Andrea Arnold: ‘I always aim to get under the belly of a place’
In 2012, Andrea Arnold was en route to Salt Lake City airport after an intense two days of press interviews at the Sundance film festival in Utah, where her adaptation of Wuthering Heights had just had its American premiere. It was still dark as she left her hotel at five in the morning, but as the shuttle bus rounded a bend in the road, the sun rose and the elemental landscape around her was suddenly revealed. “I had a bit of an emotional moment,” she says now. “It just hit me that being in this beautiful place for only two days felt so wrong.”
I met kids from mag crews. I stayed in all the same places they would stay, I drove the routes they would drive
At the airport, she checked in her bag, but immediately went to the only car hire desk in the concourse. “When they said they had one car available, I immediately went and got my bag out of the hold and let go of the flight. It was all very impulsive, but it felt so right. I got in the car and decided to explore America a bit. I needed to connect emotionally with it somehow and a road trip seemed the best way to do that.”
That spur-of-the-moment expedition was the first of several extended American road trips over the following few years “through the south, up the middle, everywhere I could go”. It was the beginning, too, of a creative journey that has led to her latest film, American Honey, a road movie that unfolds over almost three hours.
It is the first film Arnold has made in America: gone are the sink housing estates, tower blocks and claustrophobic interiors of Red Road (2006) and Fish Tank (2009), her brutally realist depictions of working-class life in contemporary Britain; they are replaced by the vast plains, endless highways and mega-malls of an America that is both recognisably real – in its poverty and exclusion – and knowingly cinematic.
“America is a vast and complicated place filled with all kinds of truths and contradictions and I wanted to find my own emotional connection to it,” she says. “Otherwise I couldn’t have made this film. It’s a mixture of what I saw and learned on those travels, but also what I grew up seeing on films – the mythical America of westerns and road movies. That’s all in there, too.”
American Honey follows the fortunes of a fictional ‘mag crew’, a group of outsiders who travel through the midwest selling subscriptions to specialist magazines door to door. Photograph: Rex Features
Punctuated by episodes of breathtaking beauty – flat sunlit landscapes, insects and flowers filmed in hallucinatory close-up, the vernacular America of road signs, diners and motels – American Honey is another of Arnold’s evocations of contemporary outsiderness.
The plot, what there is of it, unfolds amid the chaotic travels of a fictional “mag crew”, a bunch of unruly young outsiders who travel through the midwest in a minibus selling subscriptions to specialist magazines (cars, guns, sports, current affairs) door to door in suburban neighbourhoods. Eighteen-year-old Star (played brilliantly by newcomer Sasha Lane) joins them on impulse, desperate to escape her harsh home life and drawn to the street-smart charisma of recruiter Jake (Shia LaBeouf, the Hollywood actor and sometime performance artist whose film roles to date range from the Michael Bay blockbuster series Transformers to Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac). They have a short, intense and, for her, damaging relationship – he is also entangled with Krystal (played by Elvis’s granddaughter, Riley Keough), the beautiful and bullying crew manager, whose rules of the road tend towards the sadistic and humiliating. In subject and style, critics have compared the film to those of Harmony Korine, Gus Van Sant and even Terrence Malick.
I myself was struck by how closely the mag crew resembled the real-life itinerants, runaways and train-hoppers photographed by Mike Brodie in his 2013 book A Period of Juvenile Prosperity. “Yes!” exclaims Arnold, when I mention this. “I love his photos, they’re beautiful. When I first spoke to Shia [LaBeouf] about the film, I actually gave him a Mike Brodie photo for one of the characters I imagined him to be. But also his pictures have the Polaroid light that I love.”
Watch the trailer for American Honey.
I ask Sasha Lane what it was like to work opposite LaBeouf, with whom she had to do a sex scene that redefines the notion of up close and personal. “Oh, it was fine,” she laughs. “We felt good. He didn’t seem in a different world to the rest of us.” (Since I spoke to her, the tabloids have revealed that she and LaBeouf are a couple, with the Daily Mail describing how he “romanced the newcomer both on and off camera in the whirlwind 56-day shoot”.)
The crews of magazine subscription sellers on whom the film is based are an actual phenomenon that has somehow survived into the digital age. “I met kids from mag crews,” says Arnold, who spent months recruiting unknowns for the film. “I stayed in all the same places they would stay, I drove the routes they would drive.”
Her interest was piqued when she read an investigative article about them by Ian Urbina in the New York Times in 2007. In it, he described young kids living on $10 a day and sleeping three to a motel room amid constant threats of violence. A common ritual, which features only fleetingly in Arnold’s film, involves the lowest subscription sellers on each crew being forced to fight each other in front of the others. Urbina also wrote of widespread hard drug use, beatings dealt out by crew managers, thefts from customers and “several highly publicised fatal accidents and violent crimes involving the sales crews.”
The kids in Arnold’s fictional mag crew are a much more romanticised bunch, stoners rather than meth-heads, messed up but not to the point of violence or addiction. She and her scouting assistant found them in shopping malls, skate parks and urban beaches across America. One of their number, Raymond Coalson, 22, from West Virginia, told the New York Times: “When they talked to me, I was like, ‘Are you sure it’s not a porno? Because I’m not down with that.’”
Just weeks before the film started shooting, 19-year-old Texan Sasha Lane was on spring break on a beach in Florida, when she was approached to be in the movie. “Really, I didn’t know anything about acting, so I was surprised and a bit wary,” says Lane now. Her expressive face and instinctive emotional range is – along with Arnold’s regular collaborator Robbie Ryan’s luminous cinematography – the most powerful element in the film. “When we started improvising, I began slowly to feel comfortable. It seems almost overwhelming now but, back then at that moment, I felt I could do anything because she gave me this sense of confidence in myself.”
‘Magnetic presence’: Sasha Lane as Star in American Honey. Photograph: Rex Features
For the eight-week shoot, LaBeouf committed to living on the road with the production team and the cast of mainly unknowns, sleeping in cheap motels across Oklahoma and North Dakota like the actual mag crews, shooting throughout the day and partying into the night. The film’s freewheeling style makes you wonder if Arnold ever turned off the camera; the atmosphere is one of on-the-road languor mixed with edgy camaraderie.
“It was a real road trip movie in that sense,” says Arnold who, at 55, has something of the eternal teenager about her. “We were all together from the beginning, with no one flying in and out. Crazily, we went up to the Dakotas, where I had never been on my road trips, and started in Muskogee [Oklahoma], one of the poorest towns in America. It seemed as good a place as any to start from.”
Arnold has used unknowns before, but what was it like to work with so many untrained actors; was the camaraderie we see on screen echoed in real life?
“Sometimes. Yes and no. There was a lot of bonding but there were also times when somebody would behave quite badly and there was a lot of anger about. It was tough, I have to say. We had our moments.”
Could she elaborate?
“No. No way.” She sounds slightly affronted. “I can’t repeat some of the things that happened on the set. I just can’t. It would be a betrayal somehow but suffice to say we had some dramas.”
Did she have to fire anyone along the way?
Natalie Press in Wasp, Arnold’s award-winning 2003 short film.
“No, it didn’t come to that,” she laughs, “but it was hard, physically and emotionally. We were travelling a lot and we had a lot of people to look after and a limited crew. Every single day I didn’t know what was going to happen and I had to stand up straight to go out there. We got on so well, but sometimes I had to shout.”
Members of her cast were more forthcoming in a recent American interview. “I shot a porcupine with a 9mm,” 18-year-old Dakota Powers told the New York Times of her between-scenes downtime, while Isaiah Stone, one of the few cast members with acting experience, talked about the constant pranking: “They superglued my hand to my face. I’d wake up, my hair was superglued.” Another cast member recalled one of the producers “walking around worried – he’s like, ‘Oh God, one of them is going to die, where’d they go? What are they doing?’”
Arnold’s edgy style and her empathy with outsiders recall an older generation of British film-makers that includes Ken Loach and the late Alan Clarke. Born in Erith, Kent, she was the eldest of four children – her mother was just 16 and her father 17 when she was born. “I grew up in a working-class family,” she once said, “so you could say I write from what I know.” She seems to have been a darkly serious child, writing one of her first stories, aged 10, about the slave trade, and creating a performance piece for her dance GCSE in which she recited The Diary of Anne Frank. Having left school at 16, she landed a job as a dancer on Top of the Pops, before going on to present a children’s TV show, No 73, alongside Sandi Toksvig, the beginning of a 10-year career in television that also included a stint presenting the children’s Saturday morning show Motormouth. Throughout, she continued writing and her early shorts, Milk (1998), Dog (2001) and Wasp (2003), which starred Natalie Press and Danny Dyer, were made after she studied directing at the American Film Institute of Los Angeles.
In 2006 her first feature film, Red Road, a claustrophobic study in obsession and revenge, introduced her abiding subject – young people searching for hope in difficult circumstances – and her willingness to take risks by casting unknowns. Shot using hand-held cameras and available light for around £1m, and set in and around the Red Road flats in Barmulloch, Glasgow, it won the Jury prize at Cannes. The acclaimed Fish Tank followed in 2009, again featuring a fierce young girl (played with visceral intensity by newcomer Kate Jarvis) railing against her circumstances. On watching it again, I was struck by the sustained sexual tension between Conor (Michael Fassbender) and the underage Mia (Jarvis), and how casually harsh her everyday life is, from her scathing verbal exchanges with her family and neighbours to her acute sense of aloneness.
I have a lot of respect for Shia and we got on really well… a few more free spirits would make life more interesting
To Arnold’s annoyance, critics have often described her films as bleak, as if she has somehow exaggerated the struggles of her characters. “The last lady who interviewed me mentioned the bleak word,” she says, grimacing. “I get that a lot but I let it wash over me now. I don’t think my films are bleak at all.”
She does seem drawn to the marginalised and excluded…
“That’s true,” she says. “I can’t argue with that.”
How does she feel about being linked to the older generation of socially conscious film-makers? She shrugs.
“I’m OK with that, but I don’t try and emulate anyone. A film for me is a journey I have to go on. It starts with myself emotionally and moves outwards. I do make my films with a social eye. It’s not a huge thing, and I don’t want to ram it down people’s throats, but it’s there all the time in the way I feel and think. It’s just how I see the world.”
Her films also share a strong sense of place, whether it’s the darkly lit Glasgow of Red Road or the widescreen midwestern landscape of American Honey. She certainly picked an interesting time to make a film there.
“Oh yes,” she says, shaking her head. “I think the temperature has gone up since we were there, but you could feel something in the air then. It’s a place of very stark divides, but it was exciting to try to get under the belly of the place, which is what I always aim to do.”
Arnold can be a frustrating interviewee, affable but defensive, even a bit prickly if the subject moves off the work. Her eyes darken beneath her cropped fringe when she grows uncomfortable and you sense that you wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of her. She will provide a tantalising snippet of information, then steadfastly refuses to discuss it in any detail.
Arnold on working with a large group of non-professional actors: ‘We got on so well, but sometimes I’d have to shout.’
Of working with the conundrum that is Shia LaBeouf, who sometimes threatens to destabilise the precarious chemistry of the American Honey ensemble with his characteristically unrestrained approach, she says: “I have a lot of respect for him and we got on really well. A lot of the stuff that people were telling me beforehand made me quite angry because they were not taking him as a human being, and I had met him. Someone sent me an online spoof that made me angry as well. It’s so easy now to be cruel. I don’t go by things I read in the media or online or whatever – that’s a small part of someone.”
He does, though, have a reputation for unpredictable behaviour.
“A lot of that comes from a few incidents. He has grown up as a celebrity with all that entails today and he has been challenging his place in all that, which I respect. There are very few mavericks in Hollywood. A few more free spirits would make life more interesting.”
Why, though, did she choose him rather than another unknown? “We just got on really well, Someone suggested him for the role so I met him in a cafe in London and I talked to him about the film and he went for it. He’s a very experimental actor. He never questioned the way I wanted to work. He loved it.”
It is Sasha Lane’s Star, though, who is the most magnetic presence in the film, from the moment we see her scavenging in a supermarket bin for discarded food to the final symbolic scene in which she appears to gain a degree of hard-earned self-awareness. Her face is an index of her internal state, which fluctuates from Zen acceptance to reckless impulsiveness. Was she aware of the existence of the real mag crews beforehand?
“I knew about them all right. I’ve had people come up to my door. You come from my kind of background, it’s the America you see every day.”
Andrea Arnold with Sasha Lane after winning the Jury prize at Cannes film festival, May 2016. Photograph: Reuters
Lane grew up in a working-class family in rural Texas – “we didn’t view Hollywood as very respectable” – and was working in a Mexican chain restaurant in San Francisco for $7 an hour during her college breaks before she landed her role. “I don’t really know how to describe my life except to say you don’t really ever know what is going to happen next,” she says. “You just go with it, day to day. I was raised outside of Dallas. It’s a tough life, for sure, minimum wage, multiple jobs, real hard work. There’s a huge struggle to it, not having a lot of money and not having a lot of support, but it’s what I grew up with.”
Did she identify with her character?
“I did. For a lot of those kids, life is just something they take day by day to get by. It’s about having nothing left to lose and accepting it. It’s what I took from my own experience and brought to the movie. I have a lot of love for people in their raw human form. Their lives are kind of beautiful and hard. They don’t let fear get in the way.”
At times, though, Star’s storyline seems almost incidental to the film, so central is the road-trip element. It unfolds with wilful repetition through several long scenes in which the kids chat, drink, sleep and verbally spar on the bus to the constant backdrop of thumping hip-hop, R&B and, somewhat incongruously, Lady Antebellum’s lush country song from 2010 that gives the film its title.
When American Honey premiered at Cannes in May, Arnold won the Jury prize for the third time, but the film has divided opinion. The New York Times described it as, “by turns observant and exuberant, and sweet in a way that is both unexpected and organic”, while one British reviewer dismissed it, unfairly, as “in effect a music video of tediously exaggerated proportions”.
There were times as I watched it when I did feel as if I was trapped on the bus with a bunch of hyperactive teenagers – seemingly immune to the soporific effect of the weed they smoked or the vast distances they travelled.
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Arnold seems unfazed by criticisms of the film’s longueurs and repetitiveness. “I didn’t set out to make a long film, but that’s what happened. There were all these beautiful people in the film and I wanted them not to be just wallpaper so I allowed them to do things that were not part of the script. Sometimes, when we were travelling there might not be a scene written but we would film them anyway.”
It turns out that there had been even more on-the-road scenes in an earlier cut, but Arnold was persuaded to excise them as the film nudged the three-hour timespan. “The travelling really reflects the lives of the actual mag crews and the time they spend on those buses. It was integral to me. But, when we first showed those early cuts, the audiences were feeling it,” she laughs. “They were experiencing what it was like to be on that bus – which I thought was perhaps not a bad thing!”
That quip says a lot about Arnold, a film-maker for whom the usual industry rules of writing, casting and shooting do not seem to apply. And, despite its length and meandering plot, American Honey is a film that sticks in the mind long afterwards. Its portrait of American outsiders surviving against the odds in an often wondrous landscape recalls the great gritty American road movies of the early 70s. Arnold is a maverick with a social conscience at a time when we certainly need independent voices, both here and in Hollywood. “I don’t make easy choices,” she says, “but there is always more to it for me than just making a film.”
American Honey is out on 14 October