giant cannon… in a sketch comedy you’d shoot it completely differently, but when you know you might be putting that footage in front of a politician or a celebrity and trying to convince them that this stuff’s really going on in the world, it has to be shot in a realistic way. Getting our heads around that was the first big challenge I suppose.

Are there any sketches you remember being particularly difficult to execute?

Yeah, pretty much every one! I remember when we shot the Purves Grundy character, who’s obviously supposed to be Jarvis Cocker, Chris wasn’t happy with the way he looked in it. He didn’t think he had got the mannerisms right. So we reshot that. But I don’t remember us reshooting much else.

Speaking of the celebrities and politicians who appeared on the show, were there any interactions that really surprised you at the time?

Again, pretty much all of them. For me, the ones that stick out are probably the first ones we shot, because really we had no idea what was going on – we didn’t really know what the show was yet. The ‘Animals’ episode, which was the pilot, was the first material we did, and there wasn’t really any sort of protocol of how to do it. We sort of bumbled into our interviews with camcorders and I would shoot them myself and we probably looked like we didn’t know too much about what we were doing. That was our cover I suppose. I don’t want to spoil [Oxide Ghosts] for anyone coming to see it, but there are some good stories around the very first filming and us getting slightly trapped in Nigel Benn’s house.

Is there an episode or a sketch that you’re particularly proud of?

The bits that I remember now are different from the celebrity stuff because I’ve seen those clips a million times. I really like the Ted Maul character that Chris brought from The Day Today, especially the ‘Crime’ episode where he goes to the housing estate and he’s talking about “Dante meets Bosch in a crack lounge”. It’s the one that opens with the longest crash zoom in history, which starts on a wide shot of Earth viewed from space and then zooms right into Ted Maul’s face. In those days you had to join up 40 different bits of film to make it. I love that shot and I love the way Ted Maul just shouts his way through everything.

Why do you think Brass Eye has had such a lasting impact?

Simply because nobody had done anything like it before and I don’t think there’ll be anything like it again. Also because of Chris; people are endlessly fascinated by the stuff that he’s done and he doesn’t really talk about it much which sort of adds to the mystique of it. Brass Eye exists in this perfect little bubble of time, and after we made it a lot of the loopholes we exploited got closed. So I don’t think anything like it could exist today – and it would be hard to satirise some of the insane shit that goes on.

How did Oxide Ghosts come about?

The whole thing with the film is completely random, really. I made it for a one-off screening – someone had asked me to do something for Brass Eye’s 20th anniversary and I mentioned that somewhere I had this box of tapes from the making of the show. I thought it would be fun to find a clip to show for the audience at that screening, and when I realised how good some of the material was, I thought it could be a bigger thing. The sort of accidental nature of how it was put together is part of its charm, I think.

The last time you toured with the film was in 2022 for the show’s 25th anniversary. What can people expect this time around?

Stewart Lee, who’s doing one of the Q&As on this tour, said it reminded him of going to see a film like Airplane back in the day, where you have a lot of people laughing in a room together. I don’t think you get that in any other environment, really; it’s a different experience to watching something at home on TV. So I hope people come along and have a good laugh.

Oxide Ghosts: The Brass Eye Tapes screens across the UK from October 28 to November 27. Tickets are available at michaelcumming.co.uk