Today's filmmaker for our Female Filmmaker series is an inspiration. She is a British screenwriter and director who started her career later in life and has a very impressive track record despite that. That's why I love her! Let's talk about Andrea Arnold.
Andrea Arnold dabbled in acting with roles in TV shows and movies during the 1980s like No. 73 (1982) which was also her first writing job. Before that, however, she started her career as a dancer who danced on the British show Top of the Pops in the late 70s. Despite her performance background, she found herself increasingly interested in being behind the scenes.
Working in a writers' room eventually lead to her interest in studying filmmaking properly. She has said, "Television was great fun and I went along for the ride, but I never felt that comfortable in front of the camera". With that realization, she went to Los Angeles to study at the American Film Institute before returning to her home in England to get her films off the ground.
Her debut feature film was Red Road in 2006 which she made after several short films that she wrote and directed. Andrea Arnold was 45-years-old when she made this movie, her first feature, which is very inspiring. It's never too late to follow your dreams, especially if those dreams make other people cream.
The film is set in gloomy Glasgow in which Kate Dickie has a job observing surveillance cameras on a block on Red Road in order to make sure that the neighborhood stays safe. However, she noticed an ex-con on the camera and she needs to know more. She starts her own investigation and things get hairy from there. Speaking of hairy - we see Katie Dickie's hair downstairs when she gets eaten out.
Red Road was an instant critical success and earned Andrea her first of three Jury Prizes at the Cannes Film Festival.
She really wowed the world with her 2009 film Fish Tank. This indie darling from the UK starred a young Katie Jarvis as a teen who lives with her mom, Kierston Wareing, who spends her time drinking at bars and picking up men. She and her kid sister live with their mum in housing projects in Essex and Katie's character dreams of getting out of there in order to follow her goal of becoming a professional dancer.
When the mom brings home a new boyfriend played by Michael Fassbender, Katie's character starts crushing hard. Uh oh! Katie even watches her mum have sex with her crush in a sneaky scene that artfully shows Kieston's bush and hard nipples through the crack of an open door.
In 2016, her original film American Honey had critics talking once again. American Honey was loosely inspired by her own impromptu road trip across the United States in 2012. This time Sasha Lane plays a girl who parties hard and sells magazine subscriptions to make money on the side (remember those?). She travels all over the Midwest to sell those pesky magazines which means that she gets to party hard in the heart of the country.
She meets a handsome stranger who winds up being a lot of trouble, played by Shia LaBeouf. Riley Keough is also in this film as a very hot chick who sells magazines as well. She answers the door in one scene with her top unbuttoned. Watch this scene here and make some American Honey in your pants:
Where have you seen Andrea Arnold's work recently? In the TV series Big Little Lies. She actually directed most of the 2019 season of the series which means that she directed the famous line "I will not NOT be rich". What a classic! There was some controversy, however, when the director of the first season took over to re-shoot and re-edit a big majority of her content for "visual continuity". She shot the entire season, but once she handed it all over to HBO they took over and she lost her creative control.
Several think pieces were written about this, wondering about the death of the director's creative control, and Andrea has only talked about how heartbroken this entire situation left her feeling. She followed that project up with a documentary about the life of a dairy cow called Cow, something totally different for Andrea and something that she would for sure have control over.
I personally don't think that it means the death of the auteur - although I do have misgivings about actors who use their executive producer credits to override final cut - and I do think that this is something we often see happening with female filmmakers. It's doubly disappointing to have it happen on such a female-forward show like Big Little Lies where Reese Witherspoon and Nicole Kidman are executive producers who casually agreed to hand over creative control to the male director of the first season.
She also directed several episodes of Transparent and I Love Dick. Oh, she does? That's good news for us! It's clear that despite the setback that Big Little Lies may have been, Andrea Arnold is a tough cookie and she is not going anywhere anytime soon.
I love how realistic her films are and how unapologetic she is about showing nudity. She shows a lot of bush and some explicit sex which is very cool for a later-in-life filmmaker to tackle. She loves life's rough edges and I love her for that. I cannot wait to see what she decides to do next. If her track record so far is any indication, it will be another hit.
