SEEING RED

Andrea Arnold is not one to suffer journalists gladly. Even with an Oscar to her name, the UK film-maker seems determined to remain an iconoclast, making angry films her way. Donald Clarke puts a few timid questions about her Glasgow drama Red Road

FEW people who had glanced at the films of Andrea Arnold would be surprised to learn that the director, a talkative red-haired woman in her mid-40s, exhibits occasional inclinations towards prickliness. Wasp, which won the 2005 Oscar for best short, encourages us to worry over a group of children left outside a rough-looking pub while their mother boozes within.

Red Road, Arnold's excellent first feature, follows a surveillance camera operator as she first passively spies upon, then becomes dangerously involved with the man who ruined her life. Set in and around an economically depressed area of Glasgow, Red Road, like Wasp, bristles with barely repressed anger.

For the most part, Arnold comes across as chatty, warm and agreeably forthright. From time to time, however, she will climb upon a passing high horse and use the vantage achieved to scowl down flintily at you. When describing her time shooting on the Red Road estate - a genuine location - she tells me how she was frightened at first, but soon came to feel very comfortable there.

Innocently enough, I point out that the film does still paint a somewhat bleak picture of the locale. Fights break out indiscriminately in stark pubs. Filth is everywhere. The protagonist enjoys two sexual encounters, one grubby and clandestine, the other sinisterly inappropriate. Red Road is not seen in a pleasing light.

"I disagree," she snaps. "In one very small way it shows you that these people are not what you thought they were."

Actually, I'm not sure I had any preconceptions, negative or otherwise, about that area of north Glasgow. But even if I had, they would surely have remained unaltered by Arnold's grimly brilliant film.

"The place is what it is. But then where do you live? Who are you? How is your life? Where do your children go to school? What do you do for a living? You are looking at it from your point of view."

Whatever Arnold's intention, I begin to get the feeling that I am being told off for bringing my bourgeois sensibilities to bear on decent working people. Making sure to uncoil enough rope to hang myself, I foolishly ask what sort of background she came from herself.

"What do you mean?" she retorts.

As I start making inquiries about what her parents did, I find myself sounding like the Prince of Wales trying to appear interested in the little girl who brings him a bouquet before he opens a supermarket. Why don't I just ask her what her golf handicap is and have done with it?

"Well, my mother didn't work and my father was never around. So . . . " The final syllable, delivered with a proud flourish, defies me to inquire further. I don't.

For the record, Andrea Arnold was born in Dartford, a largely working-class town on the south-eastern outskirts of London, in 1961. Her enthusiasm for drama was triggered when a teacher addressed the class on the subject of slavery. Andrea threw together a play dealing with the issue and drafted all her school chums in as actors. Despite this early experience as an impresario, Arnold was lured into acting when she left school. In the early 1980s she secured a role alongside Sandi Toksvig as a presenter on the ITV children's show, No 73.

"I didn't know what I wanted to do with myself and I ended up doing a job that was really amazing," she laughs. "I was doing things that were quite fun on a daily basis. It was a team effort. A lot of people had a lot of integrity working on that show. I got to travel the world. I got to go to Africa and China. I got to hang out with Iggy Pop in a hotel when I was 18. That was a fantastic job. I absolutely wouldn't knock it."

Arnold admits that she first assumed she would be in children's television for only a few months. As things worked out, she stuck with the job for close to a decade. So why, as her thirties approached, did she suddenly decide to go to film school? Was there a Damascene conversion at any stage?

"It wasn't as simple as that. I didn't come from a place where people really went to film school. I left home at 18 and just got this job presenting. But I was thinking about this the other day and realised I have always written. All the time I was writing, writing, writing."

Wasp, an unnerving, occasionally very funny piece set in the director's hometown, had been installed as the favourite for the Academy Awards by the time Andrea made her way into the Kodak Theatre. Yet the picture did not even receive a nomination in the Baftas, the British version of the Oscars. Did that bother her?

"Oh, no. You don't expect anything when you make a film like that," she says. "Though I did hear that it was the last one they kicked out when they were drawing up the nominations. So, it was close."

The Oscars must be a weird enough experience for hardened movie stars. One can only imagine how absurd the evening must have seemed to an inexperienced film-maker from Kent.

"I didn't find it absurd at all," she says. "But it is an experience we have all grown up with. So, to find yourself there is a little odd. It is elevated from real life. It is like a weird dream. You get the Oscar, take it backstage and there are these endless corridors of curtains with somebody on every corner saying 'this way'. It is like something from a David Lynch film."

Before she got her hands on the statuette, Andrea was already in negotiations with Zentropa, the production company founded by the Danish director Lars von Trier, to direct one of three films in a scheme entitled Advance Party. Arnold, along with fellow directors Morag McKinnon and Mikkel Nørgaard, would each deliver a drama set in Scotland featuring the same characters.

"The development of the characters in each story or genre does not affect the other scripts," the regulations, drawn up with the same pious formality as those for von Tier's Dogme 95 movement, go on to state. So, as I understand it, Red Road, the first film in the trilogy, exists in a parallel universe to those of its companion pieces.

"Yes. We might take you first and say: you are this person with this life. You live on that street. You work as a dustman and have these friends. Maybe you used to have an affair with her. Then in the next film you are, perhaps, living alone. Unless, that is, the notes we were given say you don't live alone. It all depends on those notes."

Arnold's film, which is shot by Robbie Ryan, one of Ireland's finest young cinematographers, and produced by Carrie Comerford, also from this country, begins with its protagonist (Kate Dickie) spying a sinister figure from her past on a closed-circuit camera monitor. She goes in search of the man, who was somehow involved with the death of her child, and insinuates herself into his unhappy social set. Awful events follow.

"I don't quite know where it comes from. Generally when I write, and this was true of Red Road and Wasp, I have a single image in my head, an image I can't shake off. I want to explore that and try to shake it out. There was one particular image - I don't want to give away which one - that inspired the film."

Some critics have suggested that the final scenes of Red Road tend towards melodrama. Was that not a concern? "I just don't think like that. Do you mean it gets theatrical? Is that what you mean?"

Well, up to the last half-hour the film is largely a naturalistic piece. Then it takes a spectacularly troubling turn.

"Probably, because I don't have any education, I don't really know what you are supposed to do and not supposed to do. I just do what I think is right. I work from the character outwards. And, strangely, I ended up becoming annoyed with her. She began to irritate me. She is not getting to grips with life. Then there were points at the end where I thought: she is taking this too far. But that is where the character was leading me."

Despite its occasional overheated moments, Red Road remains a profoundly impressive feature debut. Arnold told me earlier that, following her success at the Oscars, she was deluged with telephone calls offering her unsuitable work. Now that Red Road has proved such a hit on the festival circuit, the mad proposals will surely continue. Might she ever be lured into mainstream genre entertainment? She bristles.

"Well I haven't yet. I think if I was going to do that I would have done it by now. Don't you?"

Sorry, miss. Don't know, miss.

Red Road is released next Friday