Emergent: Andrea Arnold

On Her Résumé:Won an Academy Award before making her first feature film, was a popular personality on live children’s television programs in Britain in the ‘80s.
Birthplace: Dartford, Kent, England
Favorite Filmmakers: Harmony Korine, David Lynch, Terrence Malick, Alan Clarke, Larry Clark, Andrei Tarkovsky

Although her first feature is just now opening in the U.S., British filmmaker Andrea Arnold is arriving on American shores with a surprising number of accolades. In 2005 her short film, Wasp, won an Academy Award; last May her first feature, Red Road, won the jury prize at Cannes; and early this year Variety included her in its list of “10 Directors to Watch.” All this plus an already steady stream of awards for Red Road has created what must feel like a whirlwind to the new filmmaker. “Yes, definitely,” she confirms. “I wonder when it’s going to stop, actually, and I can have a little time to digest it all.”

Red Road revolves around a government employee in Glasgow who monitors street corners via closed-circuit cameras and dispatches police when whe spots trouble. When a familiar face appears on the woman’s bank of TV monitors, her life takes a mysterious turn.

Arnold wrote and directed the thriller herself, but she arrived at the story through a collaborative process that began with an invitation from Danish troublemaker Lars von Trier, best known in America for films like Dogville and Dancer in the Dark, and for his “Dogme95” manifesto that challenged filmmakers to eschew special effects, big budgets and even artificial lighting. “The whole concept is called ‘Advance Party,’” Arnold says about the origin of Red Road. “Lars von Trier thought that collaboration between directors was really good. And that restrictions were good boundaries to kind of hit off of.”

So von Trier asked Anders Thomas Jensen—who co-wrote the Oscar-nominated After the Wedding (see review, page 72)—and Lone Scherfig to write descriptions of seven characters, which they would then give to three new filmmakers (including Arnold) who worked together to write the characters into stories for their first feature films. “We also had to cast together, so all the actors in Red Road will be in two more films.”

In Red Road’s ever-darkening midsection, main character Jackie steps into a seamy world that she knows only through remote-control cameras, and her motivations are so unclear that Arnold relies on careful attention to tiny logical details to earn our trust, like the way Jackie compresses a row of videotapes to hide the absence of the one she’s secretly taking home. The final act reveals justification for the film’s earlier ambiguity.

“The details are something that I naturally do. It’s just the way I write, I guess,” Arnold says. “I think for my next film I’d like to write something that’s in a short period of time, so I could really get involved in the details and make it quite complex. I have a sense of the tone, the energy, the look; I know roughly the story. I’m looking forward to actually getting time to write it.”