Fairy tale film-maker: Clio Barnard interview

Writer-director Clio Barnard’s poetic and hauntingly beautiful The Selfish Giant will surely go down as a milestone of British film. Her aim, she tells Nick Roddick, was to put the artifice next to the real
Clio Barnard
Copyright 2013 Rex Features
25 October 2013

It’s hard to see how anybody would not be passionate about The Selfish Giant, a stunningly impressive piece of film-making which stands alongside Ken Loach’s Kes as a milestone in British film, both realistic in its background and poetic in its approach. The film’s British writer-director Clio Barnard, however, is wary of such labels.

“I think I’m a bit suspicious of naturalism and realism,” she says. “Life is complicated and doesn’t really have neat storylines. There are always several different versions of a story you could tell at any one time, so it’s more fractured and complicated than that. I think that’s why I want to put the two together somehow: the artifice and the real.”

Following The Arbor, her award-winning and highly original documentary about the playwright Andrea Dunbar, The Selfish Giant is Barnard’s first feature film. It takes its title and inspiration from the fairytale of the same name by Oscar Wilde, and is definitely not happily-ever-after territory.

Arbor is a 13-year-old boy who hangs out with his friend Swifty (played by talented newcomers Conner Chapman and Shaun Thomas). Arbor is repeatedly excluded from school and finds consolation among the horses kept in the fields behind their housing estate. The two earn money by selling scrap to an unprincipled dealer called Kitten (the Giant in this version of the story).

Arbor is a natural entrepreneur; Swifty a natural with horses. They make the perfect team — for a while.

In keeping with the fairytale tone of the story, Barnard and her cinematographer, Mike Eley, find a haunting beauty in the post-industrial landscape of Yorkshire, where the ghosts of departed industries lurk.

“I think there’s a kind of greening-over that seems to be happening with post-industrial places,” she says. “What struck me about Bradford was that it was like looking at the past and the future simultaneously, because it takes you back to the pre-car time. But it’s also because of shifts in the global economy that scrap is worth something. There’s this kind of recycling element, a scavenging element.”

In real life, Conner and Shaun are the reverse of how they appear in the film, where Arbor is a real motormouth and Shaun is the strong silent type. “It’s a bit of acting and a bit of me, you know?” says Shaun of his character. “Swifty is, like, quiet and doesn’t have a lot to say — that’s the bit that’s acting. But with the horses and riding and driving is just normal.”

Conner, meanwhile, had to learn to ride a horse in three days. Who taught him? “Me,” says Shaun. “Like riding a bike, isn’t it?” Conner looks doubtful.

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Barnard found the two boys following a series of workshops in schools in the Bradford areas of Holmewood and Buttershaw. Shaun, who had never acted before, found making the film both hard and rewarding. “Clio was inspiring,” he says. “She pushed us and pushed us. But it turned out to be worth it, didn’t it?”

He’s right about that.

The Selfish Giant screens at the BFI London Film Festival on Mon Oct 14, Odeon West End 2, 9pm and Wed Oct 16, Curzon Mayfair 8.45pm, whatson.bfi.org.uk/lff

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