Andrea Arnold came to public attention with her Oscar-winning short Wasp. Her feature debut, Red Road, is a part of 'The Advance Party', a new scheme devised by veteran dogme filmmakers. She met up with Sheena Sweeney at the Cork Film Festival, where she planned to get very drunk.

The first time I see the director Andrea Arnold she is jumping up and down and whooping excitedly in the foyer of a hotel in Cork. The next time I see her she is onstage at the Cork Opera House introducing her debut feature, Red Road, which was part of this year's Cork Film Festival. But Arnold's speech isn't so much an introduction as an announcement of what she intends to do that night, how many bars she plans to visit (four) and how drunk she is going to get (very). It all goes down well with the audience, particularly her invitation to come and talk to her after the screening and say whatever they want about her film. She will, she says, answer anyone's questions as long as they buy her a drink. I worry about my interview with her, scheduled for the following morning. Later that evening, after Arnold's brilliantly disturbing film, I am introduced to her in a bar. Some admirers of her work are there and ask her, per her promise, if the intense and explicit sex scene in the film was 'real'. Arnold deftly sidesteps the question by explaining to us all, complete with a wildly gesticulating demonstration, the best oral sex technique for women to achieve orgasm. By the time I meet her the following morning – she arrives, almost on time, looking only a little tousled and still full of energy – I know she is funny, and warm, and full of fun. But I also know from her film that there is another side to her.

Proffesional voyeur
Red Road is an emotionally complex story about Jackie (Kate Dickie) who works as a CCTV operator. She monitors multiple screens and then warns the authorities about suspected criminal activity. One day a man she recognises is captured on one of the street cameras, and Jackie's tightly-wound, tragic past begins to unravel. The story is driven by a brilliantly-paced, riveting sense of suspense in which the audience discovers what's going on as Jackie feels compelled to confront the situation. Arnold uses a stalking voyeuristic camera style to heighten the atmosphere of danger, and the dark shadowy lighting offers a distinct contrast with the intermittent sequences of red danger and stark lonely yellow. Arnold's script is very well written, with little hints dropped here and there to get the audience thinking about what might be going on. The long mysterious road to discovering the truth of Jackie's awful secret is consistently engaging. So where did all this darkness and sadness come from? 'It seems like a lot of my work has had that element, but I don't think that's personally me, and a lot of people when they meet me say "oh, you're not like that at all". I don't think it's completely dark.' And there are moments of humour in Red Road, but mostly in just brief exchanges of dialogue. 'I'm glad you see that,' she says delightedly, 'humour just comes very naturally to me, it's just something that comes out when I'm writing. I mean something will tickle me when I'm writing and I'll start laughing out loud. I mean some things I had to take out of Red Road because they were too funny, and I thought "no, I can't be going here", so I took them out; you have to bow down to the bigger picture and work with that whatever that means. I think my next film is gonna have more of that comic side of me because it's gonna have a character that's gonna be quite mouthy.'

The full article is printed in Film Ireland 113.