'Explaining a film takes the fun away for the audience'

Acclaimed director Andrea Arnold speaks to Louis Chilton about working with Barry Keoghan, plucking great actors off the street, and why working in US TV felt like a holiday’

- Louis Chilton

“Every time I start a film, I feel like I don’t know how to do it,” says Andrea Arnold, hunched over a half-eaten box of salad. This would be a startling enough admission from any filmmaker, but coming from Arnold – the 63-year-old director of Red Road, Fish Tank and American Honey – it’s downright mindboggling.

“Every film feels like a massive adventure,” she continues. “Like I’m starting again each time. Sometimes I’ll get an email saying, ‘Do you want to come lead a masterclass?’ I just think, ‘Why are they asking me?’”

Anyone who’s watched Arnold’s films will know exactly why they’re asking her. Over the past two decades, she’s been responsible for some of the finest features to come out of our country: the knotty, sexually transgressive Red Road; the heartbreaking Fish Tank, about a young wannabe dancer who is preyed upon by an older man; the sparse, gritty Bronte adaptation Wuthering Heights; the potent, vivacious American Honey, following a band of young hustlers around the US. There’s a reason Nicole Kidman, whom Arnold directed in Big Little Lies, describes her as a “visionary”.

Praise like this – not to mention the Baftas she’s won (for Red Road and Fish Tank) – appears to be worn lightly. The woman who sits before me today, in an airy meeting room in central London, doesn’t seem concerned with mystique. Arnold is dressed more for the moors than an upmarket office block: dark coat, black boots, beanie atop her head. She’s enthusiastic but self-assured and free of ego.